Take Me Out To The Ball Game: 100 Years of Musical History

Description

This Electronic Field Trip takes a look at the song, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," written by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer a century ago. Today, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is synonymous with a baseball game's seventh-inning stretch, but the song was originally written to be performed on home pianos and the vaudeville stage.

Broadcast from Brooklyn, NY, this presentation explores not only the history of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", but also the influence of various musical styles of the past 100 years from vaudeville and swing to rock and hip hop.

Unpublished, as the page no longer exists.

Worklore: Brooklyn Workers Speak

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Photo, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Construction Workers, 1947
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This site explores the work lives of Brooklynites (historic and present) as they made their living in the borough. The site has four main sections: Confronting Racial Bias documents discrimination in the workplace; Women Breaking Barriers examines the ways in which women's work roles changed over the decades; Seeking a Better Life takes a look at the issues facing new immigrants; and Changes in the Workplace discusses challenges such as unemployment and job displacement.

Each section contains an approximately 2,000-word article on its respective topic, photographs, and audio files of people speaking about their various vocations. The site also includes eight help wanted advertisements from the 1850s, 1860s, 1920s, and 1930s.

Visitors should not miss the interactive feature Can You Make Ends Meet?, where they can pick one of four vocations, and see if they can stretch their salary out to adequately include housing, transportation, and entertainment.

Telling Your Story allows visitors to share their own recollections of Brooklyn life. The site includes few primary sources, but the personal stories of Brooklyn workers may be useful to students, teachers, or researchers.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence: History & Social Studies

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Portrait, George Washington
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This megasite brings together resources for teaching U.S. and world history from the far corners of the web. Most of these websites boast large collections of primary sources from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Archives and Records Administration, and prominent universities. There are more than 600 websites listed for U.S. history alone, divided by time period and topic: Business & Work, Ethnic Groups, Famous People, Government, Movements, States & Regions, Wars, and Other Social Studies. While most of these websites are either primary source archives (for example, History of the American West, 1860-1920) or virtual exhibits, many offer lesson plans and ready-made student activities, such as EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A good place to begin is the (Subject Map), which lists resources by sub-topic, including African Americans (67 resources), Women's History (37 resources), and Natural Disasters (16 resources). Each resource is accompanied by a brief annotation that facilitates quick browsing.

New Jersey Public Records and Archives

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Photo, "Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., aged 1 year," c. 1931
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For historians researching New Jersey, this site's main interest will be its "state archives." "Catalog" provides access to nearly 200 pre-established searches on the archive's manuscript series, genealogical holdings, business and corporate records, cultural resources, and maps. Topics include military conflicts, society and economics, transportation, public works agencies, and photographic collections, as well as state, county, municipal, and federal government records. The other major feature consists of eight image collections with themes that include New Jersey Civil War soldiers, Spanish-American War Infantry Officers, Spanish-American War Naval Officers, Gettysburg Monuments, and views of the Morris Canal. The archives site also includes a searchable index of New Jersey Supreme Court cases, a transcription of New Jersey's 1776 constitution, and a table summarizing the holdings of the state archives. This site is a useful aid for researching the history and culture of New Jersey.

The Making of Modern Michigan

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Photo, Man with war bond ticket. . . , 1943, The Making of Modern Michigan
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This archive affords access to the local history material and collections in more than 45 Michigan libraries, including photographs, family papers, oral histories, public reports, notices, and documents. More than 3,000 items are available, on a wide range of subjects that include architecture, automobiles, churches, cities and towns, commerce and business, factories and industry, families, farming, geography and landscapes, housing, schools, and sports and recreation. The time period of the material is primarily from the post-Civil War era to the early 20th century. The material can be browsed by subject or institution and a keyword search is also available. A useful site for researching the cultural history of Michigan and its localities.

The Great Migration

Description

This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, at the outbreak of World War I, industries in the north opened employment to African Americans. They left the south in record numbers for jobs in the north.

This feature is no longer available.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Description

The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York history until 9/11. David Von Drehle, the author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, discusses the fire in this segment from the NBC Today Show.

This feature is no longer available.

Old West Durham Neighborhood Association

Description

"We are a group of neighborhood residents working together to strengthen the sense of community in Old West Durham and to preserve and enhance the quality of life in OWD. Our neighborhood stretches from Broad Street west to Hillandale Road and from Englewood Avenue south to the Durham Freeway. The area around Erwin Mills, Ninth Street and the old mill village is listed on the National Register of Historic Districts."

The site offers information about the neighborhood.

Back to the Future . . .

Quiz Webform ID
22414
date_published
Teaser

In the year 1900, what did Americans think the next century would bring? Did they make the following predictions?

quiz_instructions

In addition to looking to the past to understand our society, we also look to the future. In 1900, newspapers and magazines printed predictions for the turn of the 21st century. Decide, true or false, whether each of the following was predicted in 1900.

Quiz Answer

1. [The American] will live 50 years instead of 35 as at present—for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.

True. In the 20th century, transportation and sanitation advances led to the rise of developments around cities. Streetcars, trains, and, later, highways made it possible for workers to commute to urban centers for work and to travel outside of the city for their home life. Suburb development grew exponentially after World War II with the rapid spread of mass-produced housing such as Levittown.

2. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides.

True. Several aspects of this prediction came true, including the move to aircraft as a central defensive and offensive weapon. Later in the 20th century, the U.S. government spent significant resources on the research and development of a national missile defense system under the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), established in 1984.

3. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient although they will not hear the crowds cheer or the guns of a distant battle as they boom.

False. In its actual form, this prediction foresaw the ability to see "live" events across the globe and also predicted the ability to hear events as they happened: "The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move".

4. The owner of a [flying] machine, or even the man who did not own one, by patronizing the express lines, could live 50 miles away and yet do business in the city day by day, going by air line to his home each night.

False. Theodore Waters of the New York Herald actually predicted that workers could easily commute 500 miles to work each day, flying home each night, a further visualization of transportation innovation as well as of the relationship between work and home as the notion of suburbs emerged.

5. Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth's hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper.

True. Well into the 1800s, Americans met their needs by harvesting energy and materials from plants, animals, rivers, and wind. By the 1830s, though, large-scale coal extraction had begun in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and beyond. By the 1910s, more than 750,000 coal miners dug and blasted upwards of 550 million tons of coal a year. Fossil fuels changed daily life in America, from travel to shopping, daily life to leisure. America's industrial ascendancy, however, caused problems for humans and the environment and in 2009, the threat of diminishing supplies is a serious concern.

6. Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed.

True. In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest—both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick published books, articles, and pamphlets on scientific management in the home with a focus on greater efficiency, from cooking to washing dishes. This plan, in some ways predictive of the late 20th-century shift to pre-cooked meals in stores and restaurants, likely drew on this emerging ideology.

7. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it.

True. X-rays were first identified in the late 19th century, but were not widely used for medical research and treatment in 1900 when this prediction was written. Since 2005, X-rays were listed as a carcinogenic by the U.S. government. The author likely would not have envisioned the 21st-century field of endoscopy that allows medical professionals to see and photograph many parts of the body through a small tube.

For more information

Contemporary understandings, issues, and conflicts lay behind the predictions of the past, as they do behind today's.

Learn about one of the first planned suburban communities—Levittown, NY—at Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb, or try the website of the Levittown Historical Society and Museum.

For more on the development and strife in the coal industry as it grew, try Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, from Harvard University Press. Though it focuses on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, it looks at coal as a coming-together point for industry, class, nature, and the human manufactured world; for more on the Massacre, try the Colorado Coal Field War Project, which provides an overview, photographs, lesson plans, and other materials on the Massacre and the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913 through 1914.

Read a 1912 article by Ladies Home Journal editor Christine Frederick on the efficient, scientific method for washing dishes or an excerpt from her 1913 guide The New Housekeeping, at History Matters. Cornell University's Home Economics Archive also provides a collection of books and journals on the reimagining of domestic life between 1850 and 1950.

And do you have any eager readers in your classes? The young-adult-level memoir Cheaper by the Dozen lets students (and casual readers) into life growing up with Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868-1924), advocate of scientific household management and motion study in the same years as Christine Frederick. Warm, humorous, and personal, the book, written by two of Gilbreth's children, memorializes a time period and a very unique family.

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