Today you can discover 42 new online historical exhibitions telling the stories behind major events of the last century, including Apartheid, D-Day and the Holocaust. The stories have been put together by 17 partners including museums and cultural foundations who have drawn on their archives of letters, manuscripts, first-hand video testimonials and much more. Much of the material is very moving—and some is on the Internet for the first time.

Each exhibition features a narrative which links the archive material together to unlock the different perspectives, nuances and tales behind these events. Among others you’ll see:

• Tragic love at Auschwitz – the story of Edek & Mala, a couple in love who try to escape Auschwitz
• Jan Karski, Humanity’s hero – first-hand video testimony from the man who attempted to inform the world about the existence of the Holocaust
• Faith in the Human Spirit is not Lost – tracing the history of Yad Vashem’s efforts to honor courageous individuals who attempted to rescue Jews during the Holocaust
• Steve Biko – a 15-year-old’s political awakening in the midst of the Apartheid movement featuring nine documents never released in the public domain before
• D-Day – details of the famous landings including color photographs, personal letters and the D-Day order itself from Admiral Ramsay
• The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – an account of the 1953 Coronation including color photographs
• Years of the Dolce Vita – a look at the era of the “good life” in Italy including the fashion, food, cars and culture

As with the other archives that we’ve helped bring onto the Internet, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, you can zoom in to see photos in great detail and search through millions of items for a specific country, person, event or date. Watch our video for some guidance about how to find your way around the exhibitions.

The historical collections are the latest chapter in the work of the Google Cultural Institute, following the Art Project, World Wonders and the Nelson Mandela archives. We’re working closely with museums, foundations and other archives around the world to make more cultural and historical material accessible online and by doing so preserve it for future generations.

You can explore the many exhibitions at www.google.com/culturalinstitute. You can also follow us on our Google+ page. What you see today is just the start, so if you’re a partner interested in contributing your own exhibitions, please fill out this form.

Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Product Manager, Google Cultural Institute

The Official Google Blog

Ever since mankind could go fast, we have longed to go faster. And ever since we’ve done work, we have longed to have someone else, or something else, do that work for us. You might already be familiar with our self-driving car project. We’ve spent years working on a tough engineering problem—how to create a hardware and software system capable of gathering and interpreting massive amounts of real-time data and acting on that knowledge swiftly and surely enough to navigate innumerable varieties of crowded thoroughfares without ever once (among other human frailties) exploding in a fit of road rage at the guy who just cut hard left across your lane without even bothering to flash his blinker.

Well, our autonomous cars have now been test-driven (or rather, test-ridden) for more than 200,000 miles without a single machine-caused mishap. And today we’re moving the project one great leap forward with Google Racing, a groundbreaking partnership with NASCAR to help self-driving vehicles compete in the world of stock car racing. We think the most important thing computers can do in the next decade is to drive cars—and that the most important thing Google Racing can do in the next decade is drive them, if possible, more quickly than anyone else. Or anything else.

The program remains in its infancy; we’ll surely face numerous testing and competitive hurdles before our first car peels out into a NASCAR race. But I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities. NASCAR’s ambitious technology investments—from driver safety to green initiatives—and the sport’s spirit of challenge, effort and execution all beautifully embody our most deeply held values as a company. Having skidded around a parking lot last week myself, I’m pretty sure that none of those test miles were as hard as it will be for one of our cars to hold its own in a field of 43 jacked-up, 800-horsepower beasts screaming down a straightaway within inches of each other at upwards of 200 miles per hour. I can’t imagine a more exciting challenge for our team than to race our autonomous vehicles against their carbon-based competitors.

Larry and I have always believed in tackling big problems that matter, and we’re surer than ever that self-driving cars are one of them, capable of changing the world in all kinds of truly important ways, like reducing traffic and accidents by driving more efficiently, making correct split-second decisions and never shifting their focus off the road to check a map, text a friend, apply rear-view mirror mascara or dip a piece of tekka maki into a lid of soy sauce jostling over on the passenger seat. I hope that today’s announcement of Google Racing will mark another step along this path, and spur innovations that improve the daily lives of people all over the world. Or at the very least offer us a few cool new thrills on hot weekend afternoons.

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder

The Official Google Blog

We believe that technology can be a force for good; one that builds and binds community. As a Googler, my proudest moments are when we take that technology and put it in the hands of people who can use it to communicate, collaborate, build and explore.

Today, on Veterans Day, I am proud to share a few Google tools and platforms for the military veteran community. They can be accessed on our website, Google for Veterans and Families, which was created by veterans and their family and friends, who work at Google. This single interface brings together Google products and platforms for servicemembers and their families. We believe it will be useful to all veterans, whether still in the service, transitioning out, or on a new path in their civilian lives. Here are some examples of what you’ll find on the site:

• VetConnect – This tool helps servicemembers connect, communicate and share their experiences with others who have served using the Google+ platform.
• Google Veterans Channel – A YouTube channel for discussion about military service for veterans, their families and the public. Veterans can share their experiences with each other as well as with civilians to help shed light on the importance and complexity of service. If you have not served, this is a great place to offer your thanks by uploading a tribute video.
• Resume Builder powered by Google Docs – We found that Docs can be a particularly helpful tool to transitioning servicemembers seeking employment. Resume Builder generates an auto-formatted resume that can be easily edited, saved and downloaded to share with potential employers.
• Tour Builder powered by Google Earth (coming soon). A new way to tell your military story. Today, you can view some sample “tours”— 3D maps of veterans’ service histories, complete with photos and videos. Stay tuned for more details and updates on the Google Lat Long Blog.

It’s been a proud month for those of us here at Google who are veterans or family of veterans.

In October, 100 Googlers visited the Soldier and Family Assistance Center at West Point to conduct resume writing workshops for members of the Warrior Transition Unit. And, just two weeks ago, we traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to teach wounded, ill and injured servicemembers how to use Google tools to stay in touch with their loved ones while in recovery.

Finally, this week, we introduced the Veterans Job Bank in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Veterans Job Bank is a customized job search engine in the National Resource Directory (NRD), which is powered by Google Custom Search technology and crawls the web for JobPosting markup from Schema.org to identify veteran-committed job openings.

Even playing a small part to serve those who have served has been an honor.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Audience Evangelist and Founder, Google Veterans Network

The Official Google Blog

(Cross-posted on the Nonprofits Blog, the Google.org Blog and the European Public Policy Blog)

It’s taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and historians, and the advent of the Internet to make the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to anyone in the world. Today, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, we’re celebrating the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem powered by Google technology.

Written between the third and first centuries BCE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. In 68 BCE, they were hidden in 11 caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Sea to protect them from the approaching Roman armies. They weren’t discovered again until 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock in a cave and realized something was inside. Since 1965, the scrolls have been on exhibit at the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Among other topics, the scrolls offer critical insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem, including the birth of Christianity.

Now, anyone around the world can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it’s written on—only one-tenth of a millimeter thick.

You can browse the Great Isaiah Scroll, the most well known scroll and the one that can be found in most home bibles, by chapter and verse. You can also click directly on the Hebrew text and get an English translation. While you’re there, leave a comment for others to see.

The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll.

This partnership with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online. We are thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, helping design the web experience and making it searchable and accessible to the world. We’ve been involved in similar projects in the past, including building the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection and collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid. We encourage organizations interested in partnering with us in our archiving efforts to enter their information in this form. We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls collection online, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history at your fingertips.

Posted by Eyal Miller, New Business Development and Eyal Fink, Software Engineer, Israel Research and Development Center

The Official Google Blog

Community service has always been important to us. When thinking of ways we can give back, we often focus on where our strengths lie—namely, in technical knowledge. More and more frequently, Googlers who volunteer note that many incredible nonprofits around the U.S. lack the tech knowledge or resources that could immensely help their operations and their cause.

With this in mind, we got together with the HandsOn Network, the volunteer arm of Points of Light Institute, to create the HandsOn Tech Corps, an initiative designed to help nonprofits effectively use technology to further their missions. Our funds will create 24 new AmeriCorps*VISTA positions, which you can apply for online now at HandsOnNetwork.org.

These AmeriCorps*VISTA members will work full-time for one year developing introductory seminars and involved in-person trainings for smaller nonprofits that are working to lift people out of poverty. The Tech Corps will start in September with a one-week training at our campus in Mountain View, learning about both our nonprofit tools and cloud-based offerings from other technology companies like Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Once they are armed with tech know-how, they’ll spend the rest of the year in three-person teams serving nonprofits in the Bay Area, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Placing AmeriCorps members around the country for in-person support provides a much-needed complement to programs like Google for Nonprofits, which makes it easy for nonprofits to take advantage of offers like $ 10,000 a month in advertising on Google AdWords to reach more donors and free or discounted Google Apps to cut IT costs.

If you’re passionate about both technology and giving back, then we hope you’ll apply to be part of the HandsOn Tech Corps.

Posted by Matt Dunne, Head of Community Affairs

The Official Google Blog