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.

American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning

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This site introduces the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML), an organization located at the City University of New York (CUNY) that "seeks to revitalize interest in history by challenging the traditional ways that people learn about the past," with a particular emphasis on labor history and social history. The site includes information about ASHP/CML books, documentary films, CD-ROMs, Internet projects, and educational programs, as well as five articles by staff members and numerous links to history resources.

"Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City" presents selected photographs, illustrations, and accompanying short explanatory texts intended for use with a ASHP/CML documentary of the same name. Among the Project's current endeavors is "an intellectual and spatial exploration of P. T. Barnum's American Museum," entitled The Lost Museum, which burned down under mysterious circumstances in 1865. With the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, ASHP/CML produces History Matters.

Virginia Military Institute Museum

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The Virginia Military Institute Museum, located in the 1916 Jackson Memorial Hall on the Institute's campus, displays artifacts from its historical collection to chronicle the creation and development of the Virginia Military Institute and the contributions of its alumni to history.

The museum offers exhibits, guided tours for school groups, and research library access by appointment.

School Days: A History of Public Education

Description

According to Backstory:

In 1983, the Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, comparing low educational standards to a kind of warfare against youth. But hand-wringing over our school system is an American perennial, going all the way back to the Founding. In this episode, the History Guys explore the origins of public education, and ask whether we set ourselves up for disappointment by expecting so much from our schools. Guests include historian Jon Zimmerman and Alicia Lugo, who taught in segregated schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, and went on to run the city’s school board.

Museum Center at 5ive Points [TN]

Description

The Museum Center at 5ive Points presents the sociocultural history of Southeast Tennessee's Ocoee District. The museum's permanent exhibit discusses local Cherokee and other Native American life, the Trail of Tears and settlement, antebellum life, industry and commerce, the World War I and II eras, and the 1996 Olympics. Seven fictional living history characters give the exhibits a personal tone.

The center offers exhibits, a summer art camp, thematic school tours, homeschool programs, traveling trunks, and 50-minute interactive outreach programs.
Reservations are required for groups of 12 or more.

Historic Jefferson College [MS]

Description

In 1817, Historic Jefferson College became the first institute of higher education in Mississipii, although it had served as a preparatory school since 1811. Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederacy, attended class at this institution. In 1864, the school was temporarily closed as a result of the Civil War. After reopening in 1866, it would once again serve as a preparatory school, rather than a college. Sights include a restored dormitory room, kitchen buildings, and the student dining room.

The college offers period rooms, exhibits, self-guided tours, summer camps, and a nature trail.

Stranahan House [FL]

Description

The Stranahan House was originally built in 1901 as a trading post for the Seminole and area settlers. Shortly thereafter, the structure was used as a post office, town hall, and community center. Between 1906 and 1971, the site served as the residence of Frank and Ivy Stranahan. Frank was postmaster and a banker and businessman, while Ivy taught. The home has been restored to a 1913 through 1915 appearance, and is furnished accordingly.

The house offers period rooms, one-hour guided tours, educational programs for students, an outreach program for students, guided group tours, and guided Scout tours. Group tours are by advance notice. The website offers student activities.

History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web

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Providing a host of resources on U.S. history survey, the three main features are: WWW.History, Many Pasts, and Making Sense of Evidence.

WWW.History provides an annotated guide to more than 1,000 high-quality websites covering all of U.S. history. Users can browse websites by time period or topic and can search by keyword.

Many Pasts offers more than 1,000 primary sources in text, image, and audio, from an exchange between Powhatan and Captain John Smith to comments by the director of the Arab American Family Support Center in Brooklyn after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Making Sense of Evidence offers eight guides with interactive exercises designed to help students learn to analyze various kinds of primary sources, including maps, early film, oral history, and popular song. These guides offer questions to ask and provide examples of how to analyze kinds of evidence. There are also eight multimedia modules that model strategies for analyzing primary sources, including political cartoons, blues, and abolitionist speeches.

Primary Sources as Windows into the Past

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This 33-second student think-aloud shows a high school student reading the introduction to an excerpt from a 1925 biology textbook. During the video, she expresses excitement about the opportunity to find an answer to a question she asked about how biology had been taught in the 1920s. She also expresses enthusiasm about having access to a primary source—"the actual one," as she calls it. This video shows how using primary sources can engage and intrigue students, and is accompanied by a written commentary. Find the document the student reads here.