"Bring your party back safe"
http://www.med.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/lewis_clark
"Bring your party back safe" is an online exhibition created by the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia. The exhibition looks at the 1803 Lewis and Clark exploration into the U.S. West, concentrating on the medicine and medical theory employed by the Corps of Discovery to promote health and prevent disease and injury throughout the expedition. The site is easy to navigate and the text is engaging and well-written. Amongst the areas covered are the background to the expedition, and biographies of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Sacagawea and York. Most of the information relates to the medical aspects of the expedition, discussing accidents, injuries and diseases, the treatments for these, the medical supplies brought on the journey, and Native American relations.
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"Them dark days" : the Arkansas slave narratives
http://www.oldstatehouse.com/exhibits/virtual/slave_narratives.asp
"Them Dark Days" is published on the Old State House Museum website, which is devoted to recording and publishing resources on Arkansas history. "Them Dark Days" is a database of transcribed slave narratives that were gathered from 1940-41 by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal. The narratives cover all aspects of slave life, including everyday life, marriage, miscegenation, religion, escape and abuse. The narratives can be searched by keyword, or browsed by the interviewees surname or by topic. Most of the narratives discuss life in Arkansas just prior to and during the American Civil War, and life during Reconstruction.
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'With an even hand' : Brown v. Board at fifty
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/
This Library of Congress exhibition revisits the landmark Supreme Court case Brown versus Board of Education for its fiftieth anniversary. The site looks at the history of segregation in the United States, the efforts to end it, and the changes that have occurred in the past fifty years. The online exhibition has been designed in tandem with a physical exhibition, and features over a hundred digitised primary sources. These include photographs, personal papers, official documentation and cartoons. The exhibition is split into three sections. The first considers the century leading up to the case, and looks at the important cases that prepared the ground for Brown versus Board, including Plessy versus Ferguson and the Pink Franklin case. The second section considers the 1954 Brown versus Board case and the public response to it, whilst the third looks at the impact of the case over the last fifty years. There is also a useful list of suggested further reading and a search engine on the site.
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17th century colonial New England : with special emphasis on the Essex county witch-hunt of 1692
http://www.17thc.us/
The Web Site "17th Century Colonial New England: With Special Emphasis on the Essex County Witch-Hunt of 1692" is published and compiled by Margo Burns, who has worked on the University of Virginia Salem Witchcraft Trials Etext project. This site is vast and provides hundreds of annotated links to resources on the North American colonies in the seventeenth century. The links are arranged by subject to ease searches and include: archaeological exploration of the period; audio programmes on relevant topics; daily life; images and facsimiles; Native American Indians; and Increase and Cotton Mather. Burns is good when writing in the field of her expertise, which is the Salem trials for witchcraft and there are several good documents on the site. This excellent site also includes links to teaching materials for all ages and has received About: Best of the Web and Britannia Internet Guide awards. It is useful for those studying witchcraft, seventeenth century history, or American studies and is regularly updated.
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1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire digital collection
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/earthquakeandfire/
This website, for the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection, looks primarily at the impact of the great earthquake and the fires that resulted in San Francisco in 1906. The very well designed, and highly user-friendly, website includes approximately 14,000 images and 7,000 pages of searchable full-text documents relating to the earthquake and fire in San Francisco. Amongst other things, the website contains an online exhibit (including short films and audio), a searchable map of San Francisco, and a 360 degree panorama of the city. It is possible, also, to search or browse the website. This website is an excellent example of multimedia approaches to history having a real impact on the learning experience and is a very valuable resource.
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1962 : the Cuban missile crisis
http://www.cubacrisis.net/
1962, The Cuban Missile Crisis is published by the Caen Memorial Museum, and looks at one of the major events of the Cold War conflict. The site can be viewed in French, Spanish and English, and it provides a comprehensive introduction to the international crisis that erupted in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the core of the site is the day-by-day account of the thirteen days if the crisis that combines text with a range of other resources, including photographs, maps, diagrams, cartoons and audio files. Additional material includes biographies of the key individuals, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro, the history of relations between Cuba and the U.S, information on Operations Mongoose and Anadyr, and international opinions of events.
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350 years of American Jewish history
http://www.350th.org/
This website outlines the history of Jewish people in America from the arrival of the first immigrants in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present day. It was created by the Commission for commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History (2004), created through the cooperation of four research institutions: the American Jewish Historical Society; the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives; the Library of Congress; and the National Archives and Records Administration. The site provides short narrative histories of the community with primary source excerpts for different periods, which would serve either for reference or teaching. For scholars, students and those interested from among the general public, the site offers an online essay with lecture and book excerpts entitled Historiography of American Jewish History. The site connects to multimedia digital archives, based on the holdings of the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, and related to the 50th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, 1948-1998. Other parts of the site include online exhibitions, such as Great Voices in Reform Judaism, which uses sound clips, images and full-text resources. There is a general illustrated historical timeline; an exhibition review; a calendar of socially, communally and academically oriented events; and further information on related conferences, links, bibliographies and instructions on how commuities can chronicle and submit their own histories to the Commission.
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3Cities Project
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/index.php
The 3 Cities project, based at the University of Nottingham, is an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and literary and visual cultures of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles in the period 1870 to 1930. Founded on collaborative research, the project utilises the expertise of critics and theorists of American literary and visual culture, historians and cultural geographers, in the service of a wide-ranging textual and historical study of representation in modern America. In addition to textual studies, a limited project on documentary photography in New York at the turn of the century has demonstrated the particular advantages which IT brings to the study of urban culture, especially in its visual dimension.
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49thparallel
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/
Taking its name from the geographic position of the border between the USA and Canada, this ejournal aims to foster discussion and debate of the culture, history and politics of North America. With articles ranging from pop music to foreign policy, the journal is resolutely interdisciplinary and internationalist in focus, although the content has a strong UK contribution. Past issues are available on the site, which include conference reports, debates, essays and reviews.
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A piece of my soul : quilts by black Arkansans
http://www.oldstatehouse.com/piece-of-my-soul
A Piece of My Soul: Quilts by Black Arkansans is an online exhibition published by the Old State House Museum, which is dedicated to recording and publishing resources on Arkansas history. This particular exhibition is one on textile history, focusing on the African American quilt collection held at the museum. The site looks at family traditions of quilting, the work of individual quilters and the different types of quilts made throughout the twentieth century in Arkansas. All the images of the quilts are excellent, and the narrative explains much about the history of quilting in African American life. There is also a page of further links to other quilting history websites.
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A sketch of Bridget Bishop
http://www.loyno.edu/history/journal/1990-1/documents/ASketchofBridgetBisho
The website "A Sketch of Bridget Bishop" provides a platform for publishing an essay with the same title, the winning essay of 1991 in the Student Historical Journal published by the Loyola University, New Orleans. It is a basic essay on the experience of Bridget Bishop, one of the women tried for witchcraft at Salem in 1692. The essay presents the scapegoating mechanisms as a partial explanation for the phenomenon. Bridget Bishop was one of the first to have been victimised. Bridget Bishop displayed many of the characteristics popularly associated with those accused of witchcraft. She had been married three times, dressed in an ostentatious manner, was extremely sociable, had been involved in local disputes, and already had a reputation for witchcraft - in short an unconventional woman for her times. This essay provides a good introduction for those embarking upon the study of the witchcraft phenomenon, by concentrating on the individual.
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A summons to comradeship : world war I and II posters and postcards
http://digital.lib.umn.edu/warposters/warpost.html
"A Summons of Comradeship" website is an online digital library of posters published during the First and Second World War by the U.S. government, and charitable and commercial organisations. The posters are taken from collections held at the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Minneapolis Public Library, and are published as a part of the University of Minnesota Libraries Images Project. From the same libraries some 700 postcards were included in the digitising project. The posters cover a wide range of topics, including military recruitment, war binds and loans, industrial production, rationing, health and safety, food production, recruitment of women, and labour organisations amongst others. Posters from Europe, including Nazi Germany, are part of the collection. Included is artwork by Otto Fischer, Gil Spicer, James Montgomery Flagg, James H. Daugherty and Ben Shahn. The posters themselves can be searched or browsed by subject, time period, topic/series or keyword. Each record lists details such as creator, date published, the place the poster is held, and the images are generally of a good standard, although some are difficult to read because they cannot be viewed in a large enough format. The site offers more insight into the digitising process, technical information about the metadata used for each item, and how to apply for a copy of the posters in the collection.
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Abraham Lincoln online
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln.html
This website, Abraham Lincoln Online, presents free online access to a wealth of resources on Abraham Lincoln studies. The website's main intention is to outline the various activities - seminars, lectures, conferences, and so on - happening around the world (although mainly in the United States) which focus on Lincoln and his era. More than that, however, there is also an extensive list of books published on Lincoln, access to a number of Lincoln's speeches and writings, and information about places connected with the man. This website will prove to be of benefit to those beginning their work on Lincoln or the American Civil War, but may not be quite as suited to more advanced work.
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Abraham Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html
The 'Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress' website provides online access to material held by the manuscripts department of the Library of Congress. This collection consists of approximately 20,000 records, which have been microfilmed and indexed. It is the microfilm collection which forms the source of the online collection. The microfilm is being digitally scanned and the resulting images are being made available online. Material in the archive dates from 1833-1916 although the great majority of the material dates from between 1850-1865. Annotated transcriptions are being made available to all the documents in Lincoln's autograph collection. The online exhibition consists of approximately 61,000 images and 10,000 transcriptions. The collection can be browsed or searched by keyword. The site also includes online exhibits relating to The Emancipation Proclamation, The Lincoln Assassination and a photograph gallery. Other features of the site include timelines, information about the collection and a selected bibliography.
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Adoption history project
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/
The Adoption History Project is the work of an academic at the University of Oregon. The aim of the project is to make the history of adoption in the United States more visible and accessible. This is a fairly comprehensive resource, and makes available a range of research materials. Featured is a timeline of adoption from 1851 to the present, an archive of transcribed primary documents, and secondary sources on the four main branches of adoption studies. In addition there is information about key individuals and organisations, introductions to over 25 topics of adoption history, and suggestions for further reading.
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African American experience in Ohio, 1850-1920
http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/index.stm
The African American Experience in Ohio 1850-1920, is an impressive online archive of over 30,000 pages of digitised primary source material relating to the history of the black community in this U.S. state. Published by the Library of Congress and the Ohio Historical Society the collection spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and covers themes such as slavery, abolition, the underground railroad and African American politics and religion. Available on the site are personal papers, pamphlets, speeches, reports, 15,000 articles from state newspapers, photographs, plantation account books, ex-slave narratives, and correspondence. The collection can be searched by keyword, browsed through the subject index, or browsed by the type of source material.
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African American history
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/index.html
African American History website charts Afro-American history from 1857 to the mid 1970s. The site is a useful resource for those interested in a broad overview of Afro-American people from the Nineteenth Century. The author documents an important selection of events beginning with the Dredd Scott case and culminating with school desegregation plans. One can navigate through the site by the contents page which is divided into five key periods: The Dredd Scott Case 1857; After the Civil War 1865-1900; Early Civil Rights Struggles 1945-1955; The Civil Rights Movements 1955-1965; and School Integration 1955-1975. The information given is mostly based on famous legal struggles throughout the period but also covers the broad themes of slavery and segregation including the infamous Montgomery Bus Boycott and anti-segregation sit-ins. The site includes a comprehensive bibliography for further references on the theme, as available when it was completed in 1998.
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African-American women online archival collections
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html
Duke University's African-American Women Online Archival Collections consist of three sets of primary resources relating to life during the nineteenth century. One is an autobiographical account, the other two archives of letters by slaves. Elizabeth Johnson Harris's life story is recorded in an 85 page hand-written memoir. The memoir is transcribed on the site, but can also be viewed as digitised images of the original document. Harris was born in Georgia in 1867 to parents who had been slaves. She was deeply religious and wrote poetry, some of her poems being included in the memoir. The collection contains only one letter by Vilet Lester, written in 1857. Addressing it to the daughter of one of her owners (with whom she seems to have had a close friendship), she traces her ownership since leaving the household and asks for news of developments. The archive of letters by Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson is a little more substantial. House slaves in Virginia, their letters from 1837 and 1838 cover daily events and news about friends and other slaves. Given the scarcity of letters written by slaves, this online collection provides an important resource. The site also includes links to other websites and details of additional materials held at Duke University.
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Africans in America
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
The website "Africans in America" was produced as an accompaniment to a series on US history courses. It is presented in four-parts: The Terrible Transformation 1450-1750; Revolution 1750-1805; Brotherly Love 1791-1831; and Judgement Day 1831-1865. Each part features a historical narrative, resource bank and teacher's guide. This informative guide traces the change in status from indentured servitude to slavery, and then finally to nominal freedom. The site presents an excellent insight into the everyday lives and struggles of the African-American, African and Caribbean people forcibly removed to America, within the context of US history. Supplemented by quotations from primary and secondary sources, the site discusses the complex relationships between master and servant, the slaves and servants themselves, the role of the family and that of slavery in the political arena. The resource banks contain ample additional contextual material, and some primary sources. The teacher's guides provide suggestions for questions, activities, lesson foci, and additional resources. Useful indices of historical documents, modern voices, and people and events are also included for ease of navigation. Overall this site is one of the better ones in its field.
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Afro-Louisiana history and genealogy 1719-1820
http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
This site provides access to a searchable database of resources relating to slavery in Louisiana between 1719-1820. It includes the names, ages and occupations of Afro-American slaves and slave owners in the region. Also accessible is data on slave prices, the text of oral histories and information on the emancipation and abolition of slavery. Additional features are explanations of how the data was compiled and links to some primary resource documents including slave advertisements and inventory sheets. The information was compiled by Dr Gwendolyn Midlo Hall of Rutgers University and marketed commercially as CD-ROM Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. It is available on the Internet via Ibiblio.org
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AFSCME and Dr. King
http://www.afscme.org/about/1029.cfm
The small website on "AFSCME and Dr. King", published by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) , documents the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike, which became part of the wider African American civil rights movement with the involvement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King, Jr. The site offers a chronology of events, a selection of newspaper articles from the time, the text of Martin Luther King's 'I've been to the Mountaintop' speech, and his views on labor, and an in depth newspaper report about the strike. Three footage clips can be viewed on the site: Keep the Dream Alive; Documentary: I Am a Man; and Labour Groups Pledge to Keep King's Dream Alive. There is also a good selection of web links on African American history.
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After the day of infamy : man-on-the-street interviews following the attack on Pearl Harbor
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afcphhtml/afcphhome.html
This site forms part of the American Memory Project maintained by the Library of Congress. It provides access to over 200 audiofiles and transcripts of interviews conducted with members of the American public in the days immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor on 8th December 1941. The materials have been digitised from the original holdings of the American Folklife Center. They offer a fascinating insight into public opinion about the American entry into the Second World War and current social and political issues of the time. In addition to the interviews, the site also provides access to biographies of the interviewees, background detail on the methodology of the original 1941 research and technical details on the digitisation of the collection. The site may be searched by subject keyword, or browsed by name or geographical location. RealPlayer software is required to access the audiofiles.
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Aftermath
http://www.aftermathww1.com/index.asp
"Aftermath" is a website which examines the social and cultural aftermath of the First World War, especially in the UK, "when the boys came home" (including: the experience of returned soldiers; the need for remembrance and war memorials; and the literature of the early 1920s). The author is a professional Web designer, and design pervades Aftermath and enhances it - even the distinctive poppy red colour scheme. The site's navigation is powered by DHTML. The majority of the extensive content of the site is database driven. The navigation bars to the left and at the top provide fast access with drop-down menus leading to index pages for the major divisions within the site. From there one can access the range of articles dealing with particular subjects including: News Clips (a very useful reference archive of newspaper articles about the Great War since 1998); the 2 minutes silence at 11 o'clock on Armistice Day now part of remembrance ceremonies; Peace Day (the official end of the war, marked by the signing three weeks earlier of the Versailles Treaty); War Memorials; Bereavement (personal accounts of loss); Pilgrimage (the history of visits to the Western Front); A Land Fit For Heroes (focuses on the grim peacetime reality for too many heroes, including J.B.Priestley's account of a battalion reunion); The Lost Generation (the myth and reality of the 1920s notion that Britain's troubles were due to the losses in the Great War); Disenchantment (extract from book by C.E.Montague, 1922); retrospectives on people and places such as Douglas Haig; Aftermath USA (the post-war experience in America); Short Stories (written in the 1920s by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Rudyard Kipling, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, and Arthur Machen; Great War Poetry; Modern Poetry; H.V.Morton's London, from the 1920s; Music Hall (the post-war decline); Crime. There is also a guestbook and other interactive message boards.
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Albert and Vera Weisbord archives
http://www.weisbord.org/
The Albert and Vera Weisbord Archives website documents the lives of a couple of leading Communist radicals of 1930s America. Albert Weisbord (1900-1977) and Vera (nee Buch) Weisbord (1895-1989) were organisers of numerous strikes and were the leaders of the Communist League of Struggle. Through personal accounts; travel notes; book extracts; magazine articles; manifestos; and official documentation the site aims to provide an accurate picture of the lives and activities of these radicals. The sources are divided into key themes including: the Passaic Textile Strike 1926; the Gastoria Textile Strike 1929; The Spanish Revolution; the 1958 Depression; the Afro-American Committee; La Parola del Popolo; and the Communist League of Struggles. Lengthy extracts of Albert and Vera's books, Class Struggle and The Conquest of Power, are also included. This site is a comprehensive account of two important figures in the development of modern America in the 1930s.
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Alcohol, temperance and prohibition
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/index.html
The 'Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition' website at Brown University Library is a digital collection of primary source materials covering the Prohibition movement in the USA. They are part of a larger body of material in the Alcohol and Addiction Studies Collection and from items across the Brown Library resources. They offer interest to researchers in American history, social studies and related areas at all levels and have been collected to illustrate the range of material available in the library holdings. All the digital items are in the public domain and include pamphlets leading up to and during the prohibition era, continuing through to its end in 1933, with the 21st Amendment. The layout of the site is straightforward with an overview of the collection, various browse and search options and an essay by Leah Rae Berk ('Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda : A Study in Rhetoric'). The quality of the images is high and they may be enlarged for further detail. This is a user-friendly site with detailed information for citation and reference, which gathers together sufficient material for a comprehensive insight of a significant era in American history.
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