Liberty Ships
These pages preserve the remnants of information I collected from the National Archives and other sources for a series of economic studies on productivity growth in wartime shipbuilding. This research project has now been completed, and no further updates will be made to these pages. 
If you are looking for the papers from this project, they are as follows: 
"How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an Old Case Study." Journal of Political Economy, 109(1):103-137. (February 2001). Reprinted in Daniel F.Spulber, (ed)., Famous Fables of Economics, Basil Blackwell, 2001, pp. 262-292. 
"Learning from Experience and Learning From Others. An exploration of learning and spillovers in wartime shipbuilding, [with Rebecca Achee Thornton], American Economic Review, 91(5):1350-1368, December 2001. 
The data files used in these papers can be found here. Most visitors to this page will find this listing more useful. I have also left posted a brief summary of the shipbuilding program here. The summary is not particulary valuable now that Frederic C. Lane's classic history, "Ships for Victory," from which the (public domain) photos are taken, is back in print.
I am afraid I do not have records of the histories of individual vessels. There are now numerous sites devoted to Liberty ships and activites of the merchant marine during the war. This is just a partial listing, to get interested readers started. The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is one of only two surviving Liberty Ships. The other is the SS John W. Brown. This database contains all the Liberty ships produced, in alphabetical order. Several other sites also contain listings of Liberty ships. The value added of this database is that it contains the dates of keel laying, launchings and delivery, as well as the yard and way number where constructed. Michael Denis has developed a new site devoted to the yards at South Portland, ME: Todd-Bath, South Portland Shipbuilding and the New England Shipbuilding Corp. Some very good drawings of the ship design, can be found in this 1994 article by Herbert Adams. For details about those who sailed on the Liberty ships, vist the site of the US Merchant Marines in WWII. Numerous pictures of Liberty ships and their crews can be found at the site of the US Navy Armed Guard WWII Veterans. A short memoir of a Liberty commander has been written by the late Captain Charles A. Jarvis. You can also find plenty of information about WWII tankers at the T2 Tanker Page. Greg Hayden has a very nice merchant marine page with much related material. A useful article on researching individual WWII ships was written by Theron Snell. 
In 1943, most of the Liberty yards began producing Victory ships, a larger and faster freighter, with an eye to producing vessels that would retain commercial value after the war. One of these, the SS Lane Victory Ship has been restored. There are at least four other ships in the process of restoration.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Liberty ship was the first mass produced ship using prefabrication. Not so. Numerous yards were constructing prefabricated ships during World War I. The most famous is the Hog Island type.
Researchers interested in the fracture problem of Liberty ships might like to be aware of the following collection at the Mariners Museum, Newport News, VA: "Documents relating to US Merchant Marine," presented to the Mariners' Museum by James E. Moss, 1964. Section 5, boxes 4-6, "The Welded Ship in WWII", contains reports and analysis covering the period 1941-1956. This is probably the most extensive single collection of materials relating to the welding problem.