July 1942: United We Stand

Image
Cover, "Screen Romances," August 1942
Annotation

Presents an exhibit on the "United We Stand" campaign of July 1942, a collaboration of the National Publishers Association and the Treasury Department in which approximately 500 magazine publications carried images of the American flag on their covers. The intent of the campaign was to raise public morale and stimulate the sale of war bonds during a time of national anxiety concerning the course World War II had taken. The exhibit includes nearly 300 covers along with a photo-narrative that addresses the history of the campaign and selected aspects of cover design issues. The exhibit also makes an effort to draw parallels to the recent nationwide display of the flag following the September 11th attacks.

Magazine covers are searchable according to subject, title, and keyword. The site includes a 19-title bibliography. Useful for those studying propaganda efforts, the history of business-government wartime collaboration, homefront nationalism, and the history of the magazine publishing industry.

StoryCorps

Image
Photo, Bob Heft, Designer of  the 50 star flag, StoryCorps
Annotation

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.

Education by Design: Using Visual Aids

Image
Puzzle, Kindergarten cut-outs
Annotation

This site offers an online exhibit and an image database of more than 70 historic educational visual aids created for use by schools, libraries, and museums beginning in 1935 by the WPA's (Works Progress Administration) Museum Extension Project. The collection features items such as puppets, toys, architectural models, dioramas, jigsaw puzzles, handbooks and pamphlets, lantern slides, miniature furniture models, prints, and posters. Each item contains information about its size and place of production.

The collection is searchable by item and by state of manufacture and contains materials from Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Suitable for those interested in material culture or government-sponsored education projects.

Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition

Image
Image, "Who will pay the beer bill?,", American Issue Publishing Company
Annotation

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.

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.

Goldband Records: "Every One a Musical Treat"

Image
Cover, Recording, Swampland Jewels
Annotation

An exhibit devoted to the Goldband Recording Corporation, a Southern regional recording company, located in Lake Charles, LA. From its inception in the mid-1940s, Goldband produced recordings in "some of the South's most important and distinctive musical styles and sounds, including Cajun, zydeco, blues, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and swamp pop."

The site includes 23 selections in both streaming MP3 and Real Audio formats; short biographical notes of 100–200 words in length on 24 artists who recorded at Goldband studio—including Freddie Fender and Dolly Parton at age 13; 32 photographs; and a 1,600-word essay on musical genres.

Provides three links to related sites, a 10-title bibliography, and an inventory of the full collection of corporate materials available at the UNC Library. Valuable for those studying Southern culture, music history, and postwar American popular culture.

Posters: American Style

Annotation

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

Image
Photo, "Portrait of Emile Berliner in later years"
Annotation

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.