News
Newly revised and enhanced, the Alger Hiss Story website has special new features as well as a newly searchable, reader-friendly format: front-page news; extensive excerpts from the Alger Hiss Oral History Collection; the complete transcript of the landmark “Alger Hiss and History” conference, a day-long scholarly convocation at New York University in 2007; and a greatly expanded Media section with more images, book excerpts, and a video collection that now includes John Lowenthal’s 1980 feature-length documentary film, The Trials of Alger Hiss, which reviewers called “fascinating, explosive.”
Also new on the site is a 2016 essay by Dr. Timothy Hobson, who, as the last remaining eyewitness in the Hiss Case, shares his thoughts at age 89 on prejudice, politics, and false history.
The rotating Alger Hiss slide show on the front page presents, in sequence: a page from Hiss’s Johns Hopkins college yearbook, class of 1926; a 1930 picture taken when Hiss was secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; an informal 1940 snapshot of Hiss in his State Department office; a reaction shot from one of Hiss’s 1948 appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-Calif.) on the day after Hiss’s 1950 perjury conviction; Hiss’s 1975 reinstatement as a member of the Massachusetts bar; Hiss on vacation in Tucson, Arizona during the 1980s.
Other technical features of the new site include:
- New Content Management System (CMS) allows for easy updates, improved navigation, and site security
- State-of-the-art Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows for higher ranking in Google and other search engines and generally improved site publicity.
- Social network integration allows for public sharing on Facebook/Twitter/etc.
- New responsive design allows site to be viewed on tablets and cell phones.
Recently posted front-page items in full: