Offering a new way of looking at the history of American culture and society, Race and Ethnicity in Advertising is a database of advertisements from across the United States throughout the 20th century.  This site offers a fresh lense for students to explore the changes in how Americans view themselves and each other in the world through the familiar medium of commercials and advertisements. 

Visitors to the site can explore the posters, videos, and images in three different ways.  With over 100 hundred pages of materials, every page offers diverse ads to analyze from the late 19th century through the early 21st century.  The option to browse by collection focuses on specific topics for analysis, such as Asian American representation and celebrity endorsement advertisements.  Browsing by essay is a function that highlights themes such as gender, stereotypes, and cultural transformation using adverts from different periods to demonstrate continuing trends.

The site is friendly to students of all ages with the background and contextual information provided for every advertisement.  Each item offers key information for students to place the ad within its historical context by providing the title, date, racial/ ethnic markers, and primary time period.  The Keywords and Context section also provides clarifying information that would assist students while evaluating sources or be a great way to introduce a new topic in the classroom.  

This website presents more than 250 commercials that appeared on American television sets beginning in 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the public. Advertisements from each election, including the 2008 campaigns, are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over time, such as Commander in Chief, Fear, Children, and Real People. Advertisements are also browsable by issue, such as civil rights, corruption, war, taxes, and welfare.

This collection includes well-known ads such as the Daisy Ad and well-known public figures, such as Harry Belafonte's advertisement in support of Kennedy, as well as many others that may be less familiar in the 21st century. Essays focus on analyzing advertising strategies of major party candidates and a program guide presents a history of the usage of television commercials in campaigns.

Images of more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in newspapers and magazines in the United States from 1911 to 1955 appear on this well-developed site. The material is drawn from a collection of one of the oldest and largest advertising agencies, the J. Walter Thompson Company.

Advertisements are divided into five main subjects areas: Radio (including radios, radio parts, and 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-related, such as V-mail and bond drives). Ads are searchable by keyword, type of illustration, and special features. A timeline from 1915 to 1955 provides general context. "About Ad Access" furnishes an overview of advertising history, as well as a bibliography and list of advertising repositories.

Transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants between 1736 and 1803 can be browsed or search on this website. The runaways are primarily from Virginia, but also come from states along the Eastern seaboard and locations abroad. Materials include ads placed by owners and overseers as well as those placed by sheriffs and other governmental officials for captured or suspected runaway slaves. Additional advertisements announce runaway servants, sailors, and military deserters.

"Exploring Advertisements" offers browse, search, and full-text search functions, as well as maps and timelines for viewing the geographic locations of slaves. The site also provides documents on runaways—including letters, other newspaper materials, literature and narratives, and several dozen official records, such as laws, county records, and House of Burgess journals. Information on the currency and clothing of the time, a gazetteer with seven maps of the region, and a 13-title bibliography are also available.

This small, but useful, website offers a wide range of primary source material for researching the history of the prohibition movement, temperance, and alcoholism. The more than 1,800 items include broadsides, sheet music, pamphlets, and government publications related to the temperance movement and prohibition.

Materials come from the period leading up to prohibition, such as an 1830s broadside on the "Absent Father" as well as the prohibition era itself, such as a 1920 pamphlet entitled, "Alcohol Sides with Germ Enemies." They end with the passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933.

All digitized items are in the public domain. An essay, "Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric" by Leah Rae Berk provides an overview of the topic and historical context.

These 9,000 advertising items and publications date from 1850 to 1920. Selected items illustrate the rise of consumer culture in America and the development of a professionalized advertising industry.

Images are grouped into 11 categories: advertising ephemera (trade cards, calendars, almanacs, postcards); broadsides for placement on walls, fences, and buildings; advertising cookbooks from food companies and appliance manufacturers; early advertising agency publications created to promote the concepts and methods of the industry; promotional literature from the nation's oldest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson; early Kodak print advertisements; Lever Brothers Lux (soap) advertisements; R.C. Maxwell advertising company images; outdoor advertising; scrapbooks; and tobacco ads.

Each category contains a brief overview, and each image is accompanied by production information. The site, searchable by keyword or ad content, includes a timeline on the history of advertising from the 1850s to 1920. This easy-to-use collection is ideal for researching consumer culture and marketing strategies.

The history of the Macintosh computer is presented on this website. Rather than profile Apple Computer's leader, Steve Jobs, and well-publicized software and hardware developers, materials include 13 interviews with designers, technical writers, Apple employees, a Berkeley user group organizer, and a San Francisco journalist who covered early developments.

In addition, nearly 90 documents from the late 1970s to the present chart company and user group developments, beginning with roots in the 1960s counterculture philosophy. Documents include "From Satori to Silicon Valley," a lecture by Theodore Roszak first delivered in 1985 with afterthoughts added in 2000. There are 13 texts by the first Mac designer, Jef Raskin, press releases and other marketing materials, and texts relating to user groups.

More than 100 images include patent drawings and product photographs.

Highlights of Coca-Cola television advertisements from the Library of Congress Motion Picture archives are exhibited on this site, with 50 commercials, broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage.

There are five examples of stop-motion advertisements from the mid-1950s, 18 experiments with color and lighting for television ads from 1964, and well-known commercials, such as the "Hilltop" commercial featuring the song "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" (1971). Additional resources include the "Mean Joe Greene" commercial (1979); the first "Polar Bear" commercial (1993); the "Snowflake" commercial (1999); and "First Experience," an international commercial filmed in Morocco (1999).

The site also includes a bibliography and links to finding aids for other television commercials at the Library of Congress. While this site is relatively small, it provides a good resource for studying the history of post-World War II consumer culture in terms of content and technique.