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.

Today in History Web Resources

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Gateway to more than 100 links, most of which provide visitors with the capability to search for events that occurred on specific days. "Specialty sites" link to resources dealing with specific ethnic groups, entertainment forms, politics, professions, regions, and countries. Users can find hundreds of holidays, birthdays of famous people, and calendar-related quotations, as well as links to events involving African Americans, American Indians, popular culture, sports, radical history, psychology, health, and the literary world. No depth, mostly trivia, but still of use to students and teachers who need to check a date.

The Capital and the Bay, ca. 1600-1925

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This site offers published books selected from the Library of Congress' general and rare book collections in an "attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century." Contains 139 books, a few by well-known figures, such as Edwin Booth, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, but most by little-known residents and visitors to the region. Includes memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, books of letters, journals, poems, addresses, reports, speeches, travel books, sermons, books of photographs, and promotional brochures. In addition to Washington, D.C., the cities of Baltimore, MD, and Richmond, VA, are featured.

A special presentation entitled "Pictures of People and Places from the Collection" consists of selected illustrations organized in three sections of 10 images each on Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The site includes 10 works dealing with slavery—a number of which were written by former slaves—and approximately 10 works dealing with encounters between whites and Native Americans. Includes links to 22 related sites. A valuable collection for those studying ways that Washington, D.C., and neighboring regions have been described in print over several centuries.

National Security Action Memoranda of John F. Kennedy

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This site provides access to 272 facsimiles of National Security Action (NSA) memoranda written by President John F. Kennedy or by McGeorge Bundy, his NSA advisor. The memoranda are 50-200 words each and cover subjects such as the training of Cuban nationals, the distribution of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Berlin, civil defense, and a "Review of the Iranian Situation." The documents are indexed by NSA numbers from February 1961 to November 1963. More documents will be added as they are declassified. The index provides a one to five-word description of the subject of each memo. There is a 100-word introduction to the collection, but no contextual material or annotations. The site cannot be searched by subject. Teachers and students in search of primary source material about foreign policy in the Kennedy Administration will find this site useful.

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.

Private Passions, Public Legacy: Paul Mellon's Personal Library

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This exhibit presents 60 items from Paul Mellon's private collection of material relating to the history of Virginia. The entire collection, 447 items, is housed at the University of Virginia. A 600-word essay provides biographical information on Mellon and his bequest. The exhibit is arranged in six sections, from "Exploring the New World" through "Slavery and the Civil War" to "Opening New Vistas". "Acquiring Virginia's Legacy" presents six highlights of the collection and a 1,400-word essay explaining its significance. A 150-word explanatory essay accompanies each image. The exhibit includes facsimiles of 11 books, seven prints, seven letters, five objects of ephemera, and five maps. Among the ephemera is a myriopticon, a rolled painting that viewers can "unroll" to view scenes from the Civil War. The site is primarily interesting as an exhibit and may not be particularly useful for researchers except as an introduction to the Mellon collection.

A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion, 1820-1890

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Focusing on 19th-century American maritime history and westward expansion, this collection of more than 160 documents from the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library provides diverse materials to explore themes such as the California Gold Rush, whaling, maritime business, migration and immigration, women's role in the West, and interactions between European migrants and native inhabitants. This Ameritech Award-winning site includes more than 25 photographs, more than 20 letters, logbooks from ships, published travel narratives, paintings, maps, and nautical charts. Provides four essays published previously in a Mystic Seaport publication, including an 1866 newspaper essay assessing Honolulu as a whaling port by youthful journalist Mark Twain.

The site is searchable by subject, name, title, and keyword, and includes an annotated bibliography of hundreds of documents in the Seaport's collections, and of 65 secondary sources. Valuable for those studying the American West, maritime history, business history, and the history of coastal and island localities.

Hall of Black Achievement Gallery

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A collection of 30 biographical essays, ranging in length from 200 to 600 words, on African Americans, Cape Verdeans, and Hispanics of African descent who have accomplished significant achievements. Covers figures from Revolutionary America to the 1990s, though most of those included lived in the 19th century. All essays include portraits and links to relevant sites; 21 of the essays contain audio clips that allow visitors to hear the essays read. The selected subjects include war heroes, writers, statesmen, artists, activists, inventors, journalists, business people, and sports figures. Valuable for young users especially because of the audio files, but also may be useful to older students for the links provided.

Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History

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History Link is an encyclopedia of the history of Seattle and King County, WA. A timeline of 180 "Milestones" connects visitors to 500-word historical essays on topics in Seattle-area history from before 1851 to 2000. "People's Histories" presents roughly 150 memoirs and oral histories (1000 to 16,000 words) of Seattle residents of diverse class and ethnic backgrounds, including Squamish and Nordic. There are 18 "Magic Lantern" photographic essays ranging from one image and 40 words to 50 images and 300 words. Special collections have been arranged in 17 folios, which cover topics such as Martin Luther King's 1961 visit to the city and the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in 1999. The WTO archive contains 19 articles of 100 to 2000 words on the history of radicalism in Seattle and the WTO protests of 1999 and 2000. This archive also contains 48 photographs of the protests taken by History Link staff.

Visitors may take four Cybertours of the city in which they click on sections of a map and connect to one or two images and 300-word descriptions of local history. "Then and Now" contains 49 before-and-after photographs of Seattle landmarks with 300-word essays on the history of each location. The site is easy to navigate and can be searched by subject. In March 2003, HistoryLink added a database for all of Washington state. It is an excellent resource for all levels of scholars interested in the history of the Northwest or oral history.