The Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection at the University of Michigan Library preserves 1,344 letters sent to the New York City office of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the aftermath of the broadcast, which were kept by one of Welles’s producing partners and largely forgotten for seventy years. Increased public interest in these letters, following their being featured in a 2013 PBS documentary and the 2015 book Broadcast Hysteria, inspired our initiative to create a digital archive making them more accessible to scholars and students.

My Dear Mr. Welles project on Zooniverse makes the War of the Worlds letters – and the many personal stories they contain – digitally available to researchers and the general public, fully searchable by city, state, and transcribed text.

Visit the collection here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wow/

Around the Zoo highlights Zooniverse’s project teams and the amazing work they do.
Volunteers can see how far their contributions go, and team members can share their impacts in their own words. Visit Zooniverse.org to get involved today!