Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819

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This database is the most essential collection of written materials for historical research in American history from 1801-1819. It provides full-text access to nearly 4.5 million pages of 36,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints published in the U.S. during this period. Gazetteers, almanacs, juvenile literature, chapbooks, hymnals, campaign literature, novels, slave narratives, spelling books, school readers, treaties, maps, atlases, advertisements, diaries, autobiographies, and much more are all included. Most of these materials were originally detailed in the bibliography compiled by Ralph Shaw and Richard Shoemaker. This collection, long available on microfiche, is made available here as a digital, fully searchable online database. It complements Readex's other Early American Imprints series of material from the period of 1639-1800.

Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage

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The cultural heritage of Maryland is readily accessible here through thousands of digitized documents, maps, and images arranged into more than 40 collections and two exhibits. Baltimore's native son and prominent early 20th-century journalist H.L. Mencken is featured through a collection of 19 portraits, artifacts, and letters. Edgar Allen Poe, who lived in Baltimore late in his life, can be glimpsed through 18 portraits, drafts, and letters. Another collection offers digital copies of primary sources from the War of 1812, including an original draft of the "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Other collections include photographs of African American life, a selection of sports-related items, photographs and watercolor paintings of old houses and churches in Queen Anne's County, vintage photographs of Baltimore streets and street cars, and a series of photographs awaiting identification from collection users. Ample historical context, including library donation information, is provided for all collections. The website's blog will be useful for those interested in library sciences, preservation, and digital archiving.

Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

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The creation of the Center for Dewey Studies, this site is devoted to the work of philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859-1952). It includes the tables of contents for each of the 37 volumes of The Collected Works of John Dewey; a chronology of Dewey's life and work, updated on a continuing basis with new information derived from his correspondence and other sources; a short annotated reading list; an extensive, updated bibliography of titles about Dewey; and information on editorial projects currently underway. The site also includes a short audio clip of Dewey reading an essay and links to the Southern Illinois University_s Morris Library's Special Collections site, where seven Dewey-related collections are housed. The Center for Dewey Studies was established in 1961 and has since "become the international focal point for research on Dewey's life and work."

Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Harned Walt Whitman Collection jmccartney Thu, 09/03/2009 - 08:57
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This site contains facsimiles of four of Walt Whitman's original notebooks—ranging in length from 24 to 210 pages—and two color photographs of a cardboard butterfly—with words from a poem by John Mason Neale printed on its ventral side—photographed on the poet's finger. These items disappeared from the Library of Congress in 1942 but were returned in 1995.

The notebooks contain both prose and poetry, and include ideas for prospective journal articles, early versions of poems that were used in Leaves of Grass, and notes taken during hospital visits to wounded Civil War soldiers. The site also includes articles on the preservation of these items.

Red White Blue & Brimstone: New World Literature and the American Millennium

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An exhibit of 101 images with a 10,000-word essay that tracks the influence of the Book of Revelations' apocalyptic vision of history in shaping conceptions of America and its destiny for religious zealots and others from the colonial era to the present. With images primarily from published texts—covers, title pages, illustrations, and relevant pages of writing—the exhibit is divided into 14 chronological sections, each opening with a quote from Revelations and detailing its relevance in successive historical periods. The exhibit begins with the period of the English Reformation, when John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, exported to America, related contemporary political events to scripture and established a timeline that proved influential over the next 250 years. The site covers beliefs that American Indians were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; Cotton Mather's sermons as the culmination of a century of speculation about America's place in the apocalyptic scheme; early nationalist ambitions as fulfilling prophecy; and the influence of Revelations on Thomas Jefferson. The site also looks at William Miller's numerologically-based predictions of the end of the world in 1843; millennial movements in the antebellum era; urban exposÎs that conceived of American cities as present-day incarnations of Babylon; and 20th-century anti-Semitic thought. Well organized, the exhibit provides a useful introduction to students of American religion and culture of the persistence of the power of the Book of Revelations, but exaggerates its importance with the odd claim that no other book has "produced a more profound vision of America's hopes, duties, dreams, and destiny."

Premonition of Death

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Question

Did President Lincoln actually foretell his death to a reporter the day before he was killed?

Answer

Lincoln's former law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, who accompanied him as a bodyguard on his train ride through Baltimore at the beginning of his presidency and remained as a friend and occasional bodyguard until Lincoln's death, wrote that he was among the "two or three persons present" when the president related a disturbing dream he had "only a few days before his assassination." Lamon's account appeared in a book of anecdotal reminiscences compiled by Lamon's daughter and published in 1895 two years after his death. Some of the writings had appeared previously in newspapers, others came from Lamon's letters and an unpublished manuscript. Lamon presented Lincoln's account of the dream, he wrote, "as nearly in his own words as I can, from notes which I made immediately after its recital."

Lincoln admitted that he did not believe in dreams

In this account, Lincoln began by commenting on the abundance of dreams in the Bible and asserting, "If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days God and His angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams." In answer to a question put to him by his wife, Lincoln admitted that he did not believe in dreams, but he went on nevertheless to allude to a recent dream that "has haunted me ever since." Prodded by Mrs. Lincoln to continue, the president related that "about ten days ago" he had gone to bed late after he had stayed up "waiting for important dispatches from the front." As he began to dream, he experienced "a death-like stillness about me." Hearing the sounds of subdued sobs, Lincoln walked downstairs in search of the "mournful sounds of distress," but encountered no living person until he entered the East Room, where he found "a sickening surprise": a covered corpse resting on a catafalque, surrounded by soldiers, with mourners gazing at the body and weeping. "'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers," Lincoln related in Lamon's account, continuing, "'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!'" Lincoln then stated that he awoke soon after in response to a "loud burst of grief from the crowd," did not sleep again that night due to the dream, and "have been strangely annoyed by it since." Lamon further related that at a later encounter Lincoln insisted to him that he was not the corpse on the catafalque, a claim that has prompted political scientist Dwight G. Anderson to speculate that the dead president in the dream, in fact, was George Washington and that Washington's assassin was Lincoln himself. Washington, in Anderson's view, "provided Lincoln with an imaginary father whom he both emulated and defied," while Lincoln's haunting guilt "provided the psychological basis for Lincoln's refoundation of political authority in the United States."

Lincoln nevertheless alluded to a recent dream that "has haunted me ever since."

Yet historians Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher have cited internal inconsistencies and external evidence regarding Lamon's account that lead them to question its veracity. Lamon stated that the incident had occurred only a few days prior to the assassination, yet within Lincoln's monologue he related at one point that the dream occurred "the other night" and also "about ten days ago." The Fehrenbachers pointed out that although Lincoln stated in the account that on the night of the dream he "had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front," during the period of March 24 to April 9, he in fact had been at the front, rather than in the White House. In addition, there was no contemporaneous account of the dream following the assassination. No one mentioned it in the voluminous writings of the period, not Mary Lincoln, Lamon, anyone else at the supposed telling of the dream, or anyone to whom those who heard it may have relayed it. Despite these seeming inconsistencies, the Fehrenbachers note that Lamon's account of the dream has been quoted as fact by a number of respected authors.

Bibliography

Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865. Edited by Dorothy Lamon Teillard. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, comp. and ed., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Dwight G. Anderson, "Quest for Immortality: A Theory of Abraham Lincoln's Political Psychology." In The Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History, edited by Gabor S. Boritt and Norman O. Forness. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

The Jack London Online Collection

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The full-text versions of more than 40 works by Jack London (1876–1916), a prominent early 20th-century writer who was also involved in the socialist movement, are available here. Materials include famous fiction, such as The Call of the Wild (1903), and lesser-known works, such as War of the Classes (1905), a collection of speeches London delivered on behalf of socialism. The website includes 20 novels, 19 short story collections, two collections of essays, three plays, and six additional published nonfiction works. The website is keyword searchable. In addition to providing the writings of Jack London, there is plenty of biographical and historical information about London and his times. Outside resources are suggested, divided into those suitable for students and those for teachers. Combining London's original works with other contextual materials provided by the site could be valuable for studying early 20th-century American literature and journalism and its relation to radical political and social currents of the time.

Race and Place

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This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection

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This is one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world. Reverend Samuel J. May, an American abolitionist, donated his collection of anti-slavery materials to the Cornell Library in 1870. Following May's lead, other abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain contributed materials. The collection now consists of more than 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, local anti-slavery society newsletters, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Materials date from 1704 to 1942 and cover slavery in the United States and the West Indies, the slave trade, and emancipation. More than 300,000 pages are available for full-text searching. Accompanying the documents are eight links to other collections.

Willa Cather Archive

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Willa Cather (1873–1947) wrote 12 novels and numerous works of short fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and is known for her intensive examination of life in the midwestern U.S. This extensive archive is dedicated to her life and work. At its core is a collection of all of her novels, short fiction, journalistic writing, interviews, speeches, and public letters published before 1922. All materials are fully searchable. Notably, both O Pioneers! and My Antonia are accompanied by extensive scholarly notes, historical context, and introductory material. Accompanying her published materials is a collection of 2,054 of Cather's letters (again annotated and fully searchable), more than 600 photographs of Cather and important people and places in her life, audio of Cather's Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, and a short video clip of Cather. Several scholarly articles and a text analysis tool are also available.