President McKinley Taking the Oath (1901) Online

This is a very short, black-and-white movie which runs only for a minute and shows us the inauguration of President McKinley after his re-election. Sadly for him, he got assassinated not much later. This film is by Thomas Edison, just like so many others, but apart from the interesting history context, there is nothing else memorable about it in my opinion. The quality is also pretty low and I cannot even say "for 1901", as very early in the 20th century there were already a handful film with really clean quality where you could really see and recognize even small details. This is not one of them. Worth a watch for film buffs and people with an interest in American history, but nobody else really needs to see it.

President McKinley Taking the Oath (1901)

A lot of times these early movies just set a camera up and captured something that was going on. It could have been workers leaving a factory, firemen racing to a fire, a ship leaving a dock or whatever else was popular back in the day. President McKinley ended up having a lot of his life and death captured on film and this one here delivers exactly what the title states. Obviously there's no sound but there's no doubt that this here is a rather important document since it does capture on video an important part of history. It's pretty cool getting to see such footage and it's good that companies like Edison thought about filming these things. I'm not sure if they realized people would be watching it 115 years later but it's great footage to have.