The Tokyo Trial at Richmond: Digitizing the Sutton Collection of Documents from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

Abstract

Many librarians and readers are by now familiar with Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken , which has spent over a year on the New York Times best seller list for hardcover nonfiction. In Unbroken , Hillenbrand chronicles the story of Louis Zamperini, a one-time Olympian who was taken prisoner and tortured by the Japanese while serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. In her research for later chapters in the book, Hillenbrand routinely cites documents from the war crimes trials of those who perpetrated crimes against prisoners of war. The University of Richmond (UR) is fortunate enough to hold many of these documents in the special collections of the William T. Muse Law Library: the papers of David Nelson Sutton, a prosecutor during the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. A new project at UR hopes to bring many of these primary documents to the digital world.