Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

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Created by two history professors, this site was designed to provide "a resource and a model for teachers of U.S. women's history." It currently offers 45 mini-monographs, each comprised of a background essay and relevant primary source documents, organized around an analytical question concerning a social movement. Projects are organized into five subject categories: peace and international; politics and public life; sexuality, reproduction, and women's health; work and production; and race and gender. The site includes more than 1,050 documents and 400 photographs. Keyword searching, links to more than 400 sites, and more than 24 lesson plans are also provided. The site has expanded to include thousands of new documents starting in 1600 in a joint project with Alexander Street Press. The joint site requires subscription.

Photographs from the Chicago Daily News: 1902-1933

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More than 55,000 photographs taken by staff photographers of the Chicago Daily News during the first decades of the 20th century are available on this website. Roughly 20 percent of the photos were published in the paper. The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon paper, sold at a cost of one cent for many years, with stories that tried to appeal to the city's large working-class audience.

The website provides subject access to the photographs, which include street scenes, buildings, prominent people, labor violence, political campaigns and conventions, criminals, ethnic groups, workers, children, actors, and disasters. Many photographs of athletes and political leaders are also featured. While most of the images were taken in Chicago and nearby areas, some were taken elsewhere, including at presidential inaugurations. The images provide a glimpse into varied aspects of urban life and document the use of photography by the press during early 20th century.

Chinese in California, 1850-1925

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These 8,000 items document the immigrant experience of Chinese who settled in California during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Materials include photographs, letters, diaries, speeches, business records, legal documents, pamphlets, sheet music, cartoons, and artwork.

Access is provided through nine galleries, each containing an introductory essay and 70 to 575 items. Four galleries present materials on San Francisco's Chinatown, including architectural space, business and politics, community life, and appeal to outsiders. Additional galleries deal with Chinese involvement in U.S. expansion westward; communities outside San Francisco; agricultural, fishing and related industries; the anti-Chinese movement and Chinese exclusion; and sentiments concerning the Chinese. Visitors may search by keyword, name, subject, title, group, and theme. The site will be useful for studying ethnic history, labor history, and the history of the West as well as Chinese-American history.

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963

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This well-organized website offers more than 900 items related to Hull House—including newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, letters, memoirs, reports, maps, and photographs. Materials are embedded within a clear historical narrative that illuminates the life of Jane Addams in addition to the history and legacy of Chicago's Hull House.

Users can search the site or focus on any of the 100 topics arranged in 12 chapters that begin with settlement life in Chicago in the 1880s and end with the movement after Addams's death. Topics include the reform climate in Chicago; activism within the movement; the immigrant experience of race, citizenship, and community; education within the settlement house; and cultural and leisure activities at Hull House and in Chicago. The site provides a timeline, featuring a pictorial biography of Addams; a geographical section that includes maps of Chicago; and an image section, with 12 photograph sections and essays.

Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in 19th-Century America

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These full-text transcriptions and page images of 163 "Sunday school books" address religious instruction for youth published in the U.S. between 1815 and 1865. Materials include texts used by Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and other denominations and are searchable by subject, author, title, and keyword.

Books are categorized according to nine types: "Advice Books, Moral Tales"; "Animals, Natural History"; "Child Labor, Orphans, Poverty"; "Death, Dying, Illness"; "Holidays"; "Immigrants"; "Slavery, African Americans, Native Americans"; "Temperance, Tobacco"; and "Travel, Missionaries." There are 67 author biographies and an essay on Sunday school books. This collection offers valuable materials for studying antebellum culture, American religious history, print culture, and education.

Virtual Jamestown

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This is a good place to begin exploring the history of Jamestown. The site includes over 60 letters and firsthand accounts from 1570 to 1720 on voyages, settlements, Bacon's Rebellion, and early history. More than 100 public records, such as census data and laws; 55 maps and images; and a registry of servants sent to plantations from 1654 to 1686 complete the site.

Virtual Jamestown also includes records from 1607 to 1815 of Christ's Hospital in England, where orphans were trained to apprentice in the colonies. There are four interactive virtual recreations. The reference section includes a timeline from 1502 to the present, narratives by prominent historians, links to 20 related sites, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The Complete Works of John Smith and John Smith's Map of Virginia have recently been added to the site, while 3D recreations of Jamestown's Statehouse and Meetinghouse as well as an archive of Virginia's first Africans are being added.

The Great Depression to World War II: Photos from the FSA-OWI

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During the New Deal and World War II, a period marked by the impulse to capture in writing, sounds, and images significant aspects of American life and traditions, government photographers with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) took hundreds of thousands of pictures. This website features more than 150,000 photographs from this project. The photographs document the ravages of the Great Depression, scenes of everyday life in small towns and cities, and mobilization campaigns for World War II.

This site also includes approximately 1,600 color photographs and selections from two popular collections: "'Migrant Mother' Photographs" and "Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination." The site also provides a bibliography, a background essay, portrait samples of 18 FSA-OWI photographers, and links to five related sites. This is a great source for studying the documentary expression of the 1930s and 1940s.

Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

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This collection of more than 1,230 images depicts the enslavement of Africans, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and slave life in the New World. Images are arranged in 18 categories, including pre-Colonial Africa, capture of slaves, maps, slave ships, plantation scenes, physical punishment, music, free people of color, family life, religion, marketing, and emancipation.

Many of the images are from 17th- and 18th-century books and travel accounts, but some are taken from sketches within slave narratives, Harper's Weekly, and Monthly Magazine. Reference information and brief comments, often an excerpt from original captions, accompany each image. Although there is no interpretation or discussion of historical relevance, these images are valuable for learning about representations of slavery in American slave societies, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America.