03.20.06
Listening to History
I ran across this link and ended up spending a lot of time browsing this collection. Librarians and archivists at the University of California at Santa Barbara have been collecting wax cylinder recordings and have managed to digitize thousands of them in their Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project. All of these recordings are public domain and can be freely downloaded in either original format (unedited WAV file) or in MP3 format files. They can also be played with a handy player that is built into the web page. The era is 1900 to about 1920 and you can listen to political speeches by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and others, or music by a variety of individuals. There are thousands of recordings on the site.
If you have an interest in history and some time to burn, check out this site. It has a good search engine and gives you complete library references on the recordings you are listening to.
