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www.history
American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library
Library of Congress, American Memory.
This expansive archive of American history and culture features photographs, prints, motion pictures, manuscripts, printed books, pamphlets, maps, and sound recordings going back to roughly 1490. Currently this site includes more than 9 million digital items from more than 100 collections on subjects ranging from African-American political pamphlets to California folk music, from baseball to the Civil War. Most topical sites include special presentations introducing particular depositories or providing historical context for archival materials. Visitors can search collections separately or all at once by keyword and type of source (photos and prints, documents, films, sound recordings, or maps). In addition, the Learning Page provides well-organized help for using the collections, including sample teaching assignments. WWW.History includes individual annotations for many of the current collections.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

www.history
American Studies Crossroads Project
American Studies Association.
This impressive site presents a rich array of primary and secondary material designed to foster electronic learning. The site’s “Reference and Research” section furnishes an annotated, searchable gateway to hundreds of links dealing generally with American history and life, including SiteScene, a biweekly journal that reviews websites, texts of recent articles published in American Quarterly; abstracts of American Studies dissertations from 1986 to 1999, organized alphabetically by author; and links to image and document archives. Three additional sections—entitled “Community,” "Curriculum,“ and ”Technology and Learning"—offer a wealth of material concerning developments in the field of American Studies and teaching with new technologies, including essays, syllabi, bulletin boards, and newsletters.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2002-10-28.

www.history
Making of America
University of Michigan.
See JAH web review by Tobias Higbie.
Reviewed 2006-09-01.
This site is a “digital library” of thousands of primary documents in American social history from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction. The result of a collaborative project between the University of Michigan and Cornell University, begun in 1995, it currently offers more than 3 million pages of text from 11,063 volumes and 50,000 journal articles. Includes 10 major 19th-century journals—like Appleton’s from 1869 to 1881, the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1864, Ladies Repository from 1841 to 1876, and DeBow’s from 1846 to 1869 — as well as novels and tracts important for understanding the development of American education, sociology, history, religion, psychology, and science. A recent addition includes 249 volumes on New York City, some from the early 20th century. Searchable by word or phrase, the site provides a complete bibliography of books and journals, organized by author. Well-designed and executed, this is an excellent collection of material.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2007-09-19.

www.history
Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.
See JAH web review by Philip J. Ethington.
Reviewed 2002-06-01.
This exhibit, curated by Carl Smith, a professor at Northwestern University, commemorates the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire (1871). Offers an array of primary sources selected from materials in the Chicago Historical Society and arranged into two sections. “The Great Chicago Fire” examines the fire through five chronological chapters, while a second section, “The Web of Memory,” focuses more specifically on the ways in which the fire has been remembered. This section is organized into six chapters, each devoted to a particular theme, including eyewitness accounts, popular illustrations, journal articles, “imaginative forms such as fiction and poetry and painting,” and the legend of Mrs. O’Leary. Both sections furnish galleries of images and artifacts, primary texts, “special media” such as songs, a newsreel, and an “Interactive Panorama of Chicago, 1858,” and chapter-specific, authoritative background essays that explore the social and cultural contexts of this catastrophe. Also includes a bibliography of 20 sources. A well-designed site that provides a wide range of diverse sources useful for studying Chicago in late 19th century and the ways that the story of the catastrophe subsequently has been told.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-09-19.

www.history
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine
H-Net, Michigan State University.
An indispensable resource for teachers and scholars in a wide variety of fields, but especially for historians. H-Net—an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers—contains sections on “H-Net Reviews,” which publishes and disseminates reviews of books, films, museums, software, sound recordings, and websites; “Discussion Networks,” a gateway to more than 130 academic discussion networks administered by H-Net via email; “H-Net Papers on Teaching and Technology,” presenting 10 discussion panels on multimedia teaching; academic announcements of professional organizations, conference programs, fellowships, and prizes; employment listings; and additional websites from various H-Net special projects.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2001-06-28.

www.history
Documenting the American South
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Libraries.
See JAH web review by Crandall Shifflett.
Reviewed 2002-03-01.
This database presents nearly 1,400 primary documents about the American South in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Culled from the premier collections at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), the database features ten major projects. Presenting the beginnings of the University of North Carolina, “The First Century of the First State University,” offers “materials that document the creation and growth” of the University. “Oral Histories of th American South” has made 500 oral history interviews on the civil rights, environmental, industrial, and political history of the South. First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860–1920 offers approximately 140 diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives, and concentrates on women, blacks, workers, and American Indians. (See separate History Matters entry for more details.) “North American Slave Narratives” also furnishes about 250 texts. And the “Library of Southern Literature” makes available an additional 51 titles in Southern literature. “The Church in the Southern Black Community, Beginnings to 1920,” traces “how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.” "The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865“ documents ”non-military aspects of Southern life during the Civil War.“ “The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940” provides approximately 575 histories, descriptive accounts, institutional reports, works of fiction, images, oral histories, and songs. “North Carolinians and the Great War” offers approximately 170 documents on effects of World War I and its legacy. Finally, ”True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina" analyzes 121 documents written by students attending the University of North Carolina. The projects are accompanied by essays from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and are searchable by author, keyword, and title. They reflect a larger effort, begun in 1995, to digitize the Southern collections at UNC.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2007-10-18.

www.history
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
See JAH web review by Jeffrey Shandler.
Reviewed 2012-03-01.
Introduces the activities of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Washington, DC, and its important collections, in addition to presenting interactive exhibitions and providing resources for study of the Holocaust and related subjects. The site is composed of five sections: education, research, history, remembrance, and conscience. The education section includes material to introduce the subject of the Holocaust to middle- and secondary-level students; the full text of a resource book for teachers; information on publications, programs, fellowships, and internships for scholars, faculty, and university students; and 45 bibliographies arranged by country. The research section contains a survivors registry; material about the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies; an international directory of activities relating to Holocaust-era assets; information on the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research; searchable catalogs pertaining to the Museum’s collections and library; and examples of artworks, artifacts, documents, photographs, films, videos, oral histories, and music. The history section includes the Holocaust Learning Center, with images, essays, and documents on 75 subjects such as anti-semitism, refugees, pogroms, extermination camps, and resistance. The remembrance section provides material on a recent commemorative ceremony undertaken by high school students from Germany, Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., and communities in the U.S. in which churches had been burned. The final section, devoted to the “Committee on Conscience” contains information on current genocidal practices in Sudan. An invaluable site for students as an introduction to Holocaust-related subjects, for scholars as a resource for further studies, and for others as a way to acknowledge the presence of the Holocaust in contemporary culture.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-10-12.

www.history
Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
Edward L. Ayers, Anne S. Rubin, William G. Thomas, University of Virginia.
See JAH web review by Michael Barton.
Reviewed 2012-09-01.
Conceived by Edward Ayers, Hugh P. Kelley Professor of History at the University of Virginia, this site is a massive, searchable archive relating to two Shenandoah Valley counties during the Civil War period—Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania—divided by 200 miles and the institution of slavery. Thousands of pages of maps, images, letters, diaries, and newspapers, in addition to church, agricultural, military, and public records—census, tax, Freedmen�s Bureau, and veterans�-provide data, experiences, and perspectives from the eve of the war until its aftermath. Offers both a narrative “walking tour” and direct access to the archive. Also presents bibliographies, a “fact book,” student essays and projects, and other materials intended to foster primary-source research. “Students can explore every dimension of the conflict and write their own histories, reconstructing the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families.” Includes a section titled �Memory of the War� that presents postwar writings on battles, soldier and camp life, reunions, obituaries and tributes, and politics. Also includes material omitted from Ayres’s recent book about the communities, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, along with digitized texts of cited materials. This is an important and innovative site, particularly valuable to historians of 19th-century American life.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-18.

www.history
New Deal Network
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College, Columbia University.
See JAH web review by Charles Forcey.
Reviewed 2002-03-01.
A database of more than 20,000 items relating to the New Deal. A “Document Library” contains more than 900 newspaper and journal articles, speeches, letters, reports, advertisements, and other textual materials, treating a broad array of subjects relevant to the period’s social, cultural, political, and economic history, while placing special emphasis on New Deal relief agencies and issues relating to labor, education, agriculture, the Supreme Court, and African Americans. The “Photo Gallery” of more than 5,000 images is organized into five units—“Culture,” “Construction,” “Social Programs,” “Federal Agencies,” and miscellaneous, including photos from 11 exhibitions and five series of photoessays, and images of disaster relief and public figures. The site additionally offers featured exhibits, many with lesson plan suggestions. Presently, the features section includes “The Magpie Sings the Depression,” a collection of 193 poems, articles, and short stories, and 275 graphics from a Bronx high school journal published between 1929 and 1941 with juvenile works by novelist James Baldwin, photographer Richard Avedon, cultural critic Robert Warshow, and film critic Stanley Kauffmann; “Dear Mrs Roosevelt” with selected letters written by young people to the first lady; “Student Activism in the 1930s,” which contains 38 photographs, graphics, and editorial cartoons, 12 American Student Union memoirs, 40 autobiographical essays, and a 20,000-word essay by Robert Cohen on 1930s campus radicalism; 17 selected interviews from American slave narratives gathered by the Works Progress Administration; and an illustrated essay on the history and social effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Includes approximately 100 annotated links to related sites. Of great value for teachers, students, and researchers interested in the social history of the New Deal era.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-18.

www.history
Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia
Jerry Goldman, Northwestern University.
See JAH web review by Melvin I. Urofsky.
Reviewed 2001-09-01.
Features audio files, abstracts, transcriptions of oral arguments, and written opinions on more than 3,300 Supreme Court cases. Includes more than 3,000 hours of audio of arguments in selected cases going back to 1955 and all cases since 1995. Users can access cases through keyword searches or a list of 13 broad categories, including civil rights, due process, first amendment, judicial power, privacy, and unions. Also provides easy access to the 20 “most popular cases”—such as Roe v. Wade (abortion), Gideon v. Wainwright (right to counsel), Plessy v. Ferguson (segregation), Grutter v. Bollinger (racial preferences in school admissions decisions), and Bush v. Gore— determined by numbers of hits to the site. Also offers images and biographical outlines for every justice who has served on the Court. “The Pending Docket” provides briefs of pending cases, along with links to relevant opinions; additional material on selected cases; a summary highlighting cases decided in the previous session with a breakdown of the voting of individual justices; and a forum for discussions of selected recent cases. The site also includes a “virtual tour” of the Court building; links to all the written opinions of the Court since 1893; and audio of speeches by a handful of justices. Of great value for those practicing law and studying its history.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.
Website last visited on 2007-10-18.

www.history
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Resources for Teachers
The U.S. Department of Education’s National Library of Education and ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology.
An annotated gateway to thousands of online lesson plans, curriculum units, and other teaching resources in subjects such as history, art, religion, social studies, economics, and gender studies. Organized according to six sections: Education News; K-12 Instruction; Health Resources; Teacher Development; Lesson Plans; and Teaching with Technology. Furnished by ERIC, “a federally funded, nationwide information network designed to provide you with ready access to education literature.” Linked to the main ERIC site Educational Resources Information Center, which offers resources in 15 additional clearinghouses, all feeding into “the largest education-related database in the world—containing more than 1,000,000 records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, and books,” to which some 33,000 new records are added annually. Both the main site and this one specializing in teaching resources are searchable. They are of exceptional value to teachers in all disciplines. U.S. history teachers will find more than 20 gateway sites for lesson plans that use the Web to help students explore topics and periods in American history. Materials also encourage students to appreciate the value of studying the past through activities that involve them personally, such as connecting family history with larger narratives and conducting oral histories with older people they know.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2001-08-01.

www.history
Digital History
Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil.
See JAH web review by Simon Appleford and Vernon Burton.
Reviewed 2008-03-01.
Provides multimedia resources and links for teaching American history and conducting basic research, while focusing on slavery, ethnic history, private life, technological achievement, and American film. Presents more than 600 documents pertaining to American politics, diplomacy, social history, slavery, Mexican American history, and Native American history, searchable by author, time period, subject, and keyword, and annotated with essays of 300–500 words each. The site offers a full U.S. history textbook and more than 1,500 searchable and briefly annotated links to American history-related sites, including approximately 150 links to historic Supreme Court decisions, 330 links to audio files of historic speeches, and more than 450 links to audio files and transcripts of historians discussing their own books. Also includes five high school lesson plans; 39 fact sheets with quotations and study questions on major historical topics; 10 essays (800 words) on past controversies, such as the Vietnam War, socialism, and the war on poverty; seven essays presenting historical background on more recent controversies, such as hostage crises and NATO in Kosovo; and essays of more than 10,000 words each on the history of American film and private life in America. Four current exhibits offer 217 photographs, ca. 1896–1903, from the Calhoun Industrial School in Alabama, a freedmen’s school; 19 watercolor sketches by a Civil War soldier; seven letters between 18th-century English historian Catharine Macaulay and American historian Mercy Otis Warren; and an 1865 letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln. A valuable site for high school students and teachers looking for comprehensive guidance from professional historians on the current state of debate on many topics in American history.
Resources Available: IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

www.history
George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741–1799
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by Susan Holbrook Perdue.
Reviewed 2008-06-01.
This collection of approximately 65,000 documents written by or to George Washington is the largest collection of original Washington documents in the world. It includes “correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account books, military records, reports, and notes accumulated by Washington from 1741 through 1799.” The site is searchable by keyword, and the range of documents make it an extremely rich source. Unfortunately, many of the documents are available only as page images—often with difficult to decipher handwriting—rather than as transcribed text. Transcripts, however, do exist for all of the diary pages and for additional selected documents. The site includes a number of helpful features: a timeline with annotations to relevant documents; a 1,500-word essay on Washington’s letterbooks; an essay entitled “Creating the American Nation,” with annotations on eight selected documents spanning Washington’s lifetime; a 8,500-word essay on his diaries; an 11,500-word essay on the publication history of Washington’s papers; and a 4,500-word essay on Washington’s career as a surveyor and mapmaker. “Because of the wide range of Washington’s interests, activities, and correspondents, which include ordinary citizens as well as celebrated figures, his papers are a rich source for almost every aspect of colonial and early American history.”
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-11-15.

www.history
Ad*Access
Digital Scriptorium, Duke University.
See JAH web review by Kelly Schrum.
Reviewed 2001-09-01.
This well-developed, easily navigated site presents images and database information for more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in the United States from 1911 to 1955. Material is drawn from the J. Walter Thompson Company Competitive Advertisements Collection of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University. The advertisements are divided into 5 main subjects areas: Radio (including radios, radio parts, and radio programs); Television (including television sets and programs); Transportation (including airlines, rental cars, buses, trains, and ships); Beauty and Hygiene (including cosmetics, soaps, and shaving supplies); and World War II (U.S. Government ads, such as V-mail or bond drives). The ads are searchable by keyword, type of illustration, and special features. A timeline from 1915 to 1955 provides general context for the ads with a chronology of major events. “About Ad Access” provides an overview of advertising history and the Duke collection, as well as a bibliography and list of advertising repositories in the U.S. Excellent archive of primary documents for students of consumer and popular culture.
Listen to the audio review:

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-10.

www.history
Famous Trials
Douglas Linder, Professor of Law, University of Missouri, Kansas City.
See JAH web review by Jerry Goldman.
Reviewed 2001-09-01.
Law professor Douglas Linder created this exceptional legal history site. It includes fascinating treatments of over 50 of the most prominent court trials in American history, including: Scopes “Monkey” Trial (1925); Rosenberg Trial (1951); Leopold and Loeb Trial (1924); Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692); Scottsboro Trials (1931–1937); Bill Haywood Trial (1907); My Lai Courts Martial (1970); Nuremberg Trials (1945–49); Dakota Conflict Trials (1862); Mississippi Burning Trial (1967); Chicago Seven Conspiracy (1969–70); Johnson Impeachment Trial (1868); O.J. Simpson Trial (1995); The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1895); Hauptmann (Lindbergh) Trial (1935); Sweet Trials (1925–1926); Amistad Trials (1839–1840); Sheriff Shipp Trial (1907–1909); Susan B. Anthony Trial (1873); the Sacco and Vanzetti Trial (1921); Clinton Impeachment Trial (1999); Moussaoui 9/11 Trial (2006); and the Black Sox Trial (1921). Most trial pages include a 750–1000-word essay on the historical background of the case, links to biographies (roughly 500 words) of key figures in the trials, and approximately 15–25 primary documents related to each trial, including transcripts of testimony, media coverage, depositions, and government documents. Cases also contain images, links to related websites, and a bibliography of scholarly works. There are also links to biographies of 5 “trial heroes,” including famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, and a “Exploring Constitutional Law” site that offers 83 important constitutional topics for class discussion, such as gay rights, student searches, and the electoral college debates. Each topic includes a 250–300-word introduction to the issue and links to roughly ten related primary documents and court opinions. These topics are designed for classroom use and include issue questions for discussion. Another link explores the Supreme Court and includes items such as biographies of past and present justices, a virtual tour of the Supreme Court building, and a term calendar. Three interactive learning sites on the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers are also offered. This exceptional site can serve as a valuable resource for studying many aspects of legal and constitutional history.
Listen to the audio review:

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-11.

www.history
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture
Stephen Railton, University of Virginia.
See JAH web review by Ellen Noonan.
Reviewed 2001-12-01.
This well-designed site explores Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin “as an American cultural phenomenon.” The section of “Pre Texts, 1830–1852” provides dozens of texts, songs, and images from the various genres Stowe drew upon: Christian Texts, Sentimental Culture, Anti-Slavery Texts, and Minstrel Shows. The section on Uncle Tom’s Cabin includes Stowe’s preface, multiple versions of the text, playable songs from the novel, and Stowe’s defense against criticism, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A third section focuses on responses to the book from 1852 to 1930, including 25 reviews, over 400 articles and notes, nearly 100 responses from African Americans, and almost 70 of pro-slavery responses. The final section explores “Other Media,” including children’s books, songs, games, and theatrical versions. 15 interpretive exhibits challenge students to explore how slavery and race were defined and redefined as well as how various characters assumed a range of political and social meanings. Excellent for teachers and students.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.
Website last visited on 2007-10-11.

www.history
Do History: Martha Ballard’s Diary Online
Film Study Center, Harvard University.
See JAH web review by Jane Kamensky.
Reviewed 2001-06-01.
Developed by the Film Study Center at Harvard University, this site is an experimental, interactive case study that explores the remarkable 18th-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard. The site demonstrates how historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pieced together the diary within a broader historical context to write the book A Midwife’s Tale and offers a behind-the-scenes tour with filmmaker Laurie Kahn-Leavitt on the making of the film version, also called A Midwife’s Tale. The site offers two versions of the 1400-page diary, facsimile and transcribed full-text; the latter is searchable by keyword and date. An archive offers images of nearly 50 documents on such topics as Ballard’s life, domestic life, law and justice, finance and commerce, geography and surveying, midwifery and birth, medical information, religion, and Maine history. It is searchable by document type, topic, author, and title. Also included are maps of North America (1795), Maine (1799), and Hallowell, Maine (1794); images of Augusta and Hallowell Maine; and a walking tour of Hallowell, Maine. A timeline traces Maine’s history from the first attempt to settle the coastline in 1607, through Ballard’s lifetime (1735–1812), to the 1997 release of the film A Midwife’s Tale. Interactive exercises offer students the opportunity to transcribe and “decode” portions of the diary, and a “Magic Lens” makes it appear as if Ballard’s handwriting is instantly transcribed. A drop-down menu offers suggestions on ways to use the site for conducting research on genealogy, midwifery and herbal medicine, and diaries, as well as for using primary sources. Of particular interest is a section on teaching with this Website, which includes 15 ideas for classroom activities and suggestions on how to customize the activities for different grade levels, as well as links to the teacher guides developed for the PBS film. 2 “Doing History” exercises allow visitors to build a story around Ballard’s notes about 2 controversies. The “On Your Own” section helps “beginning historians” organize and conduct research with ten 500- to 750-word essays describing the stages of a research project and offering step-by-step instructions on cultivating such research skills as reading 18th-century writing, reading probate records, searching for deeds, and exploring graveyards. There are also links to 5 additional Websites with further how-to information, a bibliography of over 125 related scholarly works, and 50 related websites. This rich site provides students and teachers with an ideal case study of the work involved in “piecing together the past.”
Listen to the audio review based on the JAH web review by Jane Kamensky:

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-10-24.

www.history
Wright American Fiction, 1851–1875
Committee on Institutional Cooperation; Indiana University Digital Library Program.
See JAH web review by Robert K. Nelson.
Reviewed 2003-06-01.
An ambitious attempt to digitize 19th century American fiction as listed in Lyle Wright’s bibliography, American Fiction, 1815–1875, this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. At present, the site offers 2,887 texts by 1,456 authors. Of these, 1,124 have been edited and SGML encoded so that users may access chapter and story divisions through table of contents hyperlinks. The remaining 1,763 texts have not been proofed, but still can be perused either as facsimiles of original pages or in unedited transcriptions. Most valuable is the ability to perform word searches on the whole database. A most valuable site for those studying American literature and popular culture of the 19th century.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-11-06.

www.history
Remembering Jim Crow
American RadioWorks.
See JAH web review by Joseph Crespino.
Reviewed 2003-09-01.
A companion site to the NPR radio documentary on segregated life in the South (broadcast in February 2002). Presents 30 audio excerpts, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and approximately 130 photographs, arranged in six thematically-organized sections. Covers legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community life, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site’s creators, notes, the interviews display a “marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow.” Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The site also includes 16 photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. The site provides audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than 90 additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to 9 related sites, and a 41-title bibliography. The project creators—Ellis and personnel from American RadioWorks, the Minnesota Public Radio documentary producers—used interviews selected from more than 1,000 oral histories compiled by Duke University’s “Behind the Veil” project, in addition to conducting new interviews. The short 100-word introductions to each section succinctly provide a contextual framework to the documentary material. Valuable for those studying the American South, race relations, and African American history.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.
Website last visited on 2007-09-19.

www.history
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale
Library of Congress.
This well-designed exhibit is composed of three galleries focused on the cultural impact of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Each gallery contains multiple panels with one or more images and explanatory text. “‘To Please a Child’: L. Frank Baum and the Land of Oz” uses 16 panels to examine various aspects of the book, including W.W. Denslow’s artwork, Baum’s original copyright application, and an early review of the book appearing in the October 1900 issue of The Literary Review. “To See the Wizard: Oz on Stage and Film” uses 21 panels to look at 2 of the most famous productions of Baum’s book, the 1902–1903 stage play that became one of Broadway’s greatest successes and the classic 1939 MGM movie. The panels on the stage play include 2 color posters published in 1903 to promote the show and the 16 panels on MGM’s version examine the cast, production, and music, including a full-page color advertisement placed in the September 1939 issue of Cosmopolitan. “To Own the Wizard: Oz Artifacts,” with 18 panels, examines the varieties of Oz-related novelties that have appeared over the years, including The Wizard of Oz Monopoly game by Hasbro, a Wizard of Oz stamp, and “The Royal Bank of Oz” rebate check from MGM. This exhibit is of interest to anyone studying popular culture or the history of the arts in 20th-century America.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-09-24.

www.history
Studs Terkel: Conversations with America
Chicago Historical Society .
See JAH web review by Clifford M. Kuhn.
Reviewed 2004-09-01.
Part of the digital repository, Historical Voices, this site was created in honor of Studs Terkel, the noted oral historian, radio host of “The Studs Terkel Program,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Dedicated to making Terkel’s 50 years of work available, it presents material pulled from approximately 5,000 hours of sound recordings. The seven galleries—The Studs Terkel Program; Division Street: America; Hard Times; The Good War; Race; Talking to Myself; and Greatest Hits—center on the extensive interviews Terkel completed for the radio show and his books and contain more than 400 audio clips of interviews. Most of the interviews are about 15 minutes in length and explore diverse subjects, including Chicago architecture, urban landscape, immigrants, street life, the 1929 stock market crash, organized labor, New Deal programs, race relations, and integration. Interviewees include Chicago architect Frank Lloyd Wright and labor activist Cesar Chavez as well as men and women on a train to Washington D.C. for the 1963 Civil Rights March. Sound recordings are searchable by date, keyword, or author. Complementing this site is an educational section intended to help students and teachers use oral history in the classroom and a 55-minute interview with Terkel. This well-designed site offers a rich history of many influential, as well as lesser-known, personalities living in the second half of the 20th century and is beneficial to anyone interested in the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, and labor issues.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-09-24.

www.history
Selected Civil War Photographs
American Memory, Library of Congress.
This collection offers 1,118 photographs depicting Civil War military personnel, preparations for battle, and the aftermath of battles in the main eastern theater and in the west, in addition to Federal Navy and Atlantic seaborne expeditions against the Confederacy. The site also includes portraits of Confederate and Union officers and enlisted men and photographs of Washington, D.C., during the war. Most images were created under the supervision of photographer Mathew B. Brady; additional photographs were made by Alexander Gardner after leaving Brady’s employment to start his own business. The presentation “Time Line of the Civil War” places images in historical context. “Does the Camera Ever Lie” demonstrates the constructed nature of images, showing that photographers sometimes rearranged elements of their images to achieve a more controlled effect. This site is useful for those studying 19th-century American photography and Civil War history.
Listen to the audio review:

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-09-25.

www.history
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by Thomas Thurston.
Reviewed 2001-09-01.
Approximately 2,900 life histories from 1936–1940 compiled and transcribed as part of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA)are featured on this site. Documents represent the work of more than 300 writers from 24 states. The histories, in the form of drafts and revisions, vary from narrative to dialog, report, or case history. A typical history describes an informant’s family, education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet, and other observations on society and culture. Interviewers often substituted pseudonyms for names of individuals and places. The Special Presentation, “Voices from the Thirties”—adapted in part from the book First Person America by Ann Banks and illustrated with photographs of the Project’s staff at work, interviewees, and their environments—provides the context for the creation of the Life Histories Collection and includes excerpts from sample interviews. Visitors can select a particular U.S. state or search the archive by keyword. Life histories are presented in facsimiles of original interview documents and as searchable text. This multifaceted collection provides materials for teaching subjects such as slavery and 19th-century American folk cultures as well as social history of the Great Depression.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-09-25.

www.history
America’s First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839–1864
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by Paula Petrik.
Reviewed 2010-09-01.
This collection contains more than 725 photographs, most of them daguerreotypes produced at the Mathew Brady studio. The Brady images include portraits of prominent public figures, including President James K. Polk, Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Cole, and Horace Greeley. The collection also includes the earliest known images of President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. Those not produced by the Brady studio daguerreotypes by African-American photographers, a few early architectural views taken in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area by John Plumbe, street scenes of Philadelphia, early portraits by Robert Cornelius, and copies of painted portraits. A short introduction to the daguerreotype medium and a “Timeline of the Daguerrian Era” provide additional context for the images. A special presentation, “Mirror Images: Daguerreotypes at the Library of Congress,” includes photographs from the American Colonization Society, occupational daguerreotypes, portraits, and architectural views. Useful for those studying 19th-century photography, visual culture, or art, as well as for viewing some of the earliest American photographs.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-01.

www.history
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945
American Memory, Library of Congress.
More than 160,000 images taken by government photographers with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) during the New Deal and World War II eras are featured on this site. These images document the ravages of the Great Depression on farmers, scenes of everyday life in small towns and cities, and, in later years, mobilization campaigns for World War II. This site includes approximately 1,600 color photographs and selections from 2 extremely popular collections: “’Migrant Mother’ Photographs” and “Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination.” The site also provides a bibliography, a background essay of about 500 words, seven short biographical sketches of FSA-OWI photographers, links to 7 related sites, and 3 essays on cataloging and digitizing the collection. The photographs are searchable by keyword and arranged into a subject index.
Resources Available: IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-01.

www.history
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties
American Memory, Library of Congress.
This site features 35 hours of folk and popular music sound recordings from several European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-speaking communities. The Work Projects Administration California Folk Music Project collected these 817 songs, in 12 languages and representing 185 musicians, in Northern California between 1938 and 1940. The collection also includes 168 photographs of musicians, 45 scale drawings and sketches of instruments, and numerous written documents, including ethnographic field reports and notes, song transcriptions, published articles, and project correspondence. Organized by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of the American Folk Song, this was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document folk and popular music of such diverse origin in one region. In addition to folk music of indigenous and immigrant groups, the collection includes popular songs from the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast eras, medicine show tunes, and ragtime numbers. In addition, short essays describe the California Folk Music Project and the ethnographic work of Sidney Robertson Cowell. This collection is an excellent resource for learning about ethnographic research practices as well as about cultures of various California ethnic groups.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-14.

www.history
California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849–1900
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by William E. Brown, Jr..
Reviewed 2002-09-01.
The 190 works presented on this site—approximately 40,000 written pages and more than 3,000 illustrations—provide eyewitness accounts covering California history from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. Most authors represented are white, educated, male Americans, including reporters detailing Gold Rush incidents and visitors from the 1880s attracted to a highly-publicized romantic vision of California life. The narratives, in the form of diaries, descriptions, guidebooks, and subsequent reminiscences, portray “pioneer experience, encounters between Anglo-Americans and the diverse peoples who had preceded them, the transformation of the land by mining, ranching, agriculture, and urban development; the often-turbulent growth of communities and cities; and California’s emergence as both a state and a place of uniquely American dreams.” A map of California from 1900, texts, 20 illustrations and photographs, a bibliography for further reading, and a comprehensive discussion of the collection’s strengths and weaknesses provide useful context for first-person accounts. A special presentation recounts early California history illustrated with paintings, engravings, and photographs.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-01.

www.history
American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870–1920
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by Robert W. Snyder.
Reviewed 2004-07-01.
This collection documents the development of vaudeville and other popular entertainment forms from the 1870s to the 1920s. It includes 334 English and Yiddish playscripts, 146 theater programs and playbills, 61 motion pictures, and 10 sound recordings. This site also features 143 photos and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of magician Harry Houdini and an essay with links to specific items entitled “Houdini: A Biographical Chronology.” Search by keyword or browse the subject and author indexes. The site is linked to the Library of Congress Exhibition “Bob Hope and American Variety.”
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-10-02.

www.history
Center for History and New Media
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University .
In the past decade new media and new technologies have begun to transform even the ancient discipline of history. CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web challenge historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) was established in the fall of 1994 to contribute to and reflect upon this transformation and challenge. The Center produces historical works in new media, tests the effectiveness of these products in the classroom, and reflects critically on the promises and pitfalls of new media in historical practice. The Center’s resources are designed to benefit professional historians, high school teachers, and students of history. Includes eight essays on the use of new technology in history teaching; announcements and reports on current projects; reviews of recent CD-ROMs; links to more than 1,000 history departments around the world, more than 1,500 history websites, and more than 200 CD-Roms; and six syllabi for George Mason University history courses. “Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies” includes four articles demonstrating uses of hypertext in scholarly contexts. Declaration: Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation provides translations of the American Declaration of Independence into French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, along with commentaries on the practice and problems of translating documents. The site also includes the electronic journal “English Matters,” designed for teachers and students of English. With the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York (ASHP/CML), CHNM produces "History Matters."
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2002-10-28.

www.history
African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818–1907
American Memory, Library of Congress.
See JAH web review by Randall Burkett.
Reviewed 2005-12-01.
This site presents approximately 350 African-American pamphlets and documents, most of them produced between 1875 and 1900. These works provide “a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture” in a number of forms, including sermons, organization reports, college catalogs, graduation orations, slave narratives, Congressional speeches, poetry, and playscripts. Topics covered include segregation, voting rights, violence against African Americans, and the colonization movement. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love. Information about publication and a short description (75 words) of content accompanies each pamphlet. The site also offers a timeline of African-American history from 1852 to 1925 and reproductions of original documents and illustrations. A special presentation “The Progress of a People,” recreates a meeting of the National Afro-American Council in December 1898. A rich resource for studying 19th- and early 20th-century African-American leaders and representatives of African-American religious, civic, and social organizations.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2007-10-02.