American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920

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Image, American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
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This collection documents the development of vaudeville and other popular entertainment forms from the 1870s to the 1920s. Materials include 334 English and Yiddish playscripts and 146 theater programs and playbills. Sixty-one motion pictures range from animal acts to dance to dramatic sketches. Ten sound recordings feature comic skits, popular music, and a dramatic monologue.

The website also features 143 photos and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of magician Harry Houdini and an essay with links to specific items entitled "Houdini: A Biographical Chronology." Search by keyword or browse the subject and author indexes. The site is linked to the Library of Congress Exhibition Bob Hope and American Variety", that charts the persistence of a vaudeville tradition in later entertainment forms.

Making of America

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Image for Making of America
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Also see the Cornell University branch of the project here.

Together, these two websites provide more than 1.5 million pages of text in a collaborative effort to digitize more than 11,000 volumes and 100,000 journal articles from the 19th century. The websites present full-text access to 32 journals, including literary and political magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The list includes specialized journals as well, such as Scientific American, Manufacturer and Builder, Ladies Repository, and the American Missionary. The websites also offer an abundance of novels and monographs.

A recent addition provides 249 volumes on New York City, some from the early 20th century. At present, the two collections remain separate and must be searched individually. The institutions plan to integrate their sites, however, and to include material from other major research libraries. Access to many "Making of America" texts is also available through the Library of Congress American Memory site, "The Nineteenth Century in Print".

American Transcendentalism Web

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Image for American Transcendentalism Web
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This comprehensive collection presents texts by and about the major figures of American Transcendentalism, a New England intellectual movement that began in the mid-1830s and lasted into the late 1840s. The movement has had a much longer legacy, however, in American literature, philosophy, religion, and political and social reform. Some materials are available on the website; others are provided through links.

Eleven major authors are featured—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Dr. William Ellery Channing, his son William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Amos Bronson Alcott, Jones Very, Christopher Cranch, Orestes Brownson, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Texts are also retrievable according to themes and genre. Resources include more than 100 selections from The Dial, a journal created by the Transcendentalist Club in 1840 that lasted for four years, and informative essays that provide an historic overview.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

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Image for Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
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Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.

Herblock's History: Political Cartoons from the Crash to the Millennium

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Image, "The other ascent into the unknown," Herbert Block, 1965
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The 150 cartoons presented here were drawn between 1929 and 2000 by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Herblock (Herbert Block). Cartoons comment on major events and public issues.

The website also presents an essay by Block on "the cartoon as an opinion medium"; a biographical essay; and 15 caricatures of the cartoonist by well-known colleagues. Cartoons are organized according to 13 chronological sections, with an additional segment devoted to presidents. Brief annotations provide historical context for each image.

A tribute site by the Washington Post, Herblock's longtime employer, offers additional cartoons and essays by Block.

Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley

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Image, Apple II Reference Manual, 1978, Making the Macintosh
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The history of the Macintosh computer is presented on this website. Rather than profile Apple Computer's leader, Steve Jobs, and well-publicized software and hardware developers, materials include 13 interviews with designers, technical writers, Apple employees, a Berkeley user group organizer, and a San Francisco journalist who covered early developments.

In addition, nearly 90 documents from the late 1970s to the present chart company and user group developments, beginning with roots in the 1960s counterculture philosophy. Documents include "From Satori to Silicon Valley," a lecture by Theodore Roszak first delivered in 1985 with afterthoughts added in 2000. There are 13 texts by the first Mac designer, Jef Raskin, press releases and other marketing materials, and texts relating to user groups.

More than 100 images include patent drawings and product photographs.

Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements

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Image, Coca-Cola advertisement, 1952, Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Advertisements
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Highlights of Coca-Cola television advertisements from the Library of Congress Motion Picture archives are exhibited on this site, with 50 commercials, broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage.

There are five examples of stop-motion advertisements from the mid-1950s, 18 experiments with color and lighting for television ads from 1964, and well-known commercials, such as the "Hilltop" commercial featuring the song "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" (1971). Additional resources include the "Mean Joe Greene" commercial (1979); the first "Polar Bear" commercial (1993); the "Snowflake" commercial (1999); and "First Experience," an international commercial filmed in Morocco (1999).

The site also includes a bibliography and links to finding aids for other television commercials at the Library of Congress. While this site is relatively small, it provides a good resource for studying the history of post-World War II consumer culture in terms of content and technique.

Inventing Entertainment: The Early Innovations of the Edison Companies

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Image, Catalog for Edison cylinder records, 1911, Inventing Entertainment
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These materials—early motion pictures from 1891 to 1918, 81 sound recordings from 1913 to 1920, and related materials, such as photographs and original magazine articles—document Thomas Edison's impact on the history of American entertainment. Edison's inventions included the phonograph, the kinetograph motion picture camera, and the kinetoscope motion picture viewer.

Sound recordings are accessible by title and according to six genres: instrumental selections, popular vocals, spoken word, spoken comedy, foreign language and ethnic recordings, and opera and concert recordings. Films are organized by title, chronologically, and according to genres, including actualities (nonfiction films), advertising, animation, drama and adventure, experimental, humorous, trick, and reenactments. Actuality subjects include disasters, expositions, famous people, foreign places, the navy, police and fire departments, railroads, scenic America, sports and leisure, the variety stage, and war. Special pages focus on the life of the inventor and his contribution to motion picture and sound recording technologies.

Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864

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Produced at the Mathew Brady studio, this collection contains more than 725 early photographs, most of them daguerreotypes. The Brady images include portraits of prominent public figures, such as President James K. Polk, Thomas Hart Benton, Thomas Cole, Horace Greeley, and the earliest known images of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.

In addition, the site presents daguerreotypes by African American photographers; architectural views taken around Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD; street scenes of Philadelphia, PA; early portraits by Robert Cornelius; and copies of painted portraits. A short introduction to the daguerreotype medium and a "Timeline of the Daguerrian Era" provide context for the images. A special presentation, "Mirror Images: Daguerreotypes at the Library of Congress," includes photographs from the American Colonization Society, occupational daguerreotypes, portraits, and architectural views. Useful for studying 19th-century photography and visual culture, as well as for viewing some of the earliest American photographs.

Alexander Street Press

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Offering 16 separate databases of digitized materials, this website provides firsthand accounts (diaries, letters, and memoirs) and literary efforts (poetry, drama, and fiction). Twelve databases pertain to American history and culture.

"Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment" offers primary sources documenting cultural interactions from 1534 to 1850. "The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries" draws on more than 400 sources and supplies a day-by-day chronology with links to documents. "Black Thought and Culture" furnishes monographs, speeches, essays, articles, and interviews. "North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories" covers 1840 to the present. "North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950" provides full-text letters and diaries from more than 1,000 women—totaling more than 21,000 documents and approximately 120,000 pages—written between 1675 and 1950.

Five databases present American literary writings: "Latino Literature"; "Black Drama"; "Asian American Drama"; "North American Women's Drama"; and "American Film Scripts Online." In addition, "Oral History Online" provides a reference work with links to texts, audio, and video files. While the databases include previously published documents, many also contain thousands of pages of unpublished material. In addition to keyword searching, the databases provide "semantic indexing"—extensive categorical search capabilities.