Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive

Image
Photo, V. J. Gray and L. Cress, Herbert Randall, 1964, Civil Rights in Miss...
Annotation

These 150 oral history interviews and 16 collections of documents address the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Interviews were conducted with figures on both sides of the movement, including volunteers and activists as well as "race-baiting" Governor Ross Barnett and national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons.

Document collections offer hundreds of pages of letters, journals, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, FBI reports, and arrest records. Approximately 25 interviews also offer audio clips. Users may browse finding aids or search by keyword. Six collections pertain to Freedom Summer, the 1964 volunteer initiative in Mississippi to establish schools, register voters, and organize a biracial Democratic party. One collection is devoted to the freedom riders who challenged segregation in 1961. Four explanatory essays provide historical context. Short biographies are furnished on each interviewee and donor, as well as a list of topics addressed and 30 links to other civil rights websites.

Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Digital Archive

Image
Image, Search page graphic
Annotation

A joint project between college students and a nonprofit organization, this site collects the documents, recollections, and other media relating to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Many of the documents were submitted by visitors to the website, and the site actively solicits additional resources.

Materials include 10 documents, five video files that document interviews and panel discussions, and links to 15 outside Brown sites. The Interactive section features six interactive activities, including a map showing Jim Crow laws in various states and communities. The site includes relatively few primary sources, but the individual stories featured are valuable.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820

Image
Introductory graphic, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy
Annotation

Provides detailed data on more than 100,000 slaves and free blacks in Louisiana from 1718 to 1820 gathered from notarial documents by historian Dr. Gwendolyn Hall. Users can search by name of slave, master's name, gender, epoch, racial designation, plantation location, and place of origin. Each record retrieved pertains to an individual slave. Information was compiled from documents created when slaves arrived by ship, were bought and sold, reported as runaways, testified in court cases, manumitted, and at the death of masters and in other circumstances. As French and Spanish records often were more detailed than those kept by the British, the amount of information provided is relatively extensive. Some records contain as many as 114 fields with information on name, birthplace, gender, age, language group, alleged involvement in conspiracies, skills, family relationships, and illnesses, among other categories. Dr. Hall's analysis documents 96 different African ethnicities of slaves in Louisiana during this period.

The site additionally offers tables and graphs presenting Dr. Hall's calculations concerning the data collected and presents results from three useful searches: on African names, individual slaves involved in revolts or conspiracies, and runaways. Seven examples of original documents are displayed, and downloads of complete databases on Louisiana slaves and free blacks are available. An extremely valuable site for professional historians, anthropologists, geneticists, and linguists, in addition to people conducting genealogical searches.

African Americans in Massachusetts

Image
Image, African Americans in Massachusetts: Case Studies of Desegregation in...
Annotation

This site features primary documents related to the 19th-century desegregation of the Boston and Nantucket, MA school systems. It includes a timeline with links to 71 expandable and downloadable primary sources. The documents consist of census records, maps, reports of the local school committees, and articles from William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. The site also contains a bibliography with more than 30 items. Designed to develop student critical thinking skills, materials encourage middle and high students to understand different points of view. For example, students can study petitions from those supporting desegregation and petitions from those in opposition. In addition students will better understand the relationship between Massachusetts' early desegregation cases and the 20th-century Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Complete with primary sources and lesson plans, the site not only offers useful curriculum for lessons in America's long march to free and integrated public education but helps students identify how contemporary debates about education parallel the 19th-century Massachusetts desegregation cases.

National History Day Project: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Image
Print, The Bird of Freedom and the Black Bird, 1863, F.P., NYPL Digital Gallery
Question

I'm an 8th-grade student currently looking for information for my National History Day project on the topic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would be very helpful if some of these questions would be able to be answered.

  • What groups of people, if any, were negatively affected?
  • What were some consequences because of the passing of the act, good or     bad?
  • Were there any important events or political ideas that were led up by the     Act passing?
  • What were some key leaders and other people that led up to the Act?
  • What might be some successes because of the Act passing?
  • Lastly, what are some failures that the Act was unable to address?
Answer

It is great to hear that you are participating in the National History Day program at your school. I really hope that this project allows you to experience what it is like to work as a historian, analyzing and interpreting primary sources and secondary sources to draw conclusions about the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Your questions about the Act are a good jumping-off point for starting your research. It sounds like you want to analyze the effects and consequences of the legislation on "groups" of people. However, the questions did not specify whom you might be thinking about. So, a good place to start is with the particular groups affected by the legislation. What was the goal of the act? How, for instance, did it affect people experiencing workplace discrimination and school segregation in the United States prior to 1964?

After you establish the aims and audiences of the act, you can move on to looking at important events, political ideas, and key leaders. The act was a part of the broader Civil Rights movement, so consider how the push for civil rights led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as how the act pushed the movement forward. There are lots of great resources on the web for this kind of research and our Website Reviews section is a good tool for this. It allows you to browse sites by keyword, topic, and time period to locate information pertaining to the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This feature will also help you bypass the millions of websites that a regular search engine will provide, and only return legitimate websites about historical research.

For example: Using the search box, try entering keyword terms that are critical elements of the legislation (i.e. segregation and discrimination).

Keyword: segregation
Topic: African Americans
Time Period: Post War US, 1945-Early 1970s
Resource Type: Any

The results of this specific search will generate ten different websites that vary in topic. Two might be of particular interest. Television News of the Civil Rights Era has the actual footage of African American students waiting to be picked up by the local school bus for the first time in four years. Other sites, like the Kellogg African American Health Care Project will provide first-hand accounts from African Americans during the era of segregated health care.

Information about the experiences of individuals will reveal how segregation and discrimination deeply influenced the lives of ordinary Americans. Finding clues to some of the answers to your questions should help you refine those questions and help you make your assessments about the failures and successes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I hope you find the answers to all of your questions.

The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.

Description

From the History Faculty website:

"In recent years historians of the civil rights movement have moved their focus away from the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. to explore the role played by 'ordinary people' in the struggle for racial equality. While not denying King's importance as a tactician, figurehead and orator historians have argued that, at root, the civil rights movement was a people's movement and that the countless inspiring contributions made by local blacks was a critical component of the movement's success."

"After setting out the problems that the civil rights movement sought to tackle, the presentation charts some of the civil rights movement's major tactics—litigation, boycotts and direct action, and voter registration drives—emphasizing the importance of ordinary African Americans and their allies to these efforts. The presentation ends with a re-consideration of King's role, highlighting his importance as a 'bridge' between the local campaigns and national politics."

Dr. Simon Hall, Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, presents this lecture.

Nevada Historical Society

Description

The Nevada Historical Society museum collections house over 15,000 artifacts, including mining and ranching equipment, artwork, clothing, and items related to the state's gambling industry. The permanent exhibition on Nevada history illustrates the lives of the earliest inhabitants of the Great Basin, the desert stretches of the Immigrant Trail, the Comstock era, the effects of Nevada's liberal marriage and divorce laws, and the rise of the gambling industry. The Nevada Historical Society's library, photograph, and manuscript collections constitute the largest and most complete repository of materials related to the history of Nevada and the Great Basin. Materials available to the public include books, newspapers and periodicals, print files, maps, government documents, subject files, ephemera, manuscript collections, and over 500,000 photographs.

The museum offers exhibits, guided and self–guided tours, hands-on activities, in–classroom presentations on a variety of subjects, a documentary presentation and discussion series, screenings of movies which are set in Nevada, and a research library. The website offers virtual exhibits, children's activities, and a comprehensive PDF outlining available teacher resources.

McKinley Assassination Ink: A Documentary History

Image
Postcard, McKinley Monument, Buffalo, N. Y., McKinley Assassination. . . site
Annotation

On September 14, 1901, American anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, propelling Theodore Roosevelt onto the U.S. political stage and, some historians would argue, making way for political modernization. Through hundreds of documents and images—including book chapters, newspaper articles and columns, sermons, poetry, and government documents—this website explores the McKinley assassination alongside U.S. politics and culture before and after.

Topics include turn-of-the-century journalism, race relations, anarchism, women's roles, the death penalty, international relations, and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, where McKinley was shot. A good place to begin is the "Quotes About" section, which provides short excerpts from a variety of sources that serve to familiarize users with conflicting views of McKinley, Czolgosz, Roosevelt, the assassination, Czolgosz's trial, and anarchism in the United States. All documents are keyword searchable and indexed by date, author, title, type, named persons, and source. An extensive bibliography provides suggestions for further reading.

James Madison's Failed Amendments

field_image
Medallion of James Madison
Question

James Madison proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution, but only 10 were approved. What were the two that were not?

Answer

When the Constitutional Convention sent the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification, Anti-Federalists voiced strong objections to it, especially criticizing the strength it invested in the national government and its lack of explicit protections for the rights of individuals. Politicians in several states were able to secure their states' ratification of the Constitution only with the promise that it would be almost immediately amended.

In 1789, James Madison, then an elected member from Virginia of the First Congress's House of Representatives, proposed 19 amendments meant to answer the objections already raised in the states. The Senate consolidated and trimmed these down to 12, which were approved by Congress and sent out to the states by President Washington in October, 1789.

The states ratified the last 10 of the 12 amendments. They became the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, and are now referred to as the Bill of Rights. Not enough states (10 were needed at the time) ratified the first two of Madison's original 12, however, and they did not become law.

The first of these would have established how members of the House of Representatives would be apportioned to the states. It was drafted to ensure that members of the House would continue to represent small constituencies even as the general population grew, small enough that Representatives would not be too far removed from the concerns of citizens. In addition, keeping the House of Representatives from being too small was thought to protect against its becoming a kind of oligarchy. Congress did send this amendment to the states, but the number of states that ratified it was just short of the number needed. Although the proposed amendment did not become law, Congressional apportionment is nevertheless grounded in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3) and the total number of members of the House of Representatives is set by federal statute (currently at 435).

The second of Madison's 12 amendments forbade Congress from giving itself a pay raise: Congress could vote for a raise but it would only apply from the beginning of the next Congress. This amendment also failed to gather the required number of state ratifications in the years after it was introduced. In 1982, however, Gregory Watson, a university student doing research for a government class, ran across a description of this amendment and realized that it remained "alive" because it had included no language in it about a window of time in which it had to gain the needed number of state ratifications. Watson organized a successful effort to lobby various state legislatures, seeking their ratification of the amendment. As a result, the needed number was eventually reached and this amendment, first proposed in 1789, became the 27th (and most recent) amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1992.

Bibliography

Richard E. Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-federalists: critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004)

David J. Siemers, The Antifederalists: men of great faith and forbearance (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

John R. Vile, A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments, 4th edition (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).

John W. Dean, "The Telling Tale of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment: A Sleeping Amendment Concerning Congressional Compensation Is Later Revived," September 27, 2002 (at FindLaw).

Images:
Portrait etching of James Madison and detail of broadside, printed by Bennett Wheeler, Providence, R.I., 1789.

James Madison medallion, frontispiece of William Cabell Rives, History of the Life and Times of James Madison (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859).