Voices of the Colorado Plateau

Image
Annotation

Offers more than 40 multimedia presentations featuring oral history excerpts and photographs that document aspects of life in the Colorado Plateau--encompassing parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado--during the past half century. Also presents audio files of 10 complete oral histories and transcripts of the interviews ranging from 2,200 to 19,000 words in length. A joint project of eight libraries and museums in the four Colorado Plateau states and Nevada, the site is organized into three sections--People, Places, and Topics--with subheadings that allow visitors to access the audio excerpts, many of which are accompanied by slide shows of photographs. The people interviewed include a Navajo language interpreter, the son of homesteaders, a schoolteacher, a pioneer in commercial river running, and an administrative officer for a town built for dam workers. Topics range from sociocultural concerns, such as growing up, education, families, food, and leisure, to work- and environment-related subjects, including ranching, timber, and tourism. Valuable for those studying the American West and the use of oral history for exhibit presentations.

Today in History Web Resources

Image
Annotation

Gateway to more than 100 links, most of which provide visitors with the capability to search for events that occurred on specific days. "Specialty sites" link to resources dealing with specific ethnic groups, entertainment forms, politics, professions, regions, and countries. Users can find hundreds of holidays, birthdays of famous people, and calendar-related quotations, as well as links to events involving African Americans, American Indians, popular culture, sports, radical history, psychology, health, and the literary world. No depth, mostly trivia, but still of use to students and teachers who need to check a date.

We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement

Image
Annotation

A "National Registry of Historic Places Travel Itinerary" covering 42 places of significance with regard to the postwar African-American civil rights movement. Churches, colleges, private homes, places of business, neighborhoods, and government offices, primarily located in the South, are each described in 300-word entries illustrated with one or two photographs. An introductory 5,000-word essay offers a narrative history of the movement with annotations to specific sites. Focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, with no attempt to cover civil rights struggles of groups other than African Americans. A few sites cover events and persons active prior to the 1950s, such as Ida B. Wells's home in Chicago and the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, MA.

Users can access sites from a map of the U.S. or by a list organized by states. Information for visiting each site is also provided, as is a list of 39 related websites and a 34-title bibliography. The site's creators note that the places were nominated by states and thus "do not represent a systematic effort to survey, identify, and list all important civil rights sites in the National Register." A useful way to introduce students to civil rights history.

National Security Action Memoranda of John F. Kennedy

Image
Annotation

This site provides access to 272 facsimiles of National Security Action (NSA) memoranda written by President John F. Kennedy or by McGeorge Bundy, his NSA advisor. The memoranda are 50-200 words each and cover subjects such as the training of Cuban nationals, the distribution of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Berlin, civil defense, and a "Review of the Iranian Situation." The documents are indexed by NSA numbers from February 1961 to November 1963. More documents will be added as they are declassified. The index provides a one to five-word description of the subject of each memo. There is a 100-word introduction to the collection, but no contextual material or annotations. The site cannot be searched by subject. Teachers and students in search of primary source material about foreign policy in the Kennedy Administration will find this site useful.

AdFlip

Annotation

Adflip is an archive of more than 6,000 print advertisements published from 1940 to the present. The site is privately financed and was created by two individuals who felt that "print advertising captures the essence of society at any given time." Products advertised include everything from dog food to DeSotos. The site may be searched by year, product type, and brand name. Many ads may be sent as electronic post-cards for free. For each ad, the site tells when and in what publication it appeared. A 170-word introduction describes the site. There are 17 search categories, from automotive to travel, and eight themed categories such as comic books and obsolete products.

A top ten collection changes daily and features ads that the site creators find funny. Visitors may also search a collection of ads indexed by publication. This collection includes 65 magazines and comic books, from Archie to Wired. The site does not give information about advertising agencies. This site will be useful as primary source material for research on advertising, consumer culture, and material culture, but note that the pages of this site download very slowly.

Traders: Voices from the Trading Post

Image
Annotation

Trading posts, small businesses that sold American Indian arts and crafts, were a colorful part of the culture of the American West. When the United Indian Traders Association (UITA), an organization of trading post owners and operators, disbanded in 1997, they directed some of their financial reserves toward this oral history project, capturing the history of these posts through the reminiscences of traders and their families. The 44 interviews offered on this site were conducted from 1998 to 2000 by Karen Underhill and Brad Cole of Northern Arizona University. Each interview is accompanied by a photograph and a brief (approximately 50 words) biography of the interviewee. The site offers edited excerpts, full-text transcriptions, and selected audio clips of each interview. There is no search engine and the interviews are arranged only by name, not by geographical location, so the site is somewhat difficult to navigate. But for those interested in the recent history of the American West, Native Americans, and the intermediary functions of the trading posts, this is a unique source.

Democratic Vistas: The William Clyde DeVane Lecture Series

Image
Annotation

In spring term 2001, Yale University celebrated their tercentennial by assembling 15 distinguished professors representing 11 departments to lecture on and discuss "the conditions and prospects of democracy" in America from myriad perspectives. The complete lectures and discussion sessions are now available on this site in text, audio, and video. The series includes a number of lecturers well-known to students of American history, including Nancy F. Cott, Michael Denning, Richard Brodhead, John Lewis Gaddis, and David Gelernter. Many of the lectures relate American democracy to a variety of historical subjects: the market, the family, religion, foreign policy, education, social movements, computers and other technology, and the biomedical revolution. Other topics include the widening income gap between rich and poor, the relation of Plato's Republic to the American Republic, Lincoln and Whitman as representative Americans, and whether citizenship is now dead. The site, which includes reading lists for each lecture, provides a rich collection of texts that will prove stimulating to students of American political, social, and cultural history.

Regional Oral History Office

Image
Annotation

ROHO preserves the history of the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, and the Western United States. It covers a wide range of topics, including politics and government, law and jurisprudence, arts and letters, business and labor, social and community history, University of California history, natural resources and the environment, and science and technology. ROHO has full-text transcripts of more than 270 interviews online (some with audio recordings). Offerings include the "Free Speech Movement Digital Archive," that documents the role of participants in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, in the fall of 1964 as well as its origins and legacy; "Exploring Diversity and Access at the University of California," examining the experiences of African American faculty and senior staff at UC Berkeley with six interviews available and an additional 10 interviews planned; "Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front" project, exploring the wartime experiences of Bay Area residents, with 23 oral history interviews; and "Suffragists," featuring eight interviews with major figures in 20th-century suffragist history.

There are two searchable databases, divided chronologically from 1954-1979 and 1980-1997, of abstracts from the more than 1,250 interviews in the offline collection. The site also contains an essay on "Oral History Tips" and two "One-Minute Guides" to "Conducting an Oral History" and "Oral History Interviewing." A useful resource for researching the cultural or social history of California and the West in the 20th century.

Bay of Pigs Reports

Image
Annotation

The centerpiece of this collection of American government documents about the Bay of Pigs is a more than 400-page two-volume report by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about the failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. All material is in facsimile. Volume One is the CIA Inspector General's report on the operations and Volume Two is the CIA Directorate of Operations' report on Volume One. Visitors thus have an interesting opportunity to observe high-level government self-evaluation. More than 750 additional documents include National Security Council briefings and intelligence reports about events in Cuba between 1960 and 1961. The site will be useful for research on foreign policy and the CIA.

William Gedney Photographs and Writings

Image
Annotation

This beautifully presented site features selections from Duke University's collection of photographer William Gedney's work and writings. From the mid-1950s to the 1980s, Gedney captured everyday life of people in places as diverse as Brooklyn, Kansas, India, and Europe. The site boasts more than 4,900 of his prints, workprints, and contact sheets. Photographs are arranged into 12 series: Composers; Cross Country; Europe; India; Kansas; Kentucky; New York; San Francisco; St. Joseph's School for the Deaf; The Farm; Night Series; and Miscellaneous. Each category offers a 35-50 word introduction to the series, and each image is accompanied by its title and a brief 5-10 word note on the subject matter and date taken.

Also on the site are selections from 33 of Gedney's manuscript books and notebooks, including ideas for book projects, descriptions of bookbinding methods and materials, and travel diaries. All of the writings are available in image form, and eight of the notebooks are also transcribed. Selected photographs, sketches, and dummies for nine book projects are also included, as well as a timeline of Gedney's life and work from his birth in 1932 to the San Francisco retrospective of his work in 2000. The site is keyword searchable and easy to navigate, making it an exceptional source of illustrations and images of American life, as well as an American's perspective on life in India and Europe.