- September 15, 2025
- More articles By John Tucker
- Photo by John Tucker
SIX THOUSAND COLLECTIONS totaling 45 million pages. Four million photos, 35,000 audio files and 30,000 maps—not to mention 19,000 films, some recorded on Vietnam-era reel-to-reel tape machines as large as a mini-fridge.
The U.S. Marine Corps’ official archive lives in a half-acre, aggressively air-conditioned expanse within its Quantico, Va., base, and it’s the job of Shawn Callahan Ph.D. ’23 (above) to safeguard every document.
The director of the Corps’ History Division, Callahan preserves its past and promotes its story, sharing information with government officials and scholars and serving as the commandant’s primary adviser on historical matters.
“The History Division doesn’t just collect stuff and keep it in an old dusty room,” he says. “We’re dealing with things with immediate value.”
In August, the division published one of its most significant books, “Semper Fidelis: 250 Years of US Marine Corps Honor, Courage and Commitment,” to celebrate the Corps’ 250th anniversary on Nov. 10.
A former aviator who studied American history at UMD after 22 years in the Corps, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, Callahan is now engaged with another daunting challenge: digitizing the division’s entire archive. That includes a letter from Walt Disney offering to design a squadron’s insignia during World War II, a 1918 battle plan map of Thiaucourt, France, and the archive’s “most treasured document,” Callahan says, a Nov. 28, 1775, parchment signed by John Hancock commissioning Samuel Nicholas as captain of the new Continental Marines.
“The birth of our nation is reflected in it,” he says.
(Photo from the Alfred A. Cunningham Collection (COLL/3034) at the Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections. Official USMC photograph
Stephen B. Duerk
19 days ago