Florida State Archives Photographic Collection

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Image, Conch Town, WPA, C. Foster, 1939, Florida State Archives Photo Collection
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More than 137,000 photographs of Florida, many focusing on specific localities from the mid-19th century to the present, are available on this website. The collection, including 15 online exhibits, is searchable by subject, photographer, keyword, and date.

Materials include 35 collections on agriculture, the Seminole Indians, state political leaders, Jewish life, family life, postcards, and tourism among other things. Educational units address 17 topics, including the Seminoles, the Civil War in Florida, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, pioneer feminist Roxcy Bolton, the civil rights movement in Florida, and school busing during the 1970s.

"Writing Around Florida" includes ideas to foster appreciation of Florida's heritage. "Highlights of Florida History" presents 46 documents, images, and photographs from Florida's first Spanish period to the present. An interactive timeline presents materials—including audio and video files—on Florida at war, economics and agriculture, geography and the environment, government and politics, and state culture and history.

Margaret Sanger Papers Project

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Selected materials by and about the "birth control pioneer" Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) are provided here. A link to a companion site offers approximately 200 documents dealing with The Woman Rebel, Sanger's 1914 radical feminist monthly, for which she was indicted and tried for violation of federal obscenity laws.

The project plans to digitize more than 600 of Sanger's speeches and articles. At present, there are 25 transcribed speeches, 182 newspaper articles from 1911–1921, four public statements, a letter written by Sanger in 1915, and more than 50 articles from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, some of which contain primary source materials. There are plans to add to items regularly. Materials also include 27 links to sites offering Sanger writings, a biographical essay, and a bibliography. Links to collections of images and an MP3 file of Margaret Sanger's 1953 "This I Believe" speech are also available.

Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution

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Photo, Sonia Pressman Fuentes receiving EOCP Award, Jewish Women and. . .
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This exhibit explores the contributions of Jewish women in Feminism's "Second Wave" during which Jewish women helped work "to transform American society and Jewish life in America." It offers a collection of images, a timeline, and six thematic essays. The interactive timeline using the exhibit images allows the visitor to follow the role of Jewish women in the resurgence of the feminist movement from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century. The thematic essays—"Foremothers," "From Silence to Voice," "Setting the Feminist Agenda," "The Personal is Political," "Feminism is Judaism," and "Confronting Power"—combine images, audio clips, and statements from prominent Jewish feminists, as well as short biographies of the feminists. The visitor can search the entire collection of more than 90 objects and stories from Jewish feminists used in the essays or browse the collection by person, format, topic, or date. A useful resource for researching Jewish women or the history of the feminist movement.

Teaching the 20th

Quiz Webform ID
22410
date_published
Teaser

Does the past go from 'recent' to 'history?' Answer questions about textbook portrayals.

quiz_instructions

We see the past through the filter of the present. How does that filter change perceptions as the distance between past and present widens? Date the following textbook excerpts—two on the women's movement in the later 20th century and two on Ronald Reagan's presidency—and consider the change in how writers interpret the present as it becomes the past.

Quiz Answer

1. A steadily growing number [of women] were entering the professions of medicine, law, education, religion, and the various fields of science and engineering. More and more were occupying positions of leadership in business and government formerly held only by men.

The above textbook excerpt on feminism and the post-World-Wars women's movement dates from:
a. 1966

This excerpt comes from Harcourt and Brace's Rise of the American Nation, by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. The excerpt has a tone of optimism—more and more women, the text says, were and are entering male-dominated fields. This excerpt also reveals which career fields the 1966 authors considered previously barred to women.

2. In some ways, the position of women in American society was worse in the 1960s than it had been in the 1920s. After forty years, there was a lower percentage of women enrolled in the nation's colleges and professional schools. Women were still relegated to stereotyped occupations like nursing and teaching; there were few female lawyers and even fewer women doctors.

This textbook excerpt on feminism and the women's movement dates from:
c. 1995

This excerpt comes from HarperCollins' America Past and Present, by Robert A. Divine et al. Contrast this excerpt with that in Question 1. By 1995, HarperCollins' textbook authors see the 1960s not as a period of "steady growth" in women's rights, but instead as a time in which such opportunities decreased. What changed? Certainly not events themselves. Perhaps contrast between conditions for women in 1995 and in the 1960s made the 1960s seem backward by comparison. Perhaps the different authors interpreted the same cultural trends differently. Or perhaps authors drew upon different data to create the narratives.

3. With his great popularity and shrewd handling of Congress, Reagan soon got much of his economic program passed. The final bill included $39 billion in tax cuts and a 25 percent cut in income taxes. The results of Reaganomics, however, were not quite what the President had hoped. Spending cuts, together with high interest rates, brought inflation down, but at first the cure was painful.

This textbook excerpt on Ronald Reagan's presidency dates from:
b. 1999

This excerpt comes from Glencoe McGraw-Hill's American History: The Modern Era Since 1865, by Donald A Ritchie. Contrast this excerpt with the excerpt in Question 4. In 1999, a decade after Reagan's presidency ended, this textbook's author could look back over the whole of Reagan's term and draw conclusions about the success or failure of Reagan's policies.

4. [Reagan] promised economy in government and a balanced budget, and he committed himself to "supply-side" economics, or tax reductions to businesses to encourage capital investment. But while he planned to slash federal spending, Reagan also pledged to cut income taxes and boost the defense budget—a feat John Anderson said could only be done with mirrors.

This textbook excerpt on Ronald Reagan's presidency dates from:
b. 1982

This excerpt comes from Houghton Mifflin's A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, by Mary Beth Norton et al. Contrast this excerpt with the excerpt in Question 3. In 1982, Reagan's presidency was in its early years, and textbook writers could not yet address his term in office as a neat whole. While it needed to be described—as the inevitable conclusion of the textbook's historical narrative—the recent past resisted easy integration into the text.

(Illinois Congressman John Anderson ran against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Republican primary.)

For more information

Interested in guiding your students in examination of their own textbooks? Explore teachinghistory.org's Beyond the Textbook feature. In this series of articles, historians look at what textbooks choose to leave out or miscontextualize when dealing with a number of subjects. Current articles address slavery, causes of the Civil War, and the industrial revolution.

Articles in our Teaching with Textbooks series also offer ideas and models for opening up textbooks to inquiry and analysis.

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Social Movements in Modern America: Labor, Civil Rights, and Feminism

Description

From Indiana University's website:

"Our NEH summer institute will enhance your teaching curriculum with respect to modern American social movements in a number of ways. Most fundamentally, the institute will help you understand the pivotal role that social movements have played in changing public policy in the United States over the last century. Moreover, the institute will acquaint you with the latest scholarship on these three social movements—labor, civil rights, and feminism—which you are unlikely to have encountered in your teacher training. Recent historical scholarship reveals at least three general ways to enhance these topics for your secondary school students. First, historians now emphasize the diversity and complexity of each of these movements. In each case, a variety of sometimes conflicting organizations, perspectives, and leaders made up each movement. And yet teaching tends to focus only on the dominant current within each movement. Second, the interconnections between these three movements have received renewed attention. Historians are finding more and more ways in which these movements cross-fertilized each other, but the connections are often missed by teachers. For instance, recent scholarship on Betty Friedan, the central founder of the National Organization for Women has found that her work for CIO unions like the United Electrical Workers during the 1940s was a formative experience for the development of her feminist ideas. Third, social movement scholarship has taken note of the extent to which each of these movements faced organized resistance. It is easy for young people today to forget that as reasonable as Martin Luther King, Jr. may seem to us today, in his own day he was viewed as a dangerous agitator."

Contact name
Dr. Barbara Truesdell
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Arts, Indiana University
Phone number
8128552856
Target Audience
9-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2,700 stipend
Course Credit
"Upon successful completion of the summer institute “Social Movements in Modern America: Labor, Civil Rights, and Feminism,” you will earn professional development points (PDPs or CEUs) according to the guidelines of your own school districts."
Duration
Three weeks
End Date

Twentieth-century Women's Rights Movements

Description

Movements for women's equality and gender justice have transformed American society over the past few generations. Nancy Cott will focus this seminar on the varied branches of feminism. After reviewing the suffrage campaign and opportunities for women during World War II, the seminar will explore convergences and conflicts among women's groups, both feminist and conservative, emerging after 1960. Topics include the formation of the National Organization for Women, radical feminism, African American and Chicana feminism, reproductive rights advocacy, the women's health movement, Roe v. Wade and its opponents, the women's rights revolution in law, and the campaigns for and against the Equal Rights Amendment.

Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Phone number
646-366-9666
Target Audience
Middle and high school
Start Date
Cost
Free; $400 stipend granted
Course Credit
Pittsburg State University (PSU) is pleased to offer graduate credit to workshop participants at a tuition fee of $199 per credit hour. Participants can receive three graduate credit hours for the duration of the week.
Duration
One week
End Date