History of American Education Web Project

Image
Introductory graphic, History of American Education Web Project
Annotation

Provides 55 images and 60 short essays, ranging in length from a few sentences to approximately 1,500 words, on significant topics in the history of American education. The essays were prepared by undergraduates and edited by their professor, Robert N. Barger, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of education. Organized into five chronological categories from the colonial era to the present, with an additional essay on European influences. Covers such topics as hornbooks, primers, McGuffey Reader's, normal schools, kindergarten, high school, African-American education, adult education, prayer in schools, student rights, and education of the handicapped. Includes essays on such personages as Freidrich Froebel, Herbert Spenser, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Horace Mann, and G. Stanley Hall. Also offers information on recent topics such as the Committee on Excellence in Education's 1983 study, A Nation at Risk, and the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed into law in 1994. Professor Barger's warning that he did not add balance to the "triumphalist" perspective that some of his students adopted should be remembered by those using this site. Nevertheless, it provides a useful introduction to high school students and undergraduates studying the history of American education.

Florida State Archives Photographic Collection

Image
Image, Conch Town, WPA, C. Foster, 1939, Florida State Archives Photo Collection
Annotation

More than 137,000 photographs of Florida, many focusing on specific localities from the mid-19th century to the present, are available on this website. The collection, including 15 online exhibits, is searchable by subject, photographer, keyword, and date.

Materials include 35 collections on agriculture, the Seminole Indians, state political leaders, Jewish life, family life, postcards, and tourism among other things. Educational units address 17 topics, including the Seminoles, the Civil War in Florida, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, pioneer feminist Roxcy Bolton, the civil rights movement in Florida, and school busing during the 1970s.

"Writing Around Florida" includes ideas to foster appreciation of Florida's heritage. "Highlights of Florida History" presents 46 documents, images, and photographs from Florida's first Spanish period to the present. An interactive timeline presents materials—including audio and video files—on Florida at war, economics and agriculture, geography and the environment, government and politics, and state culture and history.

The Thomas Jefferson Building: Secret Messages

Article Body

In the Library of Congress online interactive The Thomas Jefferson Building: Secret Messages, students explore four locations in the oldest of the library's buildings. Built between 1890 and 1897, the Thomas Jefferson Building features art and architectural details that help communicate the building's purpose to visitors. Students discover details in each of the four locations and decide which of four themes they best symbolize: celebrating achievement, providing access to knowledge, inspiring creativity, and promoting progress and discovery. At the end of the activity, students choose from all of the details the one they thought best conveyed its theme, and describe a modern symbol they might use to convey the same idea. A brief Teacher Resources page suggests ways of incorporating the activity into curriculum, and a blog entry offers more ideas.

Buildings are a living record of human interaction with place. This interactive encourages students to analyze buildings as primary sources and consider the intent behind architectural details.

Disability History Museum

Image
Image, "The Polio Chronicle," Bolte Gibson, 1932, Disability History Museum
Annotation

This ongoing project was designed to present materials on the historical experiences of those with disabilities. The website currently presents nearly 800 documents and more than 930 still images dating from the late 18th century to the present.

Subjects are organized according to categories of advocacy, types of disability, government, institutions, medicine, organizations, private life, public life, and personal names. Documents include articles, poems, pamphlets, speeches, letters, book excerpts, and editorials.

Of special interest are documents from the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation Archives, including the Polio Chronicle, a journal published by patients at Warm Springs, Georgia, from 1931 to 1934. Images include photographs, paintings, postcards, lithographs, children's book illustrations, and 19th-century family photographs, as well as postcard views of institutions, beggars, charity events, and types of wheelchairs.

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project

Annotation

"Densho" means "to pass on to the next generation." In this quest, this website offers an archive of more than 668 oral histories presented in countless hours of video interviews on Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Materials also include approximately 12,000 historical photographs, documents, and newspapers. Visitors to this website should keep in mind that Densho is continually engaged in expanding its resources and adding more interviews, photographs, and documents, so be sure to check back periodically to discover new content!

Access to archival materials requires free registration. Once registered, users may select materials according to 32 topics, including immigration, community, religion and churches, education, race and racism, identity values, resistance, economic losses, redress and reparations, and reflections on the past.

Materials available without registration include lesson plans and information on "Causes of the Incarceration," "Civil Rights and Japanese American Incarceration," "Sites of Shame: Japanese American Detention Facilities," and "In the Shadow of My Country: A Japanese American Artist Remembers." The website also offers 90 multimedia materials providing historical context, a timeline, a glossary, and a list of related sources in print and online.

Chicano/a Movement in Washington State History Project

Image
Photo, Carving at El Centro, November 4, 2008, litinemo, Flickr
Annotation

This website traces the history of the Chicano/a movement in Washington State, which had its roots in the early 1960s when campaigns surrounding farm workers' rights in eastern Washington and community and educational rights in western Washington united and student activism grew at the University of Washington, continued through the 1970s, fractured in the 1980s, and recently reemerged as a younger generation of activists have mobilized around affirmative action, globalization, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and immigrant rights.

This website presents a wealth of primary sources documenting this rich history, including 17 oral history interviews with prominent members of activist groups; 73 images of demonstrations, prominent leaders in the movement, and Seattle-area murals; 42 documents, including copies of the "Boycott Bulletins" that keep students informed of the proceedings of the 1969 grape boycott at the University of Washington and documents surrounding the University of Washington's Chicano/a activist group; as well as more than 300 newspaper articles from the University of Washington Daily, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dating from between 1968 and 1979 and covering topics such as farmworkers and the grape boycott, arts and culture, and the community activist group El Centro de La Raza.

A slideshow providing historical background and highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with the Chicano/a movement history, as is an extensive timeline and several historical background essays.

This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides materials that can serve as larger historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, and 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle.

Brown v. Board of Education

Image
Photo, Protester, 1961, Brown v. Board of Education
Annotation

Created in anticipation of the 50-year anniversary of the monumental Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, this website covers four general areas. These include Supreme Court cases, busing and school integration, school integration in Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan), and recent resegregation trends in America. The site contains a case summary and the court's opinion for each of 34 landmark court cases, from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Brown includes transcripts of oral arguments, as well. Visitors can also read the oral histories of five members of the University of Michigan community who remember the Brown decision and its impact. There are more than 30 photographs of participants in the Brown case and other civil rights activists, as well as a collection of documents pertaining to desegregation in the Ann Arbor Public School District. A statistical section details the growing number of African Americans in Michigan and Ann Arbor schools from 1950 to 1960.

Archives of American Art, Oral History Collections

Image
Logo, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Annotation

This archive offers more than 180 transcriptions of oral history interviews with a variety of artists, including Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana, Richard Diebenkorn, and Rube Goldberg. Many of the interviews involved artists who were active in the Works Projects Administration Artist Projects, and took place as part of the "New Deal and the Arts Oral History Program" in the 1960s. Each interview is accompanied by notes on the date and place of the interview and the name of the interviewer. These full-text transcriptions are useful for those interested in specific artists and their lives, but because the site has no search engine and there are no introductory notes or biographical information for the artists other than the information included in the interviews, the site is somewhat difficult to navigate.

Frontera Collection of Mexican American Music

Image
Image for Frontera Collection of Mexican American Music
Annotation

This collection of commercially produced Mexican American vernacular music is the largest of its kind, with more than 100,000 recordings. The music, originally published between 1905 and the 1990s, is primarily in Spanish. This website presents digitized versions of roughly 30,000 recordings. The music ranges widely in style and includes lyric songs, canciones, boleros, rancheras, sones, instrumental music, and the first recordings of norte and conjunto music, as well as politically motivated speeches and comedy skits.

A browseable list of subjects shows that love (unrequited love, adultery, regrets), war (Korean War, Mexican Revolution, World War I and II), and praise (of country, guitar, mother) are common themes in the collection. Unfortunately, the songs are available to the general public only in 50-second sound clips. Users interested in gaining full access to a select group of songs for research are encouraged to contact the website's administrators.

Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project

Image
Logo, National Indian Law Library (NILL)
Annotation

This website presents full-text versions of 500 codes, constitutions, treaties, land titles, and Supreme Court decisions relating to the more than 500 Native American tribes in the U.S. The bulk of the material lies in the "IRA (Indian Reorganization Act) Era Constitutions and Charters" section, which offers close to 300 documents. These are primarily corporate charters, constitutions, and bylaws from the 1930s and 1940s. The website also includes the 1936 Composite Indian Reorganization Act for Alaska and twentieth-century constitutions from selected tribes, such as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

For material before the twentieth century, the "Treaties" section includes scans of the original Six Nations Treaty of 1794 and the Senekas Treaties of 1797 and 1823. In addition, a digitized version of Felix Cohen's 1941 Handbook of Federal Indian Law, and the Opinions of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior Relating to Indian Affairs 1917-1974 are both available.