National Corvette Museum [KY]

Description

The National Corvette Museum preserves the history of the Corvette, a variety of sports car. The museum houses more than 50 Corvette models and one-of-a-kind concept cars spanning the history of Corvette. Also on hand are thousands of related photos, movies and videos, advertisements, scale models and rare memorabilia.

The museum offers exhibits and films. Across the street from the museum, the assembly plant offers tours.

Witness and Response: September 11 Acquisitions at the Library of Congress

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Collage, Patriotism Starts at Home, December 2001, Steven Dana, LoC
Annotation

The Library of Congress is a well-known and respected content source for the classroom. However, given the wide variety of collections, searching for items on a given topic can be time-consuming. This website links visitors to the library's September 11 resources by collection, so there's no need to run multiple searches.

First and foremost, the website is dated. However, this is no reason to assume that it is without worthwhile content. The exhibit and memorial events it advertises are long past, so the exhibition overview and public programs sections are only useful as primary sources. That said, the collection links are the heart of the site. The American Folklife Center offers a video presentation on the Library of Congress's personal account collection and three drawings by children. For a small collection of chapbooks, a poster, and newspaper clippings, try the Area Studies/Overseas Field Offices collection. The Geography and Map Division provides aerial and fly-through views of the Twin Towers site, while the Prints and Photographs Division's offerings are the most extensive, with posters, fine art, photography, architectural proposals for new World Trade Center designs, political cartoons, and comic book art. Rare Book and Special Collections houses only two photographs of Kitty Caparella's book art, The Message; while the Serial and Government Publications Division's page holds three U.S. newspaper pages announcing the attacks and a video on the Library of Congress's 9/11 newspaper collection.

While the resources are limited, educators who need to find 9/11 materials quickly should consider taking a few minutes on this Library of Congress portal site, particularly if they are interested in items from the Prints and Photographs Division.

Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982

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Image for Dynamics of Idealism:  Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982
Annotation

These materials were collected for a study on the attitudes, backgrounds, goals, and experiences of volunteers participating in a 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration effort. Resources include questionnaires submitted prior to and following the project, as well as a follow-up survey conducted in 1982.

Participants were queried about why they volunteered, what they expected, their attitudes regarding race and politics, images they held of the South, expectations they had regarding the African American community, personal memories and effects of their participation, and subsequent attitudes regarding civil rights, violence, and social change. These resources offer insight into the Civil Rights Movement and some sociological aspects of American reformers.

Flashing Across the Country: Mr. Zip and the ZIP Code Promotional Campaign

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Promotional material, June 13, 1963, Postal Bulletin, National Postal Museum
Annotation

Anytime you write a letter, you use the ZIP code. What is that code, and when did people start using it? More importantly for the postal service, how do you get an entire country's population to memorize and add a seemingly random string of numbers to their addresses?

The answer, in the 1960s, was Mr. Zip, a jaunty cartoon postman, designed to make the new ZIP code cause memorable and approachable.

This website discusses the ways in which Mr. Zip was deployed as an educational and advertising device. The majority of the content consists of an essay divided into smaller, more manageable subpages. However, sprinkled throughout, you'll find Mr. Zip comics; merchandise, such as board games and lunchboxes; promotional materials; PSA videos; a memo; photographs; and postage stamps.

This video describes what each number of the ZIP code represents, which could be a hook if you decide to introduce Mr. ZIP in the classroom. Ultimately, the content is not likely to be of direct use in the classroom but may be of more interest as trivia or to flesh out background knowledge for related lessons.

Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum [GA]

Description

On January 28, 1942, 53 days after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, the Eighth Air Force was officially activated in the National Guard Armory on Bull Street in Savannah, GA. Today, the Museum honors the men and women who helped defeat Nazi aggression by serving in or supporting the greatest air armada the world had ever seen—the Eighth Air Force.

The museum offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and research library access.

C-SPAN American Political Archive

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Logo, C-SPAN.org
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This website, which draws from C-Span Radio, is a useful resource for researching or teaching 20th-century American political history. It assembles audio recordings from such sources as the National Archives, presidential libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. It "presents interviews, debates, oral histories, news conferences, and speeches with past presidents, legislators, and other important figures in American politics." Selecting "Past APA programs available online" provides the full list of 29 archived programs. Program subjects include persons such as W.E.B. DuBois; Indira Gandhi; Eleanor Roosevelt; NASA astronauts; Presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford; and Civil Rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and Thurgood Marshall. They also include thematic topics such as the Reagan presidency, women in journalism, ex-slave narratives, Iraq war stories, Congressional leaders, the voices of World War II, and American POWs. Many of the topics feature multiple programs.

All programs are recordings of the original C-SPAN Radio program and must be listened to as originally broadcast. Playback of the programs requires media player software to be installed (free downloads can be accessed from the site).

The above recordings appear to no longer be available on the C-Span website. The history section, http://www.c-span.org/History/, suggested as an alternative offers full video programming, often discussions of historical topics. However, the page appears to feature recent video, with over 2,000 "recent events" which cannot be sorted or searched. Video search does not offer an option to select material on historical topics, so searching will pull from the entire C-Span website. As a result, the site offers a great deal of undoubtedly useful material which is nearly impossible to access. Unpublishing.