Library of Southern Literature

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Illustration from Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne, 1882
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This website—a small portion of the larger Documenting the American South project—presents the full text of more than 130 works of literature by more than 75 authors, published between the mid-1600s and 1920. Notable works include the first history of Virginia, written in 1673 by House of Burgesses member Robert Beverley, poems by Edgar Allen Poe, Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery, and several of Mark Twain's and Kate Chopin's works. Other works include collections of slave songs, sermons, and narratives published in the mid-1800s, including Frederick Douglass's famous narrative, several works addressing Ku Klux Klan activities, and many lesser-known works of fiction. Though there is no built-in search feature, all works are presented as lengthy text files and can be searched using a computer's "Find" function. Users new to Southern history may want to turn first to the "Introduction," which provides brief essays on many aspects of Southern history, literature, and culture, including early colonial-era literature, the genres of biography and autobiography, black literature, the Civil War, travel writing, folklore, and humor.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of South Carolina

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Map, Charleston, May 1884
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The 580 maps of more than 80 South Carolina towns and cities in this archive reveal urban landscapes and the locations of businesses, mills, colleges, depots, and other buildings between 1884 and 1923. The collection includes 232 unpublished, hand-drafted maps from the years 1899 to 1937. All maps are displayed with original color coding. Users can zoom in and out of maps and can pan right, left, up, or down to examine details. Every map is accompanied by bibliographic data. The full collection can be browsed or the user can choose to browse just the unpublished maps. The collection can be searched by city, year of publication, and county. The maps provide many details about mills and are particularly useful in revealing spatial relationships and location of railroad lines. There is also a link to the Union List of Sanborn and other fire insurance maps. An extremely useful resource for those researching the business or urban history of South Carolina in the decades around 1900.

Museum of the City of San Francisco: The Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire

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Logo, Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco
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This site provides images and text about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. A timeline, from April 18 to April 23, covers major events and a facsimile of a roster lists names and addresses of those who died. There are 27 photographs of earthquake damage and 31 personal accounts, 1,200 to 8,000 words, that include Jack London's "Story of an Eyewitness." Among 67 transcriptions of articles from 1906 about the earthquake are 12 that discuss the relocation of Chinatown and the treatment of Chinese San Franscicans. There are 31 transcribed fire department reports, including an article about the reorganization of the department in the wake of the disaster, and a facsimile of the 1910 police report on the quake and fire. Army operations are discussed in 29 pieces of correspondence and navy evacuation operations are detailed in seven. In addition, a 700-word article describes the evacuation of the city by train. Engineering and scientific reports include 24 articles, letters, and reports about infrastructure issues, such as water supply and structural stability. A section about relief efforts includes a flier accusing the Red Cross of corruption and a resolution by a local plumbers union to volunteer their services. The site will be very useful for anyone interested in the earthquake and in urban and California history.

Integrated Public Use Microdata Series

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Logo, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA Logo
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Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.

Baseball Cards, 1887-1914

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Logo, Baseball Cards from 1887-1914
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A collection of 2,100 early baseball cards, featuring more than 1,000 major and minor league players who represented teams in 13 leagues and 75 cities. Includes legendary players, such as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, and Walter Johnson, in addition to managers and owners, such as Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Charles Comiskey. Provides a nine-title bibliography. Searchable by keyword for material written on the cards, and by name, team, league, and city. Primarily of interest to sports historians, the cards, originally distributed as advertising material in cigarette packs, can also be used in the study of commercial advertising and printing processes.

Bartleby, Great Books Online

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Logo, Bartleby.com
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This well-organized and useful site provides full-text versions of over 200 classic American and European literary works, as well as reference materials for scholarly use and readers' enjoyment. The site is divided into four sections. The Reference category includes 27 reference works, from dictionaries to Gray's Anatomy. The Verse section offers over 60 collections from poets like William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman. The Fiction category provides over 75 works from authors like Leo Tolstoy, Agatha Christie, and Charles Dickens. And the Nonfiction section includes over 30 works from figures such as 18th century women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, writings by Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The site is remarkably easy to navigate and provides keyword author/subject/title/phrase indices for searching among works. The individual works are also searchable by index and table of contents. This site is ideal for researching the lives and works of many prominent literary figures.

Material History of American Religion Project

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Logo, The Material History of American Religion Project
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In 1996, eight historians of religion and three advisors embarked on a five-year project to illuminate ways that material culture and economic history can be used in the study of American religion, a discipline traditionally dominated by ideas. The site presents annotated photographs of 39 objects, including an evangelical coffee bar, chewing gum packed with biblical verses, artwork in a family Bible, and a church stick used to awaken sleeping congregants. Thirty-eight documents from the 1850s to the 1960s, range from an 1854 book steward report for the African Methodist Episcopal Church to a chain e-mail from the 1990s. The site also includes 23 essays and interviews by the project's participants on such eclectic subjects as "Material Christianity," religious architecture, how Catholic practice has shaped children's experiences, the role of costume in the Salvation Army, how to practice economic history of religion, and "what makes a Jewish home Jewish." Includes eight issues of the project's newsletter; a bibliography of 22 titles; and links to 18 related sites. This site will be especially valuable to university students interested in evaluating the value of material culture scholarship in religious studies, students of economic history curious about applying their discipline to non-traditional fields of inquiry, and scholars within the field of material culture and the broad discipline of American cultural history.

Hagley Digital Archives

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Logo, Hagley Digital Archives
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With a focus on business history and its connections to larger cultural, social, and political trends, the Hagley archive presents digital images on a range of topics, including "industrial processes; commercial landscapes; marketing and advertising; transportation facilities and methods; development of information technology; and, the social and cultural aspects of work and leisure." Pictured are bridges, dams, coalmines, and the testing and manufacturing of gunpowder and explosives, nylon, steel, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes. Also included are images of historic buildings, homes, and gardens in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

There are some images of advertisements, packaging, company brochures, trade catalogs, pamphlets, internal documents, letters, and other ephemera from various industrial enterprises. It includes, for example—under "nylon"—not only shots of machinery, product samples and images of the stages of melting and forming polymers, but also such treasures as ads and publicity shots of women modeling nylon stockings and swimsuits (including "Miss Chemistry" at the 1939 New York World's Fair), and news photos of the riotous early sales of nylon stockings.

Other topics include the early development and use of computers by Univac, IBM, and Remington Rand, aerial photos of the Mid-Atlantic seaboard; automobiles; Lukens Steel Company; ship building; and coal mining.

Divining America: Religion and the National Culture

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Photo, Modern Protestant Church
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This site, part of the larger TeacherServe offers an interactive curriculum enrichment service providing teachers with creative lesson plans and access to materials for the secondary school classroom. To help teachers convey the importance of religion in the development of the United States, this site highlights the intersections between American history and religion at key points like the Puritan migration to New England, abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement. The site offers essays on 24 topics grouped into 17th- and 18th- century, 19th- century, and 20th-century categories. Subjects covered include Native American religion in Early America, witchcraft in Salem village, African American religion in the 19th century, the Scopes trial, and the American Jewish experience.

Each of the 2,000-word essays includes background to the topic, tips on guiding student discussion, a bibliography of approximately five related scholarly works, a discussion of historians' debates over the issue, and links to related resources. Teachers can submit questions and comments on teaching about religion in the classroom to the Center and its consulting scholars, and a discussion link posts these questions and answers. The site also offers links to three websites that offer additional advice on teaching about religion in public schools. This is an excellent site for high school history teachers and it also provides a useful framework for college survey courses.

Origins of American Animation

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Logo, Origins of American Animation
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This site traces the development of early American animation through a collection of 21 animated films from the years 1900 to 1921. The films, including several media--clay, puppet, cut-out animation, and pen drawings--indicate the "connection between newspaper comic strips and early animated films." In addition, these "tiny, often satiric, films tell much about the social fabric of World War I-era America." Films can be viewed in RealMedia, MPEG, or Quick Time formats. Part of the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, drawn from collections in the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.