U.S. Electoral College

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Basic statistical data and explanatory material on the workings of the Electoral College, provided by the Federal office that coordinates its operations. Data includes electoral and popular vote totals for presidential elections since 1789; listings by state of electoral college members for 1992-2000; facsimiles of certificates of ascertainment and certificates of votes for the 2000 election; and a digest of current state laws and requirements. Also offers a 2,700-word procedural guide; relevant federal law provisions; a 1,600-word description of state responsibilities; and 10 links to additional National Archives sites of relevance. A quick and easy way to locate vote tallies and legal information regarding the institution of the Electoral College.

September 11, 2001: Attack on America

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This site is an extensive collection of some 2,000 primary texts related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It features documents in the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government, and includes press releases, briefings, legislation, executive orders, proclamations, and public laws.

The documents (with factual errors corrected in annotations) have been collected from sources such as the White House, Departments of State, Defense, Transportation, and Justice, the European Union, NATO, and the OAS. Users can browse the long list, arranged chronologically, or can pull up documents via a variety of drop-down menus. They may also search the collection by keyword, or jump directly to a particular date from September 2001 through April 2002.

Comprehensive and well-organized, this is a valuable site for those researching the political and legal aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

University of Missouri-Columbia: Digital Library Collections

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This archive makes available varied material on English, American, and Missouri history, including speeches, pamphlets, plat books, and government documents. The collection of Daniel Webster speeches offers more than 100 items that, in addition to his addresses and speeches in Congress, include sermons, addresses, orations, and speeches in his honor, as well as some correspondence. The Fourth of July orations collection contains more than 100 items, including orations by John Quincy Adams, Charles F. Adams, and Daniel Webster. The site also offers a collection of more than 110 Missouri county plat books published in 1930, a collection of various items of Missouriana, and a group of four miscellaneous texts that includes an 80-page text on the liberty of the press published in London in 1812. The collection of 17th- to 19th-century British religious, political, and legal tracts contains more than 400 documents and pamphlets published primarily during the English Civil War. Each collection can be individually searched. For anyone researching 17th- and 18th-century transatlantic history, the political history of New England, or the history of Missouri, this is a collection worth consulting.

Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology

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This site contains the full text of the 185 primary documents, roughly a 600-page book, dealing with urban planning. Dozens of journals, conference reports, books, official documents, and other sources are easy to navigate. In addition to the key word search engine, the site includes a topical bibliography that provides more than a dozen headings, and alphabetical and chronological bibliographies. Each entry also has a link to the full text of the document. Essays discuss a broad range of issues, including surveys of the state of urban planning, discussions of how urban improvements should be made, and details of the legal issues of land use regulations. Each document includes a brief (about 1,000 words) general introduction that sets the material in historical perspective. The selections on the site include Frederick Law Olmstead's commentary on the City Beautiful movement and continue to his son's discussion of housing developments in 1919. This site will prove useful to anyone concerned with urban planning or urban history and especially valuable to those studying how urban planning developed through World War I.

The Hartford Black History Project

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Provides two exhibits on black history in Hartford, CT. "A Struggle from the Start" charts stages in the life of the Hartford African-American community from 1638 to 1920. Structured in five chronological sections, each with three-to-four thematic subsections, a text of 21,000 words is punctuated with approximately 60 images of documents, photographs, illustrations, newspaper clippings, tables, paintings, and maps. This exhibit covers slavery, black codes, free blacks, Black governors in the early Republic period, black soldiers, the black bourgeoisie, the formation of the black community, black labor, black society, black churches, the "Talented Tenth" in Hartford, black painters Charles Ethan Porter and Holdridge Primus, black migration from the South, mass politics, and black community institutions. A second exhibit presents approximately 80 photographs from Hartford's African-American community covering the years 1870 to the 1970s. Valuable for those interested in studying African-American history from a community perspective.

Remembering Herblock

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Presents an exhibit of 36 political cartoons and five essays by Herblock (Herbert Block), the acclaimed Washington Post political cartoonist who died in October 2001 after a career spanning seven decades. This tribute includes cartoons and the essays originally put together in 1995 for the exhibit "Five Decades of Herblock," as well as cartoons from 1998 to 2001, 12 photographs, three essays of appreciation, and the editorial that appeared in the newspaper the day after he died. As if to illustrate Herblock's observation that "Political cartoons, unlike sundials, do not show the brightest hours," the exhibit addresses such "dark" American topics as the "fear and smear" era of HUAC and McCarthyism (a term Herblock himself coined), Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s, the Vietnam War, Watergate and other Nixon-era scandals, Reagonomics, the 1994 Republican "Revolution," the Clinton impeachment, the Columbine shootings, and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. Although the site is marred by annoying pop-up ads, this remains a valuable site for those studying popular culture and the history of political cartoons.

History Through Deaf Eyes

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An exhibit of 60 images, mostly photographs, and a 2,500-word essay that presents a social history of deaf community life in the U.S. from the early 19th century to the present. Covers education, the development of American Sign Language, the "silent press," deaf people in the workplace, media portrayals, deaf clubs, activism, and technological developments. Also includes material on a few historical figures such as the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell. Hosted by the National Deaf Life Museum, the website also has links to educational resources and the Through Deaf Eyes documentary film produced by Florentine Films/Hott Productions and WETA, Washington, DC, in association with Gallaudet University. A solid introduction to the history of deaf people in America.

Science, Technology, and the CIA

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Provides 44 government documents that track the organizational and operational history of various CIA departments designed to coordinate science and technology research with intelligence operations. Many of the documents—reports, letters, and memos—have been declassified through Freedom of Information Act requests by the site's editor, Jeffrey T. Richelson for his research. Other documents have been obtained from the National Archives, Library of Congress, and the CIA's public affairs office. Material dates from 1951 to 2000, with the bulk covering operations during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.

Subjects include determining France's nuclear capabilities in 1957; assessments of U-2 spy plane missions over the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s; "Black Shield" flights over North Vietnam and North Korea to find missile sites; the development of a real-time imagery satellite in the 1970s; the strategic rationale for mining harbors in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration; and restructuring efforts following the end of the Cold War. Also includes a report on technical support provided to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy for gathering information on Daniel Ellsberg and Senator Edward Kennedy, and a memo on project "Acoustic Kitty," in which a cat, surgically wired with transmitting and control devices for eavesdropping purposes, was run over by a cab. Each document is annotated with a short description of up to 300 words. The site, though modest in size, will be of interest to those studying the history of American espionage agencies, foreign relations, and the secret use by nations of science and technology.

Democratic Vistas: The William Clyde DeVane Lecture Series

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In spring term 2001, Yale University celebrated their tercentennial by assembling 15 distinguished professors representing 11 departments to lecture on and discuss "the conditions and prospects of democracy" in America from myriad perspectives. The complete lectures and discussion sessions are now available on this site in text, audio, and video. The series includes a number of lecturers well-known to students of American history, including Nancy F. Cott, Michael Denning, Richard Brodhead, John Lewis Gaddis, and David Gelernter. Many of the lectures relate American democracy to a variety of historical subjects: the market, the family, religion, foreign policy, education, social movements, computers and other technology, and the biomedical revolution. Other topics include the widening income gap between rich and poor, the relation of Plato's Republic to the American Republic, Lincoln and Whitman as representative Americans, and whether citizenship is now dead. The site, which includes reading lists for each lecture, provides a rich collection of texts that will prove stimulating to students of American political, social, and cultural history.

Regional Oral History Office

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ROHO preserves the history of the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, and the Western United States. It covers a wide range of topics, including politics and government, law and jurisprudence, arts and letters, business and labor, social and community history, University of California history, natural resources and the environment, and science and technology. ROHO has full-text transcripts of more than 270 interviews online (some with audio recordings). Offerings include the "Free Speech Movement Digital Archive," that documents the role of participants in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, in the fall of 1964 as well as its origins and legacy; "Exploring Diversity and Access at the University of California," examining the experiences of African American faculty and senior staff at UC Berkeley with six interviews available and an additional 10 interviews planned; "Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front" project, exploring the wartime experiences of Bay Area residents, with 23 oral history interviews; and "Suffragists," featuring eight interviews with major figures in 20th-century suffragist history.

There are two searchable databases, divided chronologically from 1954-1979 and 1980-1997, of abstracts from the more than 1,250 interviews in the offline collection. The site also contains an essay on "Oral History Tips" and two "One-Minute Guides" to "Conducting an Oral History" and "Oral History Interviewing." A useful resource for researching the cultural or social history of California and the West in the 20th century.