The Society operates the Franklin County Historical Museum. Originally constructed in 1910 as part of Andrew Carnegie's worldwide library construction program, the museum building's high ceilings and dark wood moldings create a period atmosphere for a collection of historic artifacts and information.
The museum offers exhibits and tours.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum presents the history of President Abraham Lincoln and the state of Illinois. The non-circulating Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library's mission is the collection and preservation of archival resources related to state history. Holdings include more than 5,000 newspaper titles, 400,000 photographs, 5,000 broadsides, 7,000 audio tapes, 1,000 World War II oral histories, 10,000,000 manuscripts, and 1,500 letters signed by Lincoln. The museum focuses on Lincoln's life, divided between his presidency and the preceding years.
The museum offers traditional and interactive exhibits, full-scale dioramas, a 17-minute film, storytelling, a 15-minute holograph presentation, a children's area, library tours, research library access, a high school summer internship program, and catered box lunches. Appointments are necessary for research in the Manuscripts, Audiovisual, and Lincoln Collections. Advance notice is required for all school groups, box lunches, and for library tours. Wheelchairs are available for use on the premises. Theater presentation scripts are available in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. The website offers a list of relevant state educational standards, seven teacher resource guides, information on the Horace Mann-Abraham Lincoln Fellowship for educators, and an educator's pass.
The Stark County Historical Society is dedicated to collecting and preserving the significant materials and records related to the history of Stark County and the presidential history of William McKinley. Through the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum, the Society serves as an educational center of history and science and offers interpretive exhibitions and educational programs for the local community and its expanding global audience.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, lectures, planetarium shows, and occasional recreational and educational events.
In August 1908, Colonel Allen Allensworth and four other settlers established a town founded, financed, and governed by African Americans. Their dream of developing an abundant and thriving community stemmed directly from a strong belief in programs that allowed blacks to help themselves create better lives. By 1910, Allensworth’s success was the focus of many national newspaper articles praising the town and its inhabitants. Today a collection of restored and reconstructed early 20th-century buildings—including the Colonel's house, historic schoolhouse, Baptist church, and library—once again dots this flat farm country.
The park offers a short film, exhibits, tours, and occasional recreational and educational events.
The New Castle Historical Society's three museums—the late-17th-century Dutch House, the 1730s Amstel House, and the 1892 Old Library Museum—tell unique stories about the town's past and its residents. From Dutch laborers and British colonial governors to prominent American architects, the New Castle Historical Society celebrates New Castle's diverse history from the town's 17th-century founding through the preservation efforts of the 21st century. The Society offer tours, educational programs, and recreational and educational events.
Student museum tours are available that emphasize colonial and revolutionary Delaware and American history. Ideal for fourth and fifth grade students, our tours are aligned with Delaware history education standards. Additional tours are available for other grade levels.
The Society’s website offers an events calendar, visitor information, and an online gift shop.
The Hunterdon County Historical Society's library has been in existence since the Society was founded in 1885. In 1963, through the bequest of the late Hiram E. Deats, over 3,000 items were added. These included his personal library and notes on the places and families of Hunterdon County. Today, the library consists of 5,000 printed volumes, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, broadsides, and photographs gathered and preserved since the Society was founded.
The Library is housed in the Doric House, an 1846 Greek Revival structure furnished in authentic Hunterdon antiques of the period.
The House offers tours by appointment and access to the Library.
"This workshop will introduce educators to the resources available at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Learn how to schedule a tour, how to prepare your class for their visit and methods for making the most of your school trip to the Museum. In addition, find out how to access digital resources from the Library collections, how to utilize the Library for research and other opportunities for professional development and classroom activities available through the ALPLM Education Department. The session will include a tour of the Museum."
"Come spend two days with the Education Department exploring and researching the vast holdings of the ALPLM. Day one will familiarize educators with the holdings of the ALPL. Find out how to access digital resources from the Library collections, how to utilize the Library for research and how to obtain usable reproduction documents to take back to your classroom. On day two, work with our educators to create an effective lesson plan, based upon the primary resources you've gathered and tailored to your students and your needs. By workshop end you will have a workable lesson plan for YOUR classroom, complete with primary documents from the Library collections."
"Using primary sources and artifacts in the classroom to explore stories from the past is an excellent way, not only to study history, but to improve oral language development which in turn can enhance students' reading and writing skills. In this hands-on session, participants will analyze reproduction artifacts, including objects, primary documents, images, political cartoons, and more, to learn methods and criteria for selecting teachable primary sources for their classroom. Participants will learn how to analyze these materials and activities to utilize them across the curriculum."
Some newspapers (The Piqua [Ohio] Daily Call, for example) have been digitized but charge quite a fee through the organization that provided that service. Is there any method for educators to access these without the fees?
No blanket method exists for researchers—whether they are educators or not—to access digitized newspaper archives for free. Digitizing or microfilming newspapers takes time and money, and unless an organization or company has received grant funding to do the work, it must find a way to pay for the expenditure. The National Digital Newspaper Program, begun jointly by the NEH, the Library of Congress, and various state-funded organizations has begun the huge task of digitizing U.S. newspapers published between 1836 and 1922, but the project is at a relatively early stage. The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website is still merely a sort of prototype, although some newspapers can be searched there. Finding the archives of each newspaper presents a unique case. For example, the entirely free online, searchable archives of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle—from 1841 to 1902—is available via the Brooklyn Public Library website. Some very large or historically significant newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Liberator, and The Pennsylvania Gazette, have been digitized and access to them is available from commercial sources, such as ProQuest or Gale. College and university libraries often subscribe to various digitized series of newspaper and periodicals, and you could check with a local university library to see what they have. Typically, if you are not a student or a faculty member or staffer of the university or college, you will have to visit the library and search their online databases there. Larger public libraries sometimes also subscribe to such services and make them available online at the libraries themselves, free to those who use the workstations provided. Some large urban public libraries provide free access onsite to digitized archives of their own cities’ major newspapers. Some other commercial services that provide online access to digitized newspapers include NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com. Public and college libraries often have microfilm copies of the archives of newspapers that are or have been published nearby. Regional historical societies or state libraries are other possible repositories for bound newspaper archives or microfilmed versions of them. In some cases, the microfilm might be available via Interlibrary Loan, but in other cases, researchers have to travel to the library to look at the microfilm (or the hard copy) there. In every case, before traveling to a library, researchers should call the library beforehand that (according to their catalog, online or otherwise) appears to have copies of the newspaper and have a librarian verify that the specific issues they wish to look at are indeed included among the issues that the library has. Some newspapers have digitized their archives—their “morgue files”—but only use the database they have created for their own research. Some others make some or all of their digitized archives available for a search fee. Calling the particular newspaper in which you are interested and pitching your case, explaining what you are looking for and how you would use the online access, might have some result, even if only having someone on staff at the paper search for a particular article or articles. Paying a small research fee for this is much cheaper and easier (depending on what you are looking for) than going through archives that consist of bound copies or microfilm. As for The Piqua Daily Call, the paper is still published and a free online searchable archive is available through its website back to 2001. A preliminary search of WorldCat (OCLC) and of the online catalogs of public and private libraries and historical societies in the region provides additional possibilities: The Edison Community College library in Piqua keeps a month’s current issues on hand. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus has original scattered issues from 1886, 1892, 1896, 1905, 1914-1916, 1922-24, 1926-28, and from 1945-1956. It also has a microfilm copy of issues from 1914-1922. The library at Wright State University in Dayton has a microfilm copy of issues from 1946-1967. The Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland has some older scattered copies from 1884 through 1922. And the local history section of the Flesh Public Library in Piqua has a microform version of issues from 1883-1910 (with some gaps), and from 1968-1972.