From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of the American West and the American Indian at the University of Arkansas, describes how guns and horses changed Native American culture, while European diseases ravaged the indigenous people of the New World who had no inherent immunity to them.
This installment of PBS's American Experience series narrates the rise and fall of Dr. Walter Freeman, inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy, and the practice of lobotomy as a whole. It looks at how this procedure became popularly accepted and then denounced as horrific and barbaric.
Unfortunately, this content is no longer free to the public; however, PBS offers a short preview video and options to purchase a full copy of the documentary.
The Ad Council has been producing public service announcements attempting to affect change in society and serve the public interest for nearly 70 years. The campaigns take the form of print, radio, and television advertisements. They have run the spectrum of societal issues, from "Rosie the Riveter" and the campaign to place women in war jobs to contemporary ads related to predatory lending. The Ad Council has brought us memorable characters like Smokey Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and Vince and Larry (the two crash test dummies who convinced us to wear seat belts). But what do these public advertising campaigns say about America? How can we use these ad campaigns to better understand U.S. history?
Through analyzing the ads we can isolate time periods in history and understand what were believed to be the most pressing societal issues of the time. These campaigns tried to decrease behaviors that were believed to lead to social problems or promote behaviors that would lead to a better society. Thus, in seeking to understand the advertisements, we can help students uncover the contemporaneous sociology of the ad campaign.
You can begin by exploring the Ad Council's Historic Campaigns that highlight some of the more notable campaigns in the last 70 years. Each campaign is complete with background information and some have links to PSA videos associated with the campaign. An even more complete retrospective of past advertising campaigns is maintained by the Advertising Educational Foundation and can be accessed here.
I have found the site particularly useful in helping students understand more recent history. For instance, few would disagree that, socially, the 1980s were rocked by the AIDS epidemic. The site highlights PSAs to prevent the spread of AIDS, which represent a dramatic shift in societal norms with the public call for condom use. The ads on crime prevention featuring McGruff the Crime Dog also help illuminate the 1980s. These ads coincide with America's "war on drugs" and emphasis on law and order during the 1980s. 1970s culture was epitomized by environmental awareness featuring Ad Council PSAs showing Native Americans distraught to find their territory littered. These ads and more can be found in the Historic Campaigns section.
Teaching with advertisements as primary sources is beneficial in two ways. One, students are exposed to yet another example of primary sources that come with their own unique set of historical questions. Two, by learning how to unpack the intent of advertisements on people of the past, students are more apt to be able to recognize advertising manipulation in the present. The Ad Council dedicates a page of resources for educators that includes useful links and frequently asked questions. These pages also identify current advertising campaigns, which might be useful for students to identify some of the important topics of today compared to the important issues they find in earlier decades.
Before having students analyze advertisements as primary sources, it is important to model for students how advertisements should be read. Students should also be made aware of the strengths and limitations of using advertisements to understand the past. An excellent overview of these strengths and weaknesses can be found on page 11 of this guide to primary sources, from the Smithsonian's History Explorer, along with questions to guide students in analyzing advertisements.
A natural fit to teaching U.S. history through public service announcements would be to have students create their own PSAs. Students could be given a list of pertinent social issues to a particular time period or could be asked to research important topics on their own. Students could write a script and use a pocket camcorder to record their PSA. Editing could be done using iMovie, Windows MovieMaker, or any number of free online video editing tools. The purpose of the assignment is to help students understand the changing nature of social issues in the United States.
Another idea is to have students research the effectiveness of given historic campaigns. The Ad Council maintains a database of reports and figures related to the success of various PSAs. This is a condensed version highlighting the impact of the Ad Council's more famous campaigns. The purpose here is to help students see how effective advertising not only convinces people to buy products, but also can convince people to change behavior for the common good.
The Ad Council works to address the most significant social issues of the day. With that purpose, the Ad Council offers a unique look into making sense of our social past by revealing important issues of the time. Advertisements offer students an opportunity to interpret an overlooked type of primary source of the past and establish connections to the present.
Looking for more guidelines on using ads in the classroom? Historian Daniel Pope helps you make sense of advertisements, and historian Roger Horowitz analyzes historical documents behind 1950s potato chip advertising campaigns. This syllabus from a university history course also walks you through the steps of analyzing an ad.
Search our Website Reviews using the keyword "advertisement" for reviews of more than 200 websites featuring archived advertisements.
Kenneth Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, describes the ways in which 19th-century cities evolved from disorganized, unregulated communities into modern cities focusing on order, safety, and public health. Professor Jackson looks at the motivations behind these developments as well as implementation strategies.
Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter and Columbia University Provost Alan Brinkley discuss the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the subject of Alter's recent book, The Defining Moment: FDR’s First Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. The book contends that the first 100 days were not only the beginning of the New Deal, but also "the climax to a piece of political theater," which had begun years earlier when Roosevelt overcame polio and public perceptions of him as an elitist lightweight.
The history of the eugenics movement in the United States, from its inception in the decades following the Civil War through its height in the first few decades of the 20th century, is traced on this website. As we move into the age of genetics, this movement, that sought to filter "bad" traits from the human population, becomes increasingly important to understand.
The movement's history is told through a narrative divided into eight themes, including social and scientific origins, research methods and traits studied, flaws in these methods, ways in which the movement was popularized, immigration restriction, and marriage and sterilization laws. Each narrative is accompanied by roughly 10 primary sources—reports, articles, charts, legal documents, and photographs. These materials provide a succinct introduction to eugenics in the U.S.
In addition to the narratives, visitors can search or browse the Image Archive, featuring more than 2,000 primary sources, including documents, artwork, photographs, and more. Visitors may browse by topic, object type, time period, or the archive sources' originals are held by, or search by keyword or ID number. Note that primary sources cannot be downloaded from the Flash version of the Archive, though they can be from the HTML version of the site.
Health and healthcare are big news in the present-day U.S. Pick up any newspaper, and you'll find articles on aging, obesity, medical research, food quality—or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's health care statute recently upheld in the Supreme Court. As emotions and opinions on health continue to fly in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, your students may have questions about the history of health in the U.S.
Point them toward our History Quiz Archive! Our quizzes on health can answer some questions—and raise others:
For primary sources on medical science, public health, disease, and more, browse our reviews of more than 80 websites featuring resources on the history of health and medicine.
I recently read that nasal snuff was initially popular because it allowed one to drown out unpleasant smells of people not bathing and of piled up sewage. Is it true that a few hundred years ago cities stank all the time?
The claim about snuff is doubtful, or at least exaggerated, but yes, cities did often stink. A modern urban dweller, traveling back in time, but remaining in the same place, might well be bowled over by the olfactory experience.
In 1494, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his 2nd voyage noted that the Indians they encountered used tobacco in two ways. The first was by smoking it through a cane pipe, the end of which they placed into their mouths. The second was by inhaling powdered tobacco through the pipe directly into their noses—“which purges them very much,” according to the friar. The European explorers took up both practices, of smoking and snuffing, and spread them simultaneously worldwide.
An anonymous poem published in London in Read’s Weekly Journal in 1761, entitled, “Six Reasons for Taking a Pinch of Snuff,” begins with the verse: “When strong perfumes, and noisome scents,/ The suf’fring nose invade,/ Snuff, best of Indian weeds, presents/ Its salutary aid.”
Popular medical theory of the day attributed many diseases to ill winds or “miasmas” of various kinds, so good odors in the nose, introduced by way of perfumed handkerchiefs, powdered wigs, incensed smoke, or scented snuff, were thought to be able to block or counter illnesses.
Despite this, the popularity of snuff was not due solely, or even primarily, to its usefulness in drowning out unpleasant smells. Users of the 17th and 18th century waxed particularly poetic about snuff’s own palette of scents, its ability to promote fellowship and sociability among friends and strangers, and the physiological effects consequent upon imbibing nicotine, but without the smoke.
Personal cleanliness has long been seen as a social virtue, as a way to be polite to others. Consequently, failure in this has been regarded as an offense against others. Steps toward cleanliness were also seen as steps toward gentility, as progressive steps advancing in social class, as distinguishing oneself from the lower classes. Until fairly recently, in urban America, washing one’s body, like washing one’s clothes, has been more fastidiously attended to the higher up the scale of social class in which one has found oneself. Keeping oneself and one's living space clean is easier, too, if one can hire servants to do the chores, and if one does not engage in heavy physical labor in order to make a living, and if one can afford a place to live that has indoor plumbing.
The considerable animus against immigrants that was especially strong in the 19th century led to a presumption that odorlessness would be one desired outcome of immigrants' assimilation into American society. The elimination of body odor was part of that, it also referred to exotic perfumes, as well as the smells of ethnic cuisine, especially its characteristic spices and aromatic vegetables, in various city neighborhoods.
The raft of related social reform movements that began in the U.S. at the beginning of the 19th century included hygiene, considering cleanliness as a kind of moral virtue, embodying the cleanliness of the soul, and purifying the body politic. The emission of body odors signaled a moral lapse, an assault on others’ privacy and personal space. The antidote was cold water, applied liberally to the system, inside and outside. In the 20th century, widespread military service introduced people to an enforced regimen of soap and water that they continued when they returned to civilian life.
Changing over time as well has been the conventional judgment of whether the larger society has the right or obligation to demand personal cleanliness, to purify those who offend against the nose, and even to exclude them from public places. Advertising for personal hygiene products demonstrates that the public was progressively sensitized, from about 1920 to 1960, to more stringent social stigmas attached to emitting body odors of various kinds, most especially underarm odor and bad breath. The basic message was that if you had such odors, you had no hope of landing a desirable mate.
City smells used to be a lot more pungent than they are today. Humans shared their space with populations of horses, pigs, cows, and chickens. Visitors to Cincinnati in the early 1800s, for example, often wrote about the omnipresence of semi-feral pigs that wandered through the streets, adding to the odor of the enormous pork processing industry of the city.
It was not until the early 19th century that many people had the notion that public cleanliness—as a measure against garbage in the street, offal, noxious effluvia from industrial processes going on right in the midst of the city, and polluting smoke—was something that civil authorities should attempt to police. This resulted in street paving, public water supplies to individual dwellings, municipal garbage collection, waste treatment plants, and industrial zoning regulations.
Nevertheless, civil authorities did not consider odor to be the prime offender to public peace. Metropolitan municipalities in the 19th century were spurred to clean up their cities in order to combat the spread of disease, especially at first in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New Orleans. These cities were periodically afflicted by cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhoid. The abatement of odors was a byproduct, rather than a goal, of these efforts.
Virginia Sarah Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Jim Drobnick, editor, The Smell Culture Reader. New York: Berg, 2006.
E. R. Billings, Tobacco: Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce, with an account of its various modes of use, from its first discovery until now. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1875.
The National Archives has created this vast database of electronic records (85 million records on the date visited) from federal agencies and from collections of donated historical materials. Search and browse functions extend throughout the database, and the collection can also be browsed by pre-set subject categories or by time spans. All records are electronic texts. There are no scanned images of documents, photographs, or microfilm.
A very small sampling of the records: Ships and passengers who arrived in New York during the Irish Potato Famine, 18461851; Red Cross records of WW2 Allied POWs; descriptive indexes of flood photographs from FEMA (19892004); helicopter air sorties flown in Vietnam (19701975); documentation from the Historic American Buildings Survey (19331997); and records about worker-initiated strikes and employed-initiated lockouts (19531981).
The main feature of this website is an exhibit presenting the story of Helen Keller's life through five exhibits. Each exhibit offers text and photographs that examine a different period of her life from childhood through her career as a champion of the blind and a world figure. Together, the exhibits contain more than 30 photographs. "Who Was Helen Keller" offers a short Helen Keller biography; a recommended reading list with 19 books, including seven works by Helen Keller; a link to a free version of Keller's The Story of My Life; some fun facts and quotes; and a link to the Helen Keller Archives. The site also includes a chronology of Keller's life. This website is an excellent aid to teaching children the inspiring story of Helen Keller's life.