StoryCorps

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Photo, Bob Heft, Designer of  the 50 star flag, StoryCorps
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StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the stories of people across the U.S. Founded in 2003, it has collected more than 15,000 stories from people in all walks of life—immigrants, veterans, those that suffer from debilitating diseases, lovers, September 11th survivors, and many more. Each recorded conversation includes two or three people, often grandchildren interviewing grandparents, old friends interviewing each other, or children remembering their parents. Clips, usually between two and five minutes, from hundreds of these stories are available.

The clips are keyword searchable and browseable by category: Angels & Mentors, Discovery, Friendship, Griot, Growing Up, Hurricane Katrina, Identity, Romance, September 11, Struggle, Witness, Wisdom, and Work. Many people discuss their involvement in World War II or the Vietnam War, and many more talk about how they met their spouses or coped with segregation. Always thought-provoking, and often moving, these clips can expose the more human side of major 20th-century events.

Sanborn® Fire Insurance Maps for Georgia Towns and Cities, 1884-1922

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Map, Savannah, GA, Sheet 27, 1898, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. . .
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This extensive archive offers detailed color maps for more than 130 Georgia towns and cities between 1884 and 1922. The maps reveal urban landscapes and the locations of businesses, mills, colleges, depots, and other buildings. There are 540 sets of maps and most sets have several or more map sheets. For instance, Atlanta for 1911 has 395 map sheets covering the entire city with three index maps and Savannah for 1916 has 137 map sheets with two index maps. All maps are displayed with their original color coding.

Users can zoom in and out and pan right, left, up, or down to reveal details and every map is accompanied by full bibliographic data. Visitors can browse the collection by county or city or by year of publication; or they can search by keyword, title, city, county, or by address in listed cities. An advanced search feature is also available. Maps for each city are grouped by year with holdings indicated. There are also 17 related links that include two sites on how to read Sanborn maps and seven other digitized collections of Sanborn maps. The maps provide many details about the mills and other industries in these towns, and they are particularly useful in revealing spatial relationships and location of railroad lines. An extremely useful resource for researching the business or urban history of Georgia in the decades around 1900.

Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition

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Image, "Who will pay the beer bill?,", American Issue Publishing Company
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This small, but useful, website offers a wide range of primary source material for researching the history of the prohibition movement, temperance, and alcoholism. The more than 1,800 items include broadsides, sheet music, pamphlets, and government publications related to the temperance movement and prohibition.

Materials come from the period leading up to prohibition, such as an 1830s broadside on the "Absent Father" as well as the prohibition era itself, such as a 1920 pamphlet entitled, "Alcohol Sides with Germ Enemies." They end with the passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933.

All digitized items are in the public domain. An essay, "Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric" by Leah Rae Berk provides an overview of the topic and historical context.

Burlington County Historical Society and Museums [NJ]

Description

The Burlington County Historical Society operates three house museums furnished in period style—the 1743 Bard-How House, circa 1780 James Fenimore Cooper House, and Captain James Lawrence House. The Cooper House was the birthplace of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), author of The Last of the Mohicans; and now contains items from the estate of Napoleon's brother. The Lawrence House served as the boyhood home of Captain James Lawrence (1781-1813), who died in the War of 1812, best known for initiating the battle cry, "Don't give up the ship!" The society also maintains a research library and an exhibit on production history within Burlington County, NJ.

The society offers exhibits, research library access, period rooms, and guided house museum tours.

Chadds Ford Historical Society, Barn Visitors Center, and Historic Sites [PA]

Description

The Society maintains the Barn Visitors Center, as well as three 18th-century historic sites: the 1725 John Chads House, the John Chads Springhouse, and the 1720s Barns-Brinton House.

The society offers educational programs, lectures, research library access, and occasional recreational and educational events; the Center offers exhibits; the John Chads House offers tours; the Barns-Brinton House offers tours.

Posters: American Style

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An exhibit of 20th-century poster art relating to three subjects: commerce, propaganda, and patriotism. Presents approximately 135 posters, arranged into four thematic categories: "American Events"; "Designed to Sell"; "Advice to Americans"; and "Patriotic Persuasion." The selections--which concentrate "on major artists and images that have endured in our collective memory"--include 100-word biographical sketches of artists, short introductions for each category, and other pertinent background information. Special focus is directed to posters on the 1939 World's Fair, the war in Vietnam, the Black Panther movement, the moon landing, the motion picture Vertigo, the poem "Howl," Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address and Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. Audio files and photographs related to these topics are included. The site also contains a 4,000-word essay by curator Therese Heyman, discussing the history and concept of poster art, notes on the process of production, and a discussion of the impact of posters. A site of particular interest to art historians and scholars of popular culture.

Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry

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Photo, "Portrait of Emile Berliner in later years"
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Presents 108 sound recordings produced in the mid- to late 1890s by pioneer recording manufacturer and inventor Emile Berliner (1851-1929) as well as more than 400 additional items from the inventor's papers. Berliner, based in Washington, D.C., developed the microphone, the gramophone player, and the flat recording disc. The recordings on the site—each averaging about two minutes in length and available in Real Audio, MP3, and WAV formats—include Western music (band and orchestra, instrumentalists, popular music vocalists and vocal groups, classical and opera, and foreign language songs), spoken word selections (comedy, speeches, addresses), and a variety of ghost songs and dances of Native American peoples recorded by ethnologist James Mooney. Selections include Buffalo Bill Cody's "Sentiments on the Cuban Question," recorded in April 1898; John Philip Sousa's band; humorist Cal Stewart relating one of his popular "Uncle Josh" stories; and Victor Herbert's 22nd Regiment Band.

Most of the other items—articles, books, catalogs, clippings, correspondence, diaries, lectures, notes, pamphlets, patents, photographs, scrapbooks, and speeches—are from the 1870s to the early 1930s. Also includes a 23-title bibliography, links to eight related sites, a timeline, a family tree, and three informative essays (2,000-4,000 words) on Berliner's life, the history of the gramophone, and the Library's collection of Berliner recordings. A valuable site for those studying the beginnings of the recording industry, turn-of-the-century popular culture, and the milieu of American inventors in the period from the 1870s to the Great Depression.

Phillip Morris Advertising Archive

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Advertisement, "Proofing stock for four-color cover advertisements " 1967
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More than 55,000 color images of tobacco advertisements from litigated cases, dating back to 1909, are now available on this site, created as a stipulation of the Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco industry and various states' attorneys general. In addition, more than 26 million pages of documents concerning "research, manufacturing, marketing, advertising and sales of cigarettes, among other topics" are provided in linked sites to the four tobacco companies involved—Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Brown and Williamson—and to two industry organizations, the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research. Ads and documents can be accessed by date, brand name, title words, and persons mentioned, among other searchable fields. Images can be magnified and rotated. An important site for those studying the historical uses of advertising to promote smoking and those with a more general interest in some of the motifs in ad texts and images that have become part of 20th-century American life.

Oral History Digital Collection

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Image for Oral History Digital Collection
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These full-text first-person narratives present the voices of more than 2,000 people from northeast Ohio discussing issues significant to the state and the nation. These oral histories, collected since 1974, focus on a range of topics such as ethnic culture, including African American, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Romanian, and Russian, and industry, such as steel, pottery, brick, coal, and railroads.

Others discuss labor relations, including women in labor unions, wars (World War II, Vietnam, Gulf War), college life (including the shootings by National Guard troops at Kent State in 1970), the Holocaust, and religion. Subject access is available through more than 200 topics listed alphabetically.

Boot Hill Museum [KS]

Description

The Museum preserves the history of Dodge City and the Old West. Its Front Street buildings are reconstructions, representing Dodge City in 1876 and exhibiting hundreds of original artifacts. The various exhibits throughout the museum depict life in early Dodge City, and include a collection of over 200 original guns, a working print shop, and an extensive collection of drugstore items.

The museum offers exhibits, living history demonstrations, historically-inspired variety show entertainment, stagecoach rides, and chuckwagon-style dinners.