Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia 1876

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The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, unofficially known as the Centennial Exhibition, was held in Philadelphia in 1876 and was attended by more than nine million people. This website presents 1,500 images, including photographs, lithographs, engravings, maps, scrapbooks, and albums, searchable by keyword or subject, on this event.

"Exhibition Facts" provides statistics, a summary of the fair's significance, photographs of buildings erected by foreign nations, and images of sheet music. A timeline traces the fair's lifespan from the 1871 Act of Congress that created its planning commission to the removal of exhibits in December 1876. A bibliography lists more than 130 related works and 17 websites. "Tours" features an interactive map of the fairgrounds. "Centennial Schoolhouse" offers activities, including excerpts from a 17-year-old boy's diary. This website provides revealing images of the event that introduced America "as a new industrial world power."

Literature and Culture of the American 1950s

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This collection of more than 100 primary texts, essays, biographical sketches, obituaries, book reviews, and partially annotated links explores the cultural, intellectual, and political trends of the 1950s. Organized alphabetically and according to lesson plans, this eclectic collection of readings is structured around a few landmark texts and topics, including McCarthyism and anticommunism, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960), William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), feminism, Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and conformity in universities.

Materials include substantial excerpts from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (1959) and the Encyclopedia of the American Left, in addition to retrospective analyses of the postwar period.

History of the American West, 1860-1920

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More than 30,000 photographs of Colorado towns, landscapes, mining scenes, and American Indian tribes, taken between 1860 and 1920, are featured on this website. Approximately 4,000 images deal with the mining industry, including labor strikes, while 3,500 photographs depict Indian communities from more than 40 tribes west of the Mississippi River.

Special presentations include a gallery of over 40 photographs depicting the dwellings, children, and daily lives of Native American women; more than 30 images of buildings, statues, and parks in Denver built in conformance with the turn-of-the-century "City Beautiful" movement; and 20 World War II-era photographs of the Tenth Mountain Division, ski troops from Colorado who fought in Italy. Each image in these special exhibits is accompanied by a brief description. There are also biographies of three Western photographers.

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls

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More than 2,300 covers of American "dime novels," and their British counterparts, the "penny dreadfuls," are available on this website. In addition, the full text of nine books and a series entitled Secret Service (1899–1912) are available.

The site offers "guided tours" with images and essays of approximately 1,500 words on print processes and dime novel covers. The full-text selections include stories featuring such heroes as Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Deadwood Dick, Fred Fearnot, and Calamity Jane. A full-text search is available only for those affiliated with Stanford University.

The site provides basic information on each title and indexes books according to subject, genre, setting, intended audience age and gender, and type of graphic material. Subject indexing of cover iconography is especially valuable. Listings are organized according to depictions of ethnicity/nationality, occupation, types of places, types of sports and recreations, types of violence, and types of gestures and actions classified according to gender of character portrayed.

Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers

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The papers of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), more than 4,600 items, are presented on this website. Materials include family papers, general correspondence, laboratory notebooks from 1891 to 1893 and 1910, scientific notebooks, blueprints, journals, articles, lectures, and photographs.

Writings address a range of subjects, including the telephone, deaf education, experiments with aeronautics, and other inventions. There are more than 100 letters to and from Helen Keller, family correspondence, and material on life in Washington, DC and Nova Scotia, where Bell had a summer home and conducted experiments. Ten "collection highlights," including notebook pages, document his first success with the telephone, essays on Bell's career and on the telephone, an annotated timeline, a 19-title bibliography, and a list of related sites.

Performing Arts in America, 1875-1923

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A selection of more than 16,000 items relating to the performing arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is offered on this website. Materials include books, clippings, photographs, drawings, music, manuscripts, moving images, posters and lobby cards, programs, and recorded sound.

Diverse types of material on specific performers—such as Ruth St. Denis, Loie Fuller, and Isadora Duncan—have been selected to allow focused study. More than 2,400 entries are available for photographs (entries often contain multiple images) as well as 21 large format clippings scrapbooks, each with more than 100 pages. The website also presents 16 full-text books and video clips from nine early motion pictures, including a nine-minute clip featuring renowned dancer Anna Pavlowa in Lois Weber's The Dumb Girl of Portici (1914).

Nineteenth-century California Sheet Music

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These scanned images come from more than 2,700 pieces of sheet music published between 1852 and 1900 in California. The website also includes more than 800 illustrated covers, 48 audio selections, eight video clips of singers, and a handful of programs, posters, playbills, periodicals, catalogs, broadsheets, books on music, and maps. More than 350 items contain advertising.

Explanatory essays of 1,000 to 2,000 words in length provide general information on music from more than a dozen ethnic cultures, and with reference to specific topics, including buildings, composers, dance, disasters, gender, mining, performers, politics, product ads, railroads, and sports. Provides 14 links to additional sheet music collections and reference sources. These resources are valuable to those studying popular culture, California history, music history, advertising, and depictions of ethnicity, gender, and race in 19th-century America.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

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Cylinder recordings were the first commercially produced sound recordings. This extensive collection of more than 6,000 cylinder recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1890 to 1928) allows visitors to explore this era of sound recording that is often overlooked in the study of American musical history.

Users can browse the collection by performer, title, label, or year of release or they can search the collection by keyword, author, title, subject, or year. Recordings stream online and are available for download. The project overview describes the technical issues involved in the project, explains variations in recording quality, and provides a warning about the potentially offensive "dialect recordings" and why they were included. There are also links to thirty-six related websites.

America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894-1915

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Photo, Boys diving, Honolulu, American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, 1902, LoC
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This collection of 150 motion pictures produced between 1894 and 1915 deals with work, school, and leisure activities in the U.S. The films include footage of the U.S. Postal Service in 1903, cattle breeding, firefighters, ice manufacturing, logging, physical education classes, amusement parks, sporting events, and local festivals and parades. Each film is accompanied by a brief summary.

A special presentation furnishes additional information on three categories: America at school, work, and leisure. Essays of roughly 1,000-words provide context and general descriptions of films in each category, display 15 illustrative photographs, and link to related films. A 31-work bibliography provides suggestions for further reading and websites on American labor, education, and leisure.

Anti-Saloon League, 1893-1933

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These printed materials are representative of the public campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League from 1893 to 1933. A six-page history of the League and the Temperance movement and six biographical essays of movement leaders provide context. Facsimiles of 89 fliers produced by the League advocate temperance with arguments that include the effect of alcohol on puppies and German Emperor William II's opinion of drinking. A periodical section reproduces three covers, three sample articles, and one complete 1912 issue of American Patriot, a temperance magazine, and one cover of American Issue.

Other material includes 14 wet and dry maps of the U.S. produced by the League, three temperance anthems, transcriptions of nine anti-alcohol stories, and 12 pro-temperance cartoons. In addition, six entries from the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, published between 1925 and 1930, offer the Temperance perspective on communion wine, whiskey production, and alcohol use in China.