Yet another fine production from the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, this site was created to celebrate the centennial of composer Aaron Copland's birth. The site offers a selection of over 1000 items and 5000 images drawn from over 400,000 items in the Copland Collection of the Library's Music Division. Items in the online exhibit include music sketches, correspondence, writings, and photographs spanning 1899-1981, but primarily drawn from the 1920s to 1950s. In addition to these items the site also includes a roughly 3000-word essay on Copland's life and works with 12 photographs of Copland and a timeline of the artist's life and accomplishments from his birth in 1900 to his death in 1990. Leonard Bernstein's 1000-word article on Copland from the 1970 High Fidelity/Musical America issue and five 300-word tributes to Copland on his 75th birthday, published in the 1975 Schwann-1 Record and Tape Guide are also included. Visitors may search the site by keyword or browse alphabetical listings of musical sketches, writings, correspondence, photographs, titles, and works. This is a useful site for students and teachers interested in the history of American music and the lives of American composers.

More than 240 items dealing with African-American history from collections of the Library of Congress, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings. The exhibition explores black America's quest for political, social, and economic equality from slavery through the mid-20th century. Organized into nine chronological periods covering the following topics: slavery; free blacks in the antebellum period; antislavery movements; the Civil War and African-American participation in the military; Reconstruction political struggles, black exodus from the South, and activism in the black church; the "Booker T. Washington era" of progress in the creation of educational and political institutions during a period of violent backlash; World War I and the postwar period, including the rise of the Harlem Renaissance; the Depression, New Deal, and World War II; and the Civil Rights era. Each section includes a 500-word overview and annotations of 100 words in length for each object displayed. In addition to documenting the struggle for freedom and civil rights, the exhibit includes celebratory material on contributions of artists, writers, performers, and sports figures. Valuable for students and teachers looking for a well-written and documented guide for exploring African-American history.

This site contains transcripts, audio recordings, and edited stories from interviews, conducted in the spring of 1998 by sophomores at South Kingstown High School, with 31 Rhode Islanders about their recollections of the year 1968. These narratives, including references to the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, as well as personal memories, are a living history of one of the most tumultuous years in United States history. The project includes a glossary, timeline, and bibliography of reference, as well as notes from the project coordinators about oral history in the classroom.

This is the companion to the PBS series, Vietnam: A Television History. David McCullough introduces the site with a 600-word essay on the war and 30-word program notes for each of the 11 episodes. Transcripts for each episode, from the "Roots of a War" to "The End of the Tunnel" are available. "Who's Who" provides photographs and profiles (50-100 words) of 41 major figures. The site provides a timeline from 1945 to 1997 including events leading up to the war, the war itself, and its results, as well as links to 50-word descriptions of events. A 600-word essay illustrated with four photographs describes Vietnam's recovery from the war. Among the 12 personal reflections of the war (300 to 900 words) provided here, visitors may read the memories of a Vietnamese-born American poet, a U.S. marine, a soldier who guarded the Ho Chi Minh trail, and a Red Cross aid worker. There are nine photographs and 3,000 words on equipment from fighter planes to boots and food. One essay (500 words) describes the My Lai massacre and another essay (1,600 words) discusses the continuing issue of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. This site is easy to navigate and mixes the personal and global effectively, making it useful for research into the cultural history of war.

Listen to tapes of four telephone conversations about the Vietnam War secretly recorded by Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. Johnson recorded these conversations with Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Russell, and Press Secretary George Reedy in 1964. In his four-minute conversation with Stevenson, Johnson attempts to get the U.N. Ambassador’s opinion on the situation in Vietnam and Laos. Bundy spoke to Johnson for seven minutes about communicating with North Vietnam through Canada. Johnson spoke to Reedy for ten minutes about Dean Rusk’s activities. Johnson spoke with Russell for 26 minutes about his anxieties regarding American involvement in Vietnam. The site offers 30-word descriptions of the conversations and is linked to both the Houghton Mifflin textbook, Challenge of Democracy, and to History and Politics Out Loud, a site created by Jerry Goldman, one of the book’s authors. This site will be useful for research on Johnson, the Vietnam War, and the Presidency.

The ethnically diverse history of Tucson, Arizona is celebrated here in sections on the Hispanic, Native American, African American, Chinese, and Jewish heritage of the area. A 1000-word essay on the Hispanic history of Tucson is complemented by the four histories, from two to 100 pages, of local families. An exhibit of traditional arts in the Mexican American community includes photographs of houses, piñatas, and ten video clips of low-rider cars. Sources on Native Americans include 12 oral histories (300-600 words), about food and culture. The history of African Americans in the Tucson area from the 16th to the 19th century is recounted in an 1,800-word essay. A collection of 22 biographies (120-800 words) and summarized oral histories offer more personal details of African American life in Tucson. The collection of material about Chinese Americans in Tucson includes four biographies (600-1,200 words) and seven video clips of interviews with a Chinese American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. The journey made by one Jewish family from Russia in the 19th century to Tucson in the 20th is recounted in a 4,700-word illustrated essay. The site will be useful for research in ethnicity and the history of the west.

This site highlights Orville and Wilbur Wright's pioneering aviation work that led to the world's first powered, controlled, and sustained flight. The collection contains approximately 49,000 digital items, including correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and 300 glass-plate photographic negatives. The papers cover the years 1881-1952, although the years 1900-1940 are especially well represented. The diaries offer detailed records of the brothers' ideas, as well as their successes and failures; and photographs include the first flight, taken at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. The materials are particularly valuable because the brothers so carefully documented their work and ideas, and because they corresponded so often with members of their family.

The site includes a Wright Brothers timeline and a Wright family tree. This site would be of particular use to anyone interested in the Wright Brothers or the history of flight, but is also useful in examining the role of photography in history and invention.

Produced as a part of a series of articles on black history titled "Through Spokane's Eyes: Moments in Black History," this site is a civil rights oral history project organized around the memories of men and women from Spokane, WA. Visitors can listen to of eight oral history interviews. They include an account by Jerrelene Williamson who compares the civil rights movement in Spokane to events in Alabama. Like most of the interviews, Williamson's dialogue is approximately 10 minutes in length. Emelda and Manuel Brown discuss their experiences with racial prejudice within the context of raising a family in Spokane in the 1960s. Their interview (32 minutes) is the second longest within the collection. Like many others within the project, Clarence Freeman shares his remembrances of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Sam Minnix and Verda Lofton describe the local civil rights demonstrations, and Flip Schulke recounts his experiences as a photographer in the south during the 1960s. His interview includes a discussion of James Meredith's admission into the University of Mississippi and at 45 minutes, is the longest. Alvin Pitmon talks about the desegregation of Arkansas schools and Nancy Nelson sings two civil rights spirituals, "My Lord, What a Morning" and "Let Us Break Bread Together."

A search engine allows users to search interviews by keyword and across database topics. This site will be of great interest to those interested in the history of civil rights in the United States.

This is essentially a digital tribute to the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira. The site explores their musical and lyrical legacies as one of the most famous songwriting duos in American history. The site features playable audio files of 58 of the Gershwins' best-known songs, performed by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, and Harry Connick, Jr. In the History section, visitors can view a timeline of the brother's lives, complete with photographs, or read detailed profiles (approximately 2,500 words) of both George and Ira, separately and together. An Anthology highlights 10 selected films and 10 shows, while References provides additional resources in print, music, and digital media.

Divided into six galleries, this website features 21 online exhibits. The first gallery, Binding the Nation, includes six exhibits such as "The Post and the Press" and "Moving West" which explains how the postal service contracted with stagecoach lines to transport mail across the frontier. The second gallery, Customers and Communities, uses a series of exhibits to examine the development of mail delivery to the growing urban and rural populations in the 20th century. For example, through a virtual tour of the "Mail by Rail," visitors learn about the revolutionary Railway Mail Service. Moving the Mail is the third gallery, with three exhibits, and Art of Cards and Letters, the fourth gallery, spotlights the important role mail has held as a medium for personal communications, including "Undercover: The Evolution of the American Envelope." The fifth gallery, Artistic License comprises six exhibits; and the last, the Philatelic Gallery, includes exhibits entitled "Rarities Vault" and "Inverts." This gallery also features changing exhibits featuring special objects from both the Museum and private collections, including an online version of "Mail to the Chief," a collection of original drawings by Franklin Roosevelt of the many stamps he designed.

There are also two research guides online for the Benjamin B. Lipsner Airmail Collection and for the 1847 Federal Postage Stamp Correspondence. An Activity Zone offers materials for young students and free downloadable curriculum guides (grades K through college level) are available for teachers. The 24 online articles from EnRoute, the National Postal Museum's membership magazine, complete this rich site.