The Museum of Broadcast Communications

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The Museum of Broadcast Communications is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making accessible historical and contemporary radio and television content, as well as artifacts and images documenting the history of broadcasting. To that end, it has amassed a collection of more than 25,000 television programs, 5,000 radio programs, and 12,000 commercials totaling close to 100,000 hours, as well as 1,800 objects and artifacts and 3,500 images from broadcasting history—all of which is available at its Chicago, IL location.

This website presents the more than 7,000 programs and commercials that have been digitized, as well as the entire collection of images, and selected artifacts. These materials include radio programs dating to the 1920s and television programming from the 1940s to the present. All materials are keyword searchable and browseable by select categories.

Those interested in the history of advertising, for example, can browse commercials by 23 categories, including automotive, alcoholic drinks, cosmetics, and leisure and hobbies. Radio and TV can both be browsed by program type, such as adventure, drama, dance, soap opera, and news. Images include headshots, publicity photos, scenes from the sets of television programs, and much more. Users must complete a simple registration process before searching the collections.

State of the Union

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Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have delivered 214 State of the Union addresses, some delivered orally and many more only written. This website makes the full text of all addresses available and fully searchable, and has done some innovative work text-mining these speeches to examine "changes in the language of the State of the Union address over the past 200 years."

A good place to begin is the website's Essay section, which gives a brief history of the State of the Union address, and describes some of the project's most interesting findings. The website's most prominent feature is a series of graphical representations of the most frequently used words in each address, which allows users to compare those words to those of any other speech.

Another tool allows users to compare the usage of two words in all addresses delivered. Comparing "war" and "peace," for example, reveals that these words have been used in 206 of the addresses, and that the word "war" alone has been used more than 2,600 times, compared to 1,821 usages for "peace."

Indiana Historical Society Digital Image Collections

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This website boasts a growing collection of more than 38,000 photographs, lithographs, letters, cards, poems and other texts centering around Indiana history from the early 19th century to the present. The collection is especially strong in African American history in Indiana, with browseable collections on Madam C.J. Walker (1867–1919), a nationally renowned businesswoman and philanthropist, Flanner House, the first agency in Indianapolis devoted to meeting the social service needs of African Americans, and the Indianapolis Recorder, the longest continually operated African American newspaper in Indiana.

In addition to that of Madam C.J. Walker, there are collections of roughly 100 images each related to other notable Hoosiers. The website also contains a collection of more than 1,000 items related to President Lincoln, including portraits and busts of the president, as well as documents surrounding the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Other notable collections include one devoted to military history, several collections of images and portraits of Native Americans from the mid-19th century, and close to 200 historical maps of Indiana. All content is keyword searchable.

Playing House—Homemaking for Children

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This collection presents five digitized instruction manuals published between 1877 and the 1930s targeted at teaching girls the art of homemaking. These manuals include Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland's Six Little Cooks, or, Aunt Jane's Cooking Class (1877) Mabel Louise Keech's Training the Little Home Maker, by Kitchengarden Methods (1912), Elizabeth Hale Gilman's Housekeeping (1916) and Things Girls Like to Do (1917), and Betty's Scrapbook of Little Recipes for Little Cooks: Saved from Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer (1930s).

These books focus on cooking, cleaning, laundry, household management, and instruct girls in the proper way to, for example, make a bed, decorate a table, serve a meal, make furniture, or prepare for the Christmas season.

All volumes can be browsed in their entirety, or keyword searched. Several are accompanied by photographs and other illustrations. This collection is useful for the history of domesticity, family life, cooking and food, as well as childhood and girlhood.

Seattle General Strike Project

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The Metal Trades Council Union alliance in Seattle shut down the shipyards on February 6, 1919, in hopes of forcing a promised pay increase following the strict price controls set during World War I. After the Metal Trades Council obtained the support of Seattle's Central Labor Alliance, more than 65,000 Seattle workers staged a sympathy walkout, creating what has come to be known as the first "general strike" in U.S. history, and laying the foundation for labor unrest in the nation's steel, coal, and meatpacking industries in the years that followed.

This website documents the history of this strike through a large collection of primary and secondary source materials.

A four-minute video introduction, containing original film footage from 1919, is a useful place to begin for those unfamiliar with Seattle's labor history.

The website also includes contemporary and more recent newspaper articles, including more than 180 articles from Seattle's major newspapers covering the February 1919 events; 15 oral histories; more than 30 photographs of labor activity in Seattle, prominent union members, and strike activities; as well as research reports on the strike by history students at the University of Washington.

Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington 1898

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On November 10, 1898, Wilmington, NC, experienced what has come to be known as the only coup d'etat in United States history, when white supremacist members of the Democratic Party overthrew the municipal government and killed anywhere between six and 100 African Americans in the city, which at that time had a large, thriving African American population supported by the biracial Republican Party.

This website narrates the history of this event, from the rising racial tensions surrounding the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments and court disputes over miscegenation and interracial marriage, through the contentious election politics of 1898 that pitted the Democratic Party, supported by white supremacists, against the Republican and Populist Parties that represented African American interests at the local level, and the riot on November 10, through the legacy of the riot in the months and years to come, including the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws.

Each section is illustrated with links to primary sources, including political cartoons, newspaper clippings, laws, court cases, and photographs of prominent Wilmington African Americans.

The website also includes the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report published in 2006 by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources' Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which includes maps, photographs, and other primary source materials, and a link to an interactive map allowing visitors to visualize the events of November 10, 1898.

The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918

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In 1918, an influenza epidemic swept around the world, killing an estimated 50 million people—34 million more than died in World War I—and attacking more than one-fifth of the world's population. No part of the United States was spared, as people in both urban and rural areas, from densely populated cities on the East Coast to those living in the Alaskan wilderness experienced the disease. This website offers 16 documents and images documenting this crisis. These sources reveal that many aspects of daily life in the United States were affected by the epidemic. Visitors can see, for example, a photograph of a mail carrier in New York City wearing a protective mask, telegrams from Arizona and Oklahoma describing the cancellation of public meetings and the symptoms of patients, and the personal letter of a nurse to her friend describing conditions at various military bases. Visitors can also order reproductions of these documents.