Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

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martin luther king
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Featuring texts by and about Martin Luther King Jr., this regularly updated website currently contains more than 1,400 speeches, sermons, and other writings, mostly taken from five volumes covering the period from 1929 to 1968. (These are listed in the Published Documents section under Papers.)

In addition, sixteen chapters of materials published in 1998 as The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. are available. The website presents important sermons and speeches from later periods, including "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," the March on Washington address, the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and “Beyond Vietnam.” Additional materials include an interactive chronology of King's life, two biographical essay, over twenty audio files of recorded speeches and sermons, and twelve articles on King. More than thirty photographs complete the website.

The King Papers Project is valuable for studying King's views and discourse on civil rights, race relations, nonviolence, education, peace, and other political, religious, and philosophical topics.

Documenting Our Past: The Teenie Harris Archive Project

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Photo, Charles Teenie Harris, c. 1950-1970, Documenting Our Past
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This archive of 1,500 photographs taken by Teenie Harris, photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, "one of the largest and most influential Black newspapers in the country," documents African American urban life in Pittsburgh from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is a sample of the 80,000 images that make up the full collection. Many of the images have not been identified and the site's authors ask assistance (a submission form accompanies each image).

Visitors can browse the collection through 15 galleries of 100 images each. They can also comment on images and view the comments of others. Following the link to the Teenie Harris image collection in the Historic Pittsburgh Images Collections at the University of Pittsburgh allows visitors to browse the 541 images that have been identified with full captions. The site also offers a chronology of Harris's life. This site is useful for researching the history of Pittsburgh and its African American community as well as urban history or African American history in general.

John Hope Franklin: The Historian and the African American Experience

Description

Distinguished historian and lifelong civil rights activist Professor John Hope Franklin joins archivist Allen Weinstein and Dr. Lonnie Bunch, director of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, to discuss his careers as educator, scholar, and activist.

To watch this interview, scroll to "John Hope Franklin," and select "Watch the Video."

Intertextual Reading of Two Primary Documents

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Daguerreotype, unidentified African American woman, c. 1850, Flickr Commons
Article Body

This student think-aloud shows a 99-second video of a student reading a Social Security poster and congressional testimony by a NAACP representative. The student reads the poster out loud, generating a question as she reads. Rather than spending time hypothesizing answers, the student reads the next document, which helps her answer her original question, and raises other questions about the significance of race and class in the fashioning of Social Security legislation.

This example of intertextual reading reveals a student capable of reading documents using and comparing multiple documents to help her answer historical questions. The accompanying text commentary explains what the student is doing and how teachers can support students in intertextual reading. The documents she interprets may be downloaded here.

Historical Thinking Matters

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Photo, Scopes Trial, Historical Thinking Matters
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Four guided investigations designed to teach students how to read primary sources and construct historical narratives lie at the heart of this website. Topics are: the Spanish-American War, the Scopes Trial, Social Security, and Rosa Parks. Each topic includes a short introductory video, a timeline of events, a central question, and extension activities. For example, the Rosa Parks investigation poses the question: "Why did the boycott of Montgomery's buses succeed?"

After completing a simple login, students read annotated documents—including letters written by the boycott organizers, a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and an interview with a woman working in Montgomery—and answer guiding questions, and draw on their responses to answer the question. The website also includes a useful introduction to the idea of historical thinking.

Radical Christian Pacifists

Description

According to the Library of Congress Webcasts summary, in this video, "Joseph Kip Kosek, assistant professor at George Washington University, discussed the impact of radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice, at the Library of Congress. Kosek, the author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy and a former fellow of the Library's John W. Kluge Center, talked about his book. According to Kosek, in response to the massive bloodshed that defined the 20th century, American religious radicals developed an effective new form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi, these 'acts of conscience' included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes and conscientious objection to war. Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Kosek traces the impact of radical Christian pacifists on America."

Understanding and Appreciating WWII Veterans

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Photo, 1948, Signal section, Camp Edwards, Kentucky, New York Public Library
Question

My 8th-grade students will interview a veteran and then do independent research on those battles and locations. Do you have suggestions of sites my
students can hit that would have info about the various branches of military and info about battles, ships, planes, etc. where these vets served?

Answer

There are a number of wonderful sites for someone looking for background information about World War II, and the experiences of military men and women abroad and at home. Unfortunately, while there is considerable general information, the experiences of specific veterans can be widely varied—extending across the globe, and over land, sea, and air. Given the large number of units and the many changes in deployments over the course of the war, it can be difficult to find information about specific units on the web.

As a starting point, to transport your students back into the period you might start with some of the very broad overviews of the war by sites such as the History Channel. And (with proper warnings about the way they exaggerate and oversimplify) you might have them look at one of the War Department’s Why We Fight documentaries.

As they try to get a closer understanding of the specific experiences of particular service people and their units, your students can look at the materials prepared by the military services, which have substantial resources on the web (though they are a pretty clunky). For information on ground forces, they should check out the Army’s U.S. Center for Military History. Much of the material here consists of digitized version of print publication (hence the rather look), but it provides very comprehensive information about particular events.

The Naval History Center offers similar information for the U.S. Navy and Marine corps. Those are probably your best sources for information on the web at the unit level.

The National Archives also offers a treasure trove of information digitized from their collections, which includes everything from enlistment records of particular soldiers to photographs from the period. It can be hit-or-miss the closer you try to get to a specific person or unit, but it does provide some excellent examples of their specific experiences at the time.

Finally, the Library of Congress’s Veteran’s History Project provides a model of the kinds of information students might want to gather from each of the veterans they interview. Each interviewee in the database has a small fact sheet summarizing the key elements of their careers, and also offers digitized recordings of interviews with service men and women.

These are the best sources of information about World War II I have found on the web, though there are dozens of other sources available out there of widely varied quality. Most of the other sites are either extremely dated or are quite general summaries of broad themes and specific battles or events, but these sites should get your students started and on the right track.

The Mystery of Radar in Hawaii

Description

From C-SPAN's Video Library:

"Historian Harry Butowsky discussed 'The Mystery of Radar in Hawaii.' In 1941 radar was a new technology that was being utilized at Pearl Harbor, but the infrastructure surrounding its monitoring was not fully developed. Mr. Butowsky used many slides while telling the December 7, 1941, story from the point that the Japanese planes were detected on radar to the ongoing discussion of assigning blame for the success of the surprise attack."