Kentuckiana Digital Library

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Image for Kentuckiana Digital Library
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These historical materials come from 15 Kentucky colleges, universities, libraries, and historical societies. There are nearly 8,000 photographs; 95 full-text books, manuscripts, and journals from 1784 to 1971; 94 oral histories; 78 issues of Mountain Life and Work from 1925-62; and 22 issues of Works Progress Administration in Kentucky: Narrative Reports.

Photographs include collections by Russell Lee, who documented health conditions resulting from coal industry practices; Roy Stryker, head of the New Deal Farm Security Administration photographic section; and others that provide images of cities, towns, schools, camps, and disappearing cultures. Oral histories address Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed, Senator John Sherman Cooper, the Frontier Nursing Service, veterans, fiddlers, and the transition from farming to an industrial economy. Texts include Civil War diaries, religious tracts, speeches, correspondence, and scrapbooks. Documents cover a range of topics, including colonization societies, civil rights, education, railroads, feuding, the Kentucky Derby, Daniel Boone, and a personal recollection of Abraham Lincoln.

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.

Civil War Letters of Galutia York

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Photo, Envelope, Civil War Letters of Galutia York
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Features 48 letters from Galutia York, a 19-year-old Union soldier from an upstate New York farm family. The letters are directed to family members, and cover the period from August 1862 to May 1863, when York died from disease. The site also includes a letter from a private in York's company and one from his captain, both to York's family expressing their condolences.

Arranged chronologically, the transcriptions, formatted like the actual letters, provide brief summaries and supplementary materials on persons and places mentioned in the letters, including three photographs, a map, and two other images. The site also gives facsimile reproductions of a partial letter and an envelope, and links to a site for the 114th New York State Volunteer Infantry Archives. Valuable for those interested in the experiences of ordinary soldiers during wartime.

Brooklyn in the Civil War

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Photo, Private Charles Mitchell, Matthew Brady, c. 1862
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This website is focused on exploring and teaching the history of Brooklyn and Brooklyn's people during the Civil War through primary sources, essays, and instructional materials. More than 100 primary sources focus on Brooklyn's role in the Civil War, including letters, maps, newspaper articles, photographs, and illustrations. Additionally, the document collection can be explored through four thematic presentations on soldiers, women, slavery, and daily life. Each presentation features a short introduction and each document is accompanied by a brief description and links to related material.

Lesson plans, available as word or .pdf documents include 11 on soldiers, six on slavery, eight on women, and nine on daily life. There are also links to the Brooklyn Public Library's lists of books and related websites, resources for children, and resources for teenagers. An interactive map and timeline are also available. A useful resource for those teaching or researching Brooklyn, NY, or northern states during the Civil War.

Typical in the 1930s

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Leathers family of Clarendon, Texas
Question

Who was the Typical American Family of the 1930s?

Answer

The Leathers family of Clarendon, Texas.

At least that was the conclusion of a panel of judges enlisted by the New York World’s Fair Corporation to make the choice out of forty-six families who had been selected by local newspapers across the United States as “typical” in their area. The contest was a promotional effort by the World’s Fair, which was in its second season. As research by Jon Zachman shows, the families chosen hardly represented a cross-section of America. None, for example, were African Americans; the largest group of winners by far were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Moreover, the ground rules of the contest mandated a very traditional notion of “family” as a nuclear family with two parents, headed by a male breadwinner.

Whatever the obvious biases of the contest and the selection process, the quest for the “average family” was itself quite representative of 1930s American culture. As historian Warren Susman points out, the thirties were the heyday of the notion of “the people,” which suggested “that a basic unity underpinned the social and culture structure of America.” Out of the quest for “the people”—the single voice that united American society—came the birth of “the concept of the average,” what Susman calls “a kind of statistical accounting of the people seen as a unit.” Whereas American culture had previously venerated individualism, it now celebrated the Average American and the Average American Family. This search for the average American reflects a deeply conservative impulse within a decade that is often mistakenly seen as largely radical—a “red decade,” as it is sometimes called.

And what were the “average” Leathers like? Mr. Leathers was a thirty-nine-year-old stock farmer; Mrs. Leathers was a thirty-eight-year-old housewife. Both were Baptists of English descent. Their teenage son, Johnny, was president of the 4-H Club; their sixteen-year-old daughter, Margaret Jean, belonged to the Pep Squad as well as the Home Making and Natural Music clubs. Mr. Leathers’s ambition was “to become a more useful citizen and raise more and better Hereford cattle.” His wife wanted “to give my children the very best education possible and teach them to be good American citizens.” At the end of a decade of great social turmoil, what could be more reassuring than to consider the Leathers as the average American family.

Bibliography

Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. Pantheon Books, 1984.

Jon B. Zachman, “The Typical American Family during the Great Depression,”unpublished paper, George Mason University, 1996.

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.

San Luis Obispo County Historical Society, Museum, and the Dallidet Adobe [CA]

Description

The San Luis Obispo County Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of San Luis Obispo County, California. To this end, the society operates the Historical Museum and the Dallidet Adobe. The museum, housed within the circa 1905 Carnegie Library building, offers exhibits of local historical interest. The Dallidet Adobe is decorated with furnishings which once belonged to the Dallidet family. The grounds include an arbor and Mediterranean garden.

The museum offers exhibits, a children's activity room, student tours, research rooms, and research assistance. The Dallidet Adobe offers gardens and school tours. Reservations are required for school tours.

The Album in the Age of Photography

Description

Video background from The Library of Congress Webcasts site:

"As photography became an increasingly accessible medium in the 20th century, the popularity of the photographic album exploded, yielding a wonderful range of objects made for varying purposes—to memorialize, document (officially or unofficially), promote or educate and sometimes simply to channel creative energy. Verna Posever Curtis traces the rise of the album from the turn of the last century to the present day."

Williamson Museum [TX]

Description

The Williamson Museum presents the history of Williamson County, Texas. Exhibits address Swedish immigration, an overview of 13,000 years of local history, cowboys, and local communities and towns.

The museum offers exhibits, group tours of the museum, group walking tours of the Courthouse Square, guided tours of the Williamson County Courthouse, museum overnights, a summer camp, hands-on activities, traveling trunks, and hands-on outreach presentations for students. School tours are designed to meet state curricula for second through seventh grade, and must be scheduled at least two weeks in advance. The outreach presentations are designed for kindergarten through second grade. The traveling trunks are designed for third through seventh grade; and topics include pioneer life, the Chisholm Trail, life as a cowboy, Swedish immigrants, and archaeology. The website offers historic images.