Professor and author Noam Chomsky discusses the current "War on Terrorism" in the context of earlier perceptions of terrorism and national threat, including the Cold War and World War II.
The link provides direct access to the video, as no visual webpage exists as a gateway.
According to the History of Photography Podcasts website:
"During his 29-year tenure as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curator and photographer John Szarkowski (1925-2007) changed the way the world saw photography."
This recording of Jeff Curto's class session introduces Szarkowski's work.
NBC Nightly News looks back at the Cuban Missile Crisis, showing how close America came to nuclear war with Russia in 1962.
The documentary clip may not appear on the first page.
The granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg discusses a documentary she has created for HBO that explores the question of whether they were really guilty.
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.
This website, which draws from C-Span Radio, is a useful resource for researching or teaching 20th-century American political history. It assembles audio recordings from such sources as the National Archives, presidential libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. It "presents interviews, debates, oral histories, news conferences, and speeches with past presidents, legislators, and other important figures in American politics." Selecting "Past APA programs available online" provides the full list of 29 archived programs. Program subjects include persons such as W.E.B. DuBois; Indira Gandhi; Eleanor Roosevelt; NASA astronauts; Presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford; and Civil Rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and Thurgood Marshall. They also include thematic topics such as the Reagan presidency, women in journalism, ex-slave narratives, Iraq war stories, Congressional leaders, the voices of World War II, and American POWs. Many of the topics feature multiple programs.
All programs are recordings of the original C-SPAN Radio program and must be listened to as originally broadcast. Playback of the programs requires media player software to be installed (free downloads can be accessed from the site).
The above recordings appear to no longer be available on the C-Span website. The history section, http://www.c-span.org/History/, suggested as an alternative offers full video programming, often discussions of historical topics. However, the page appears to feature recent video, with over 2,000 "recent events" which cannot be sorted or searched. Video search does not offer an option to select material on historical topics, so searching will pull from the entire C-Span website. As a result, the site offers a great deal of undoubtedly useful material which is nearly impossible to access. Unpublishing.
This archive of 1,500 photographs taken by Teenie Harris, photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, "one of the largest and most influential Black newspapers in the country," documents African American urban life in Pittsburgh from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is a sample of the 80,000 images that make up the full collection. Many of the images have not been identified and the site's authors ask assistance (a submission form accompanies each image).
Visitors can browse the collection through 15 galleries of 100 images each. They can also comment on images and view the comments of others. Following the link to the Teenie Harris image collection in the Historic Pittsburgh Images Collections at the University of Pittsburgh allows visitors to browse the 541 images that have been identified with full captions. The site also offers a chronology of Harris's life. This site is useful for researching the history of Pittsburgh and its African American community as well as urban history or African American history in general.
Smithsonian curators examine a photograph of civil rights activist Medgar Evers (1925-1963), looking at what it says about the tension between racial groups at the time and the call for social change an accumulation of such media objects can communicate.
Professor Jules Tygiel reviews the life of Jackie Robinson and his relationship to and support of the Civil Rights Movement. Tygiel focuses not on Robinson's life as a baseball player, but on his wider cultural and social impact.
I am looking for an electronic copy of a cartoon which shows most of the different aspects of the home front effort in America during World War II.
America’s home front effort included recruiting for the military, participating in scrap drives, paying income taxes, buying war bonds, using rationing coupons, planting Victory gardens, encouraging sanitation, volunteering for civil defense work, increasing public morale, and participating in industrial retooling and production. The Hollywood studios that were making cartoons at the beginning of the war were quickly drafted into turning their art to the war effort, to mobilize the American public. Cartoons were just one part of a propaganda effort, which also included the production and distribution of feature films, posters, war-themed commercial radio, newspaper and magazine advertising, the organization of celebrity tours and war bond drives, the establishment of censorship offices, and the formulation and distribution of a barrage of information and directives from various government officials and agencies.
Leon Schlesinger Productions produced popular cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for Warner Brothers Studios, many of which had war themes, such as “The Ducktators” (1942), “Confusions of a Nutzy Spy” (1943), “The Fifth Column Mouse” (1943), “Tokio Jokio” (1943), “Daffy—The Commando” (1943), “Falling Hare” (1943), and “Draftee Daffy” (1945).
At least two of these Warner Brothers’ cartoons focused on home front activities and might be the cartoon you’re thinking of: “Scrap Happy Daffy” (1943), and ”Wacky Blackout” (1942).
Walt Disney also produced many war-themed cartoons with Mickey, Donald, Goofy and the rest of the gang, some of which were focused on the home front, such as “Out of the Frying Pan into The Firing Line” (1942), and ”Food Will Win the War” (1942).
A collection of short cartoons and movies from the Disney Studio during World War II, which includes many intended for the home front, was released (for purchase) in 2004 as a 2-disc DVD, “On the Front Lines,” in the series “Walt Disney Treasures.” This collection includes such titles as “Donald Gets Drafted” (1942), “Private Pluto” (1943), “Home Defense” (1943), “All Together” (1942), “Defense Against Invasion” (1943), and “Cleanliness Brings Health” (1945), as well as many others. The collection also includes Disney’s 1943 animated film, “Victory Through Air Power,” as well as a few of the hundreds of training films that the Disney studio made for the War Department or the National Film Board of Canada, such as “Four Methods of Flush Riveting” (1942).
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Cass Warner-Sperling, Cork Millner, and Jack Warner. Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.