Built in 1859 for George Hearst, a mining superintendent during the California gold rush, the house served as a mining office. The house was later bought by John Mackay, an Irish-American whose mining company found the largest silver mines in North America in the early 1870's.
Tours of the house are offered, but no specific educational programs are available for field trips.
The Nevada State Museum presents Nevada history. Exhibit topics include the Carson City mint, geology, Native American life, and Columbian mammoths.
Collection highlights include a 19th-century coin press, mammoth fossils, slot machines by designer Charles August Fey, the USS Nevada silver service, and a 1902 Basque sheepherder's wagon. The museum includes the Marjorie Russell Clothing and Textile Research Center, which preserves more than 10,000 artifacts.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, 90-minute guided hands-on student tours, and unguided student tours. Areas of emphasis available for student tours are geology, Native American culture, Nevada history, and botany and zoology. Appointments are required for all tours. The textile research center offers programs on costume history, as well as research library access. Appointments are required for library access. The website offers 14 virtual exhibits.
In 1864, Ben Holladay was awarded a contract to deliver mail from Salt Lake City to Walla Walla, WA. Rock Creek became a "home station," where stage drivers and attendants lived while they were off-duty and where passengers could buy a meal or a night's lodging. The original station consisted of a lava-rock building that served as a hotel and barn. In 1865 a store was built at the site. A small community grew up around the business, which also became a social center.
The site offers tours.
This well-designed website, companion to the PBS documentary, offers a wide variety of secondary material on the Carter presidency. "People and Places" offers short profiles of Carter, his wife Rosalynn, his brother Billy, Carter's White House staff (collectively known as "The Georgia Mafia"), Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O_Neill, and Vice-President Walter Mondale.
It also offers short essays on key events of Carter's presidency, including the election of 1976, the Egyptian-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter's July 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" speech, and the election of 1980. Many of the essays link to special features, such as the extensive media coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis and the text of the "Crisis of Confidence" speech. "Teacher's Guide" offers nine suggestions for classroom learning activities in four categories: economics, civics, history, and geography. The site also includes a detailed chronology of Carter's life and a small photo gallery with 16 images. This site provides a useful overview of Carter's life and the political and diplomatic history of his presidency.
In February 1971 to July 1973, President Richard Nixon secretly began recording phone conversations and meetings, compiling thousands of hours of tape. Created in 2007 by a Texas A&M University history professor, this website intends to provide "the most complete digitized Nixon tape collection in existence."
At present, only a fraction of the recordings are available. Visitors may listen to MP3 versions of over 500 conversations organized by primary conversation participant; 29 conversations organized by topic themes; and more than 2,000 hours of conversations organized by the date of their release to the general public.
Though the site promises that all recordings will eventually be accompanied by full transcripts, accompanying material is spotty. Some recordings are accompanied by corresponding entries from the presidential daily diary, some by general outlines of the recording's topics, and a handful by full transcripts. The recordings vary in quality, from fully audible to inaudibly faint or noise-obscured.
The website is not searchable (the search engine on the home page searches the web at large). As it stands, it may be useful to educators as a casual introduction to the recordings for students, but locating specific content (to accompany lesson plans or complement events being taught in class) would require significant time.
What was Ronald Reagan's "supply side" economic policy?
Reagan campaigned on the promise to cut taxes and reduce the size of government. He believed that growing business would have a beneficial effect on the entire economy, or, as he put it, "A rising tide lifts all boats."
When he became President in 1981, the main economic problem he faced was a high rate of inflation, or, as he described it, "too many dollars chasing too few goods." The "supply side" policy he adopted was to stimulate the non-government portion of the economy, which was the goods-producing portion, while not trying to solve the problem simply by reducing the money supply, the traditional way for the government to combat inflation. Reagan meant to allow business to expand and lower consumer prices and consequently lower unemployment and increase the growth of wealth in the private sector. The theoretical means to reach that goal were:
1. Reduce the growth of government entitlement programs.
2. Reduce government discretionary spending, which meant shrinking government agencies.
3. Reduce the public debt by cutting deficit spending and tightening the money supply, which was meant to strengthen the dollar and reduce inflation. Having the Federal Reserve tighten the money supply was not, strictly speaking, a "supply-side" technique, however.
4. Reduce the cost of doing business by lowering capital gains taxes, thereby increasing manufacturing output (the "supply" in "supply side").
5. Increase the amount of money in the hands of consumers by lowering income taxes.
6. Reduce the cost of doing business by reducing regulation, which was also intended to promote business competition, ultimately lowering consumer costs.
7. Reduce or eliminate government guarantees, subsidies, and price supports, which was meant to allow the free market to determine the cost of doing business and businesses to thrive or fail without interference.
In practice, however, not all of this occurred. Some of this was impossible to achieve for political reasons and some of it did not produce the anticipated effects.
The rate of inflation was cut in half. But economists disagree about how much to attribute that to Reagan's policies and how much to attribute it to other causes, such as the lessening of oil prices.
Also, total government revenues did increase, despite the fact that the top marginal rate of tax in the U.S. fell from 70% to 28%, beginning with the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut of 1981. Some "supply-siders," proposing what their opponents called "Voodoo economics," hoped that cutting taxes drastically would, in and of itself, increase the government's revenues by more than the amount it would lose from the rate reduction. Economists generally agree that that did not happen and attribute some or most of the rise in government revenue after the era's tax cuts to other causes.
Critics also point out that the government's budget deficit rose dramatically during Reagan's term in office. The government's overall discretionary spending was cut, but defense spending grew, as did non-discretionary spending, such as for Social Security. Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, a "supply-sider" in general, believed that just cutting tax rates would not help balance the government's books, and that it was at least as important to cut government expenditures, such as agricultural subsidies, Social Security payments, and even the defense budget. He was disappointed that these cuts were politically impossible to make.
David Stockman. The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
William Greider. "The Education of David Stockman," The Atlantic (December 1981).
Paul Krugman. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Experience. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Lawrence Lindsey. The Growth Experiment: How the New Tax Policy is Transforming the U.S. Economy. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
"Founded in 1824 in Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is one of the oldest historical societies in the United States and holds many national treasures. The Society's building, designed by Addison Hutton and listed on the City of Philadelphia's Register of Historical Places, houses some 600,000 printed items and over 19 million manuscript and graphic items." The Society's library is one of the preeminent libraries in the nation, housing extensive manuscript collections from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Finally, the Historical Society has paired with Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania through a Strategic Alliance Agreement, and the Society has become "a chief center for the documentation and study of the ethnic communities and immigrant experiences."
The site offers an online catalog, 10 online manuscript collections, an online event calendar, exhibit information along with nine online exhibits, purchasing information for the society's publications, and educational resources, including lesson plans, readings, primary sources, online exhibits, and information on educational workshops.
A 28-page study, including charts, of 1960 census data compiled according to residence areas, or "tracts," within the cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Also provides census data for 1940 and 1950 with regard to Chicago and Detroit. Offers raw data and percentage computations on total population of tracts, number of males and females, African-American ethnicity, foreign origin, age, marital status, income level, education, units of substandard housing, rent amounts, employment figures, and salary levels. Also provides medical-related data, such as numbers of hospitals, hospital beds, pharmacists, and types of physicians in each tract. Of use for those studying mid-20th-century urban history. See "History Matters" entry Data and Program Library Service: Online Data Archive for information on other social science studies available at this site.
The Museum presents visitors with exhibits brimming with art and artifacts; contemporary, interactive areas for children and adults; an historic shipyard with five of the original 19th-century buildings; a Victorian-era shipyard owner's home; an active waterfront; and a life-size sculptural representation of the largest wooden sailing vessel ever built.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, boat cruises, classes, educational programs, research library access, and educational and recreational events.
Dr. Kent Germany, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, argues that the rise of suburbs and the decline of the inner city factored into the larger struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s and set up the conditions exposed by Hurricane Katrina.