America Votes: Presidential Campaign Memorabilia

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Photo, FDR campaign button, America Votes
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A potpourri of 69 images of campaign memorabilia focusing primarily on presidential elections, beginning with a 1796 letter from Supreme Court Justice William Paterson picking John Adams to win against Thomas Jefferson and closing with a Bush/Cheney 2000 button. Includes flags, letters, sheet music, bumper stickers, handbills, buttons, and even a pack of "Stevenson for President" cigarettes.

Items are indexed by candidates and parties. Includes a 600-word background essay and links to 13 sites pertaining to current political parties. Though limited in size, this site can be useful to students interested in comparing visual materials from presidential campaigns throughout U.S. history.

American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900

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Logo, Readex
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This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of documents relevant to early U.S. history, offering full-color facsimile images of approximately 30,000 broadsides and ephemera. Advertisements, campaign literature, poems, juvenile literature, and Civil War envelopes comprise the bulk of the collection, making the archive especially valuable for those interested in early American consumer culture, political campaigns, and literary life. The collection also contains rich information on slavery, Native American relations, and local events—plays, gatherings, and religious events.

Users can browse the archive by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching 18th- and 19th-century North America.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

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Image for African-American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century
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These 52 published works by black women writers are from the late 18th century through the early 20th. The full-text database offers works by late 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, late 19th-century essayist and novelist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Harriet Jacobs, a woman born into slavery who published her memoirs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in the late 19th century.

Users can browse by title, author, or type of work (fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essays). Each browse category also contains a keyword search for subjects such as religion, family, and slavery. Brief biographies of the 37 featured writers are available. This site is easy to use and is ideal for learning about African American history, women's history, and 19th-century American literature.

Accessible Archives

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Image, Godey's Lady's Book, Accessible Archives
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These eight databases present more than 176,000 articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states.

Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1880), one of the most popular 19th-century publications, furnished middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion illustrations, and editorials. The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728–1800), a Philadelphia newspaper, is described as the New York Times of the 18th century. The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective includes major articles from the Charleston Mercury, the New York Herald, and the Richmond Enquirer. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes runs from six newspapers published in New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto between 1827 and 1876. American County Histories to 1900 provides 60 volumes covering the local history of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809–1870 has been partially digitized, with 25,000 records available. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819–1870 addresses industrialization in a rural area settled by Quaker farmers.

Seattle Power and Water Supply Collection

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Photo, Man standing in completed penstock. . . , 1925, University of Washington
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This collection features images of dams, hydroelectric power plants, and water supply facilities built in Washington State from the late 1890s to the 1950s. The archive contains 695 items, primarily photographs but also some maps, diagrams, and other documents. A book excerpt on Washington's public water projects from Building Washington: A History of Washington State Public Works (Seattle, WA: Tartu Publications, 1998) by historians Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy provides perspective on the photographs. The collection is notable because "many of these dams, power plants and reservoirs were built in some of Washington's most rugged terrain and had features that represented significant engineering feats of their time." Each image is accompanied by full descriptive and bibliographic data.

The site offers three ways to search the archive of photographs: keyword search, search by collection, or an advanced search option by selected fields and subjects. Or the visitor can browse all the items by selecting "view all items" in the search drop-down menu. This website is a useful resource for those interested in the history of Western hydroelectric dams and other water projects in the first half of the 20th century.

Women's Studies Database

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Photo, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison
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This site, by the Women's Studies group at the University of Maryland, presents primary materials relating to women's history. Offers the texts of the 1848 "Declaration of Sentiments," and Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech, "Ain't I A Woman?" Additionally, the site furnishes essays and timelines concerning the 19th amendment, a newsletter entitled Women of Achievement and Herstory, and 39 biographical sketches, which range from approximately 75 to 150 words each. The presentation is haphazard, and the search engine is cumbersome. The site is perhaps most valuable for its examination of the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment.

Illinois Digital Archives

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Photo, Gordon Ray on the farm, Gordon Ray, 1915, Digital Past
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This website offers an archive of more than 35,000 items from 75 individual collections at nearly 30 institutions in Illinois. Items include black-and-white and color photographs, post cards, audio recordings, maps, books, newspaper articles, newsletters and bulletins, handbills, and film clips. The focus of all the collections is the history of Illinois, its places, and people. A strength of the collections is the large number of photographs of residential and commercial buildings from cities and towns throughout Illinois.

Visitors can browse the contents of all collections by city, organization, or proper name. Once in a collection, other collections can be individually browsed by selecting from the collections dropdown menu. All collections are searchable by such fields as subject, description, creator, publisher, contributors, date, type, or format. Clicking on the thumbnail image brings up a new window with a large image and descriptive data. There are also 14 exhibits on various topics such as "History of Park Ridge, 1841-1926" and "Brides of Yesteryear." This is a useful collection of primary source material on the social and cultural history of Illinois.

Great Lakes Maritime History Project

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Photo, Crew standing on the shipwrecked George M. Cox, May 1933
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Dedicated to recording the maritime history of Wisconsin (especially Lake Michigan and Lake Superior), this site features more than 7,000 documents, advertisements, and photographs of ships associated with Wisconsin waters since 1679. Geared toward the specialist as well as the beginner, the site contains a list of the more than 400 ships registered in Wisconsin over the years, as well as useful descriptions of the types of ships.

The collection is searchable by keyword and browsable. The quality of the photographs varies; some are small files, while others are quite large. The site recommends six related outside resources. This site would be very useful to anyone interested in the history of Wisconsin maritime shipping, passenger cruises, or naval history.

Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History

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Photo, Frederick Douglass, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right, LoC
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This collection of 20 essays on African American history and literature, commissioned from leading scholars and written for secondary teachers, is part of the larger TeacherServe site. The essays are designed to deepen content knowledge and provide new ideas for teaching. These 3,000-7,000-word essays cover three time periods: 1609-1865, 1865-1917, and 1917 and Beyond.

Essays begin with an overview of the topic. A “Guiding Discussion” section offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay. Each essay includes links to primary source texts in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library.

Essays in "1609-1865" focus on topics related to slavery, including families under the slavery system, slave resistance, types of slave labor, the end of slavery, analyzing slave narratives, and the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Essays also look at African American arts and crafts and African influence on African American culture.

Essays in "1865-1917" focus on topics that fall between the eras of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, including Reconstruction, segregation, trickster figures in African American literature, and issues of class and social division.

Essays in "1917 and Beyond" focus on literature and the Civil Rights Movement, including protest poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz in literature.

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project

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Cover image, Science in the Kitchen, 1893
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This website features digital scans of 75 cookbooks published in the United States between 1798 and 1922, providing a unique window into 19th century social history, and especially the history of immigration and the introduction of new foods into "American" cuisine. Each book can be browsed by date, author, or interest (including military cooking, quantity cooking, regional cooking, and ethnic influences), is available in downloadable PDF format, and is accompanied by a brief annotation providing useful information about the book's author, intended audience, and place of publication. All recipes also can be searched by name and ingredient. A search for "turkey," for example, reveals it to be a common ingredient in chicken salad—because, as Carrie Shuman writes in her 1893 Favorite Dishes, "the Irishman would say, turkey makes the best chicken salad." To accompany these recipes, the website includes images and explanations of close to 100 kitchen items found in the cookbooks, such as a piggin (small wooden bucked used for dipping liquids), a firkin (water-tight barrel often used for pickling), and a jelly press (used for rendering lard or pressing fruit).