Las Vegas: An Unconventional History jmccartney Wed, 09/09/2009 - 17:12
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Photo, Burt Glinn, Las Vegas: An Unconventional History
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Produced as a companion to a PBS documentary, this site explores the history of Las Vegas through interviews, essays, and primary documents. "The Film and More" offers a film synopsis, a program transcript, and six primary documents on Las Vegas. These include a 1943 Time article on lenient divorce laws in Nevada as a tourist attraction and a newspaper report of an NAACP protest. "Special Features" offers seven presentations that include an interview with noted Las Vegas historian Hal Rothman, an exploration of the Federal government's public relations campaign on nuclear testing in the 1950s, and an essay on Las Vegas architecture. "People and Events" offers 14 essays on the people of Las Vegas and three essays on Las Vegas history.

An interactive map allows the visitor to survey the Las Vegas area and examine its development, and a timeline from 1829 to the present charts the growth of Las Vegas from a small railroad town to the present-day resort and gaming metropolis that is the most visited place in the world. A teachers' guide contains two suggested lessons each on history, economics, civics, and geography. The site also has 11 links to related websites and a bibliography of 55 books. The only search capability is a link to a search of all PBS sites.

Eckley Miners' Village [PA]

Description

Eckley is one of the hundreds of company mining towns or "patches" built in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania during the 19th century. In 1854, the mining firm of Sharpe, Leisenring, and Company, later known as Sharpe, Weiss, and Company, leased land from the Tench Coxe Estate of Philadelphia and began work on the Council Ridge Colliery and the village of Eckley. The village, built near the colliery where the coal was mined and processed, provided housing for the miners and their families. Its stores, schools, and churches supplied the economic, educational, and religious needs of the villagers. By owning the village, the company had greater control over the lives of their workers.

The site offers exhibits, tours, and occasional recreational and educational events (including living history events).

100 Years of Parcels, Packages, and Packets, Oh My!

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Detail, cartoon, Now That the Parcel Post is With Us, National Postal Museum
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This website overviews the early history of the U.S. Parcel Post system. Although the website states that it examines “one hundred years of parcels, packages, and packets,” most of the content is from the first few years of the service, 1913 through 1915. An introduction and six subsections—Congressional Opposition, The First Packages, The Oddest Parcels, The Service in Use, Preparing for All of Those Packages, and A Century of Posted Parcels—feature short essays and 25 photographs and cartoons.

Though the website is text-heavy, teachers could potentially use its resources with students to examine early 20th-century United States history or changes in communication within the United States.

Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

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Screencapture, Prohibition homepage
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This website provides a light introduction to the history of Prohibition in the United States, reinforced with videos and images from the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary from PBS. The website showcases a photo gallery and biographies on figures from the time period paired with clips from the full-length documentary. The website also includes a map and timeline function for visualizing Prohibition efforts across space and time, as well as more than 10 lesson plans and activity resources for educators.

The website is relatively easy to navigate. The photo gallery contains more than 70 images of individuals, newspaper articles, and events, coupled with brief descriptions. More than 30 brief videos, pulled from the larger documentary, are scattered throughout the website. (Note: the video content is not transcribed or captioned.) Another useful feature may be the map, which enables visitors to get a sense of the geographical relationship of events and figures, or the timeline, which visualizes the sequence of events. Students may also be encouraged to examine one of the more than 20 biographies: brief descriptions paired with videos that provide a more in-depth discussion of the individual.

Educators should direct their attention to the For Educators section. This page provides access to four prepared lesson plans and nine quick "snapshot activities" intended to work in conjunction with website and documentary materials. These activities can be modified and integrated into larger units in coursework on these subjects. Given the graphic nature of some photos on the site and the available subject content, teachers may want to reserve the website for students grades eight and higher.

Gatsby vs Superman Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/22/2013 - 16:55
Description

From the Library of Congress:

"Three international scholars discuss the significance of comic books and their influence as documents of cultural history. Each scholar responds to questions based on research from the Library of Congress's comics collection and their expertise in Medievalism, the World Wars, and gender and ethnicity."

The Great Gatsby Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/07/2013 - 13:55
Date Published
Portal to Texas History jmccartney Wed, 09/09/2009 - 17:12
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Postcard, postmarked October 9, 1907, Portal to Texas History
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This archive offers a collection of more than 900,000 photographs, maps, letters, documents, books, artifacts, and other items relating to all aspects of Texas history, from prehistory through the 20th century. Subjects include agriculture, arts and crafts, education, immigration, military and war, places, science and technology, sports and recreation, architecture, business and economics, government and law, literature, people, religion, social life and customs, and the Texas landscape and nature. Some subjects include sub-categories. For instance, social life and customs, with 694 items, includes 13 sub-categories, such as clothing, families, food and cooking, homes, slavery, and travel. The visitor can also search the collection by keyword.

Resources for educators include seven "primary source adventures," divided into 4th- and 7th-grade levels, with lesson plans, preparatory resources, student worksheets, and PowerPoint slideshows. Subjects of the lessons include Cabeza de Vaca, Hood's Texas Brigade in the Civil War, life in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the journey of Coronado, the Mier Expedition, runaway slaves, the Shelby County Regulator Moderator war, and a comparison of Wichita and Comanche village life. This website offers useful resources for both researching and teaching the history of Texas.

Missouri Digital Heritage

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Painting, Portrait of a Musician, Thomas Hart Benton, 1949
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This massive mega-website presents thousands of documents and images related to Missouri's social, political, and economic history, linking to collections housed at universities, libraries, and heritage sites across the state. These resources are organized both into archival collections (by topic and source type) and virtual exhibits.

Archival collections include maps, municipal records, government and political records, newspapers, photographs and images, books and diaries, as well as topical collections on agriculture, medicine, women, business, exploration and settlement, art and popular culture, and family, rendering the website's resources as useful for genealogists as for those interested in history.

Exhibits encompass a diverse range of subjects, and include topics of relevance to Missouri history (Miss Carrie Watkins's cookbook from the mid-19th century, several exhibits on life at the University of Missouri and Washington University, Truman's Whistle Stop campaign), and topics outside of Missouri (the body in Medieval manuscripts, Roman imperial coins, propaganda posters from World War II, and drawings documenting dinosaur discovery before the mid-20th century).

Teachers will be especially interested in the large Education section, which includes curricular resources on topics such as African Americans in Missouri, Lewis and Clark's Expedition, Missouri State Fairs, and the history of dueling.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

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Photo, New York, New York, January 23, 2010, flickr4jazz, Flickr
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In 1863, 97 Orchard Street, a tenement in New York City's Lower East Side, opened its doors to the growing population of recent immigrants to that city, housing more than 7,000 people before it closed in 1935. The museum that now occupies that building has restored six families' apartments with careful attention to historical detail. This website, while primarily intended as a guide for those intending to visit the physical museum, provides several tantalizing glimpses at tenement life, as well as information on historical restoration.

The History section presents 15 photographs and etchings explaining the evolution of bathrooms, light, water, and heat in the building, as well as examples of primary source documents and interviews available in the museum's collections. Additionally, a small exhibit of five photographs reconstructs how the museum's curators interpreted a 1918 apartment in the tenement—showing the use of crime scene photographs to determine how the family would have decorated the walls.

The Play section contains a narrated virtual tour of the museum, and five well-designed interactive experiences on immigration and immigrant life geared towards younger learners. Highlights from these sections are repeated in the Education section, which also includes three lesson plans each for elementary, middle, and high school levels focused on teaching with objects, oral histories, and other primary sources.

Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930

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Photo, Police Captain Max Nootbaar, Jul. 21, 1914, Chicago Daily News
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Post-Civil-War industrialization and urbanization put new stresses on American law and society. Criminal records reveal the circumstances where social strain boiled over into violence and unrest. Using this website, visitors can search the complete Chicago Police Department Homicide Record Index from 1870 to 1930, detailing more than 11,000 homicides, and read and watch accompanying contextual material that explores tensions between laborers, industry leaders, political ideologies, social reformers, organized crime, and more.

The core of the site is the "Interactive Database." Here, visitors can search cases using keyword, case number, date, circumstances (accident, manslaughter, homicide, number of victims, number of defendants, method of killing, involvement of alcohol), details about the victim and defendant (age, gender, race, occupation), victim/defendant relationship, and legal outcome. Searches return one-line case summaries including the date, names of people involved, case number, a description of the crime, and legal outcome. Clicking on a result brings up details on the particular crime: time, location, type of death/homicide and details of homicide, details on the victim(s) and defendant(s), police involvement, and legal outcome.

Contextualizing primary and secondary sources frame this bare-bones information. A timeline features a summary of one major event and up to five photographs for every year. "Historical Context" currently offers a second timeline highlighting links to up to 17 notable cases for each year and a section on children's lives in the city, with nine newspaper articles on child labor and obituaries for activist Florence Kelley and lawyer Levy Mayer. (Sections on labor and reform movements and people and events did not work at the time of this review.) In "Legal Content," visitors can read short essays on topics related to Chicago criminal and social history, including capital punishment, anti-corruption campaigns, the Chicago Police Department, judges, lawyers, criminology, prostitution, gambling, murder-suicides, and accidents. Each essay links to related cases and onsite and off-site documents. "Legal Content" also hosts 16 downloadable acts and statutes under "The Laws."

"Crimes of the Century" organizes links to related cases under 23 topics, including the 1919 Chicago race riot and the Haymarket Affair. "Publications," the most valuable part of the site for teachers looking for primary sources, archives the full text of 15 primary and secondary documents related to Chicago crime and social change. Here users can download in PDF form modern studies on the death penalty, crime and policing in Chicago, and the Haymarket Affair, or download primary sources such as law codes and crime reports, the Hull House Maps and Papers, Chicago Daily News articles exposing graft and corruption, 19th-century studies of Chicago's homeless, and contemporary commentary on the Haymarket Affair. Finally, visitors can watch 18 interviews with present-day professors, judges, and lawyers in "Videos."

Though difficult to navigate, this site has rich resources to help students and teachers explore the challenges of change at the turn of the century.