Online Archive of California

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Photo, Joseph Sharp, 1849 gold miner of Sharp's Flats, Online Archive of CA
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This archive provides more than 81,000 images and 1,000 texts on the history and culture of California. Images may be searched by keyword or browsed according to six categories: history, nature, people, places, society, and technology. Topics include exploration, Native Americans, gold rushes, and California events.

Three collections of texts are also available. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive furnishes 309 documents and 67 oral histories. Free Speech Movement: Student Protest, U.C. Berkeley, 1964–1965 provides 541 documents, including books, letters, press releases, oral histories, photographs, and trial transcripts.

UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office offers full-text transcripts of 139 interviews organized into 14 topics including agriculture, arts, California government, society and family life, wine industry, disability rights, Earl Warren, Jewish community leaders, medicine (including AIDS), suffragists, and UC Black alumni.

Oral History Research Center

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Photo, "The Kim Sisters at a table in Reno"
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Established in 1905, Las Vegas, NV, officially became a city in 1911. Its growth and development over the course of the 20th century is documented through this diverse collection of oral histories. Eight oral histories, in video, audio, and transcript format, expose aspects of daily life in early Las Vegas from the 1930s to the 1960s. Las Vegas showgirls Anna Bailey, Carol Baker, Betty Bunch, Sook-ja, Ai-ja, Mia Kim, and Virginia James discuss working conditions on the Las Vegas strip in the 1960s and 70s as well as their involvement with prominent shows, the racial integration of showrooms, and the growth of the Las Vegas Korean community. Present-day Las Vegas comes to life through oral histories and videos of six women in their 70s and 80s who tap dance together several times a week at the West Las Vegas Arts Center. Segregation, integration, the Nevada Test Site, and local history in Las Vegas are the focus of the oral history roundtable with Rose Hamilton and four other women who grew up together in Las Vegas and remain friends to this day.

Maine Memory Network

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Photo, Percival Procter Baxter, Age 10, 1886
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This site has two primary goals: to serve as a resource center for Maine history, and to assist classroom teachers as they teach American and Maine history. The site provides a search engine for its 5,700 primary sources (photographs, artwork, and documents), while the 34 online exhibits cover subjects including the 20th Maine regiment in the Civil War, Irish immigration, and Maine during the Revolutionary War.

Particularly interesting is My Album, where visitors can select, save, and arrange photographs and add text. Albums can be viewed in a slideshow or shared with other visitors through email or by storing them in a publicly accessible folder (users must register and give personal information to use this feature).

In addition to the nine lesson plans for teachers, there is a Community Gallery, where visitors can view 15 exhibits created by elementary, middle, and high school students posted for public viewing.

Japanese-American Internment

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Photo, Oakland Store, from the National Japanese American Historical Society
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In 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were U.S. Citizens, into internment camps. This site, created for a class project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides a gateway to brief essays and samplings of primary sources about the internment period from 1942-1945, a time line, oral histories, and photographs. There are links to 34 electronic essays and roughly 50 websites. Some of the more useful links are to the the National Archives and Records Administration, which documents the rights of American Citizens and actions of the Federal Government; the War Relocations Authority Camps in Arizona; the Museum of the City of San Franciso; the Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project; and Heart Mountain Digital Preservation Project. The site also contains personal reminiscences of life in the camp. Though many links on this site are useful for research on Asian-American history and the history of the World War II home front, this site should be used carefully. Some of the information presented as "fact" is highly controversial, some links present hearsay or speculation as fact, and several of the links are broken or obsolete.

Japanese American National Museum Collections

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Drawing, Playing Go K5-BA, 8-24-42, George Hoshida, Japanese American Nat. Muse.
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This site provides access to the digitized resources of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Collections include more than 300 letters sent to Clara Breed, a San Diego librarian, by her former patrons after their relocation to internment camps; panoramic photos from Buddhist Churches of America events; artwork by Hideo Date, Hisako Hibi, Estelle Ishigo, Henry Sugomoto, and Benji Okubo; the diary of Stanley Hayami, a high school student during the internment years, later killed in combat at age 19; sketches and watercolors from the diary of George Hoshida; photographs of Manzanar and Tule Lake by Jack Iwata, as well as other photographs of daily life in the internment camps; a major collection of issei immigrant artifacts and plantation clothing; and photographs for the Rafu Shimpo, one of the oldest Japanese American newspapers in the U.S.

This is an excellent source for anyone seeking primary sources related to Japanese American experience in the U.S., particularly with an emphasis on the years of internment.

Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive

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Photo, Leah Hing, ca. 1934, Pilot and WWII instrument mechanic, c. 1934, WSU
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This site offers a large archive of selected documents, reports, records, maps, photographs, newspapers, artifacts, and oral history interviews. Items are searchable by ethnic group, keyword, archive, type of material, date, or subject. Brief historical overviews and bibliographies for each ethnic group profiled are also available in the archive section. Another section has lessons plans for teachers on African Americans, immigration and settlement, migration, and ethnic culture and identity, 1850-1950. It also offers tutorials on using the archive, using history databases on the web, interpreting photographs, interpreting documents, and interpreting oral history. Historical overviews are provided on the various ethnic groups that settled the Columbia River Basin.

A discussion forum offers a place to talk about discoveries in the archive or questions. Topics currently include ethnic groups, ethnicity and race, work and labor, immigration and migration, family life, religion, social conditions, discrimination, and civil rights. A very useful site for researching or teaching the social and cultural history of the Columbia River Basin.

Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar

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Photo, Tsutomu Fuhunago, Ansel Adams
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During World War II, the U.S. Government forced more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to leave their homes and businesses, relocating them to internment camps from California to Arkansas. Well-known photographer Ansel Adams documented the lives of Japanese Americans at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California—from portraits to daily life, including agriculture and leisure.

This site presents 242 original negatives and 209 photographic prints, often displayed together to show Adams's developing and cropping techniques. His 1944 book on Manzanar, Born Free and Equal is also reproduced. Adams donated the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, writing, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice . . . had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment."

A More Perfect Union

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Photo, Tule Lake renunciant, November 23, 1945
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Based on a 1987 Smithsonian exhibition, this site allows visitors to click and drag through sections of text, music, personal accounts, and images that tell stories of the forced—and ultimately determined to be unconstitutional—internment during World War II of 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Also provides searching capabilities to retrieve images of more than 800 artifacts relating to the lives of those interned.

Sections in the narrative cover immigration, removal, internment, loyalty, service, and justice. Provides a 5,000-word audio file of interview excerpts; 6,400-word accompanying text from the 1994 traveling exhibition; annotated timeline; 72-title bibliography; 20 links to related sites; and two classroom activities. Also invites visitors to share their responses and to read those of others. Of value to students of Asian American history, the homefront during World War II, and constitutional issues.

Jim Crow Segregation: The Difficult and Anti-Democratic Work of White Supremacy

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How did segregation shape daily life for generations of African Americans and how do its legacies remain with us today?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks locate segregation’s origins in Southern disenfranchisement laws of the 1890s and highlight the Supreme Court's 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. New job opportunities during World War I and the Great Migration are briefly addressed along with "custom and tradition". Textbooks emphasize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's legal challenges, and portray the 1954 Brown v. Board decision as the culmination of the fight. Thus, according to the textbooks, from the 1890s to the 1950s, African Americans endured as best they could.

Source Excerpt

Primary sources provide ample evidence of segregation's brutality. They demonstrate the kind of structural inequalities that white supremacist laws and practices institutionalized but also that African Americans embraced a variety of methods to combat Jim Crow's injustices, and that white allies occasionally joined them. Collectively, the primary sources included here reveal how geography, class, gender, and culture have influenced ongoing battles for justice, as have changing national and international contexts.

Historian Excerpt

Historians debate the origins of Jim Crow, but it is important to remember that slavery had mandated the use of laws and practices to govern interracial relations. Separation from whites by choice accompanied freed people's desire for independence from their former white owners even as they expected the full and equal citizenship guaranteed to them by the 14th Amendment.

Abstract

Segregation contradicts what most students have learned about American freedom and democracy. Textbooks discuss de jure [in law] segregation as a great inconvenience that began in the 1890s and soon spread to every aspect of Southern daily life. Most routinely ignore:

  • segregation's economic dimensions and long-term impact;
  • black community activism;
  • interracial efforts to contest the status quo; and
  • the violence and terrorism necessary to uphold it.

Textbooks that portray segregation as a prelude to a more celebratory narrative of the civil rights era collapse the history of earlier generations of African Americans into a monolithic victimhood.

While the South's vicious de jure system stands apart, the rest of the nation's reliance on both informal custom and formal policy means that segregation—as well as the white supremacy and federal complicity that sustained it—cannot be dismissed as a regional aberration in an otherwise democratic nation.

Segregation contradicts what most students have learned about American freedom and democracy. Textbooks locate segregation's origins in southern disenfranchisement laws of the 1890s and highlight the Supreme Court's 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The majority of African Americans still lived in the south and worked as agricultural laborers for white landowners who denied them an education and exploited them economically. New job opportunities during World War I offered one escape.

Thinking About the Future in a World War II Barrack

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Material culture is at the heart of the work of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Using material culture, we fulfill our mission of promoting the understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. JANM has a permanent collection of over 60,000 photographs, documents, crafts, artwork, and moving images. These artifacts make up the material culture that illustrates and substantiates the history of one ethnic group in the United States.

One of the largest artifacts in our collection is a barrack from a World War II-era American concentration camp. During World War II this barrack was located in Heart Mountain, WY, and housed Japanese American families forcibly removed from the West Coast. It is now on display as part of Common Ground: The Heart of Community, JANM's ongoing exhibition covering the history and culture of Japanese Americans from the 1880s to the present.

Within the exhibition the barrack confronts people with the reality of the experience of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent who were confined in one of 10 camps run by the United States government. For Japanese Americans who were once confined in similar barracks, seeing this artifact often serves as an emotional reminder of a difficult past.

. . . the barrack confronts people with the reality of the experience of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent who were confined in one of 10 camps run by the United States government.

Each year, over 20,000 students in Los Angeles visit JANM and are able to stand inside this barrack. They listen to the volunteer docents' first-person stories about life during World War II. Material culture brings history to life so when students see the gaps between the barrack floorboards and hear the volunteers recount the mass removal and confinement without due process, they often respond by saying, "That's not fair."

An opportunity for dialogue opens when students ask how this could have happened to the Japanese Americans. This allows us to share not only the World War II experience, but also the pre-war discrimination, the community's post-war struggles to get back onto its feet, and the coalition that fought for and in 1988 achieved redress from the United States government. A tour that began in a 70-year-old barrack can become a discussion about race-based discrimination and the struggle to redress a constitutional wrong.

A tour that began in a 70-year-old barrack can become a discussion about race-based discrimination and the struggle to redress a constitutional wrong.

The barrack from Heart Mountain is one example of an object's ability to teach and invite thoughtful conversation. Like many other museums, we are beginning to experiment with ways to increase the accessibility of more of our artifacts. This school year we have introduced two new school programs. Digital Speakers Bureau is designed to allow real-time, Web-based dialogue between docents and students who cannot visit the museum. Object Analysis with the Education Collection is for students who live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in hands-on analysis of a subset of JANM's collections. Additionally we have begun to upload 30- to 60-second video clips of volunteers sharing stories that relate to artifacts from our collection and have a handful of online collections.

Material culture encourages students to think critically about the real-life lessons that this experience holds for us all. While the Heart Mountain barrack evokes deeply personal memories for many Japanese Americans, it also stands as a general warning against the discrimination, mass removal, and incarceration of any one ethnic group. The barrack from World War II reminds us that—now and in the future—it is our individual and collective responsibility to uphold constitutional rights for all.

Teaser

Material culture brings history to life so when students see the gaps between the barrack floorboards and hear the volunteers recount the mass removal and confinement without due process, they often respond by saying, "That's not fair."