Band Music from the Civil War Era

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Logo, Band Music from the Civil War
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Examples of brass band music from the 1850s through the 19th century. "Bands of this kind served in the armies of both the North and the South during the Civil War, in the field as well as for the entertainment of the officers." Including both printed and manuscript music, the collection features more than 700 musical compositions, as well as eight full-score modern editions, 19 recorded examples of brass band music in performance, and a gallery of 37 photographs taken of bands during the Civil War.

Also provides a 10,000-word "Special Presentation" entitled, "The American Brass Band Movement: A Historical Overview," that includes 15 drawings and photographs. Useful primarily to music specialists, the site may also be of interest to those studying the popular culture of the Civil War era.

Baseball Cards, 1887-1914

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Logo, Baseball Cards from 1887-1914
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A collection of 2,100 early baseball cards, featuring more than 1,000 major and minor league players who represented teams in 13 leagues and 75 cities. Includes legendary players, such as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, and Walter Johnson, in addition to managers and owners, such as Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Charles Comiskey. Provides a nine-title bibliography. Searchable by keyword for material written on the cards, and by name, team, league, and city. Primarily of interest to sports historians, the cards, originally distributed as advertising material in cigarette packs, can also be used in the study of commercial advertising and printing processes.

Bartleby, Great Books Online

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Logo, Bartleby.com
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This well-organized and useful site provides full-text versions of over 200 classic American and European literary works, as well as reference materials for scholarly use and readers' enjoyment. The site is divided into four sections. The Reference category includes 27 reference works, from dictionaries to Gray's Anatomy. The Verse section offers over 60 collections from poets like William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman. The Fiction category provides over 75 works from authors like Leo Tolstoy, Agatha Christie, and Charles Dickens. And the Nonfiction section includes over 30 works from figures such as 18th century women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, writings by Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The site is remarkably easy to navigate and provides keyword author/subject/title/phrase indices for searching among works. The individual works are also searchable by index and table of contents. This site is ideal for researching the lives and works of many prominent literary figures.

Material History of American Religion Project

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Logo, The Material History of American Religion Project
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In 1996, eight historians of religion and three advisors embarked on a five-year project to illuminate ways that material culture and economic history can be used in the study of American religion, a discipline traditionally dominated by ideas. The site presents annotated photographs of 39 objects, including an evangelical coffee bar, chewing gum packed with biblical verses, artwork in a family Bible, and a church stick used to awaken sleeping congregants. Thirty-eight documents from the 1850s to the 1960s, range from an 1854 book steward report for the African Methodist Episcopal Church to a chain e-mail from the 1990s. The site also includes 23 essays and interviews by the project's participants on such eclectic subjects as "Material Christianity," religious architecture, how Catholic practice has shaped children's experiences, the role of costume in the Salvation Army, how to practice economic history of religion, and "what makes a Jewish home Jewish." Includes eight issues of the project's newsletter; a bibliography of 22 titles; and links to 18 related sites. This site will be especially valuable to university students interested in evaluating the value of material culture scholarship in religious studies, students of economic history curious about applying their discipline to non-traditional fields of inquiry, and scholars within the field of material culture and the broad discipline of American cultural history.

Hagley Digital Archives

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Logo, Hagley Digital Archives
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With a focus on business history and its connections to larger cultural, social, and political trends, the Hagley archive presents digital images on a range of topics, including "industrial processes; commercial landscapes; marketing and advertising; transportation facilities and methods; development of information technology; and, the social and cultural aspects of work and leisure." Pictured are bridges, dams, coalmines, and the testing and manufacturing of gunpowder and explosives, nylon, steel, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes. Also included are images of historic buildings, homes, and gardens in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

There are some images of advertisements, packaging, company brochures, trade catalogs, pamphlets, internal documents, letters, and other ephemera from various industrial enterprises. It includes, for example—under "nylon"—not only shots of machinery, product samples and images of the stages of melting and forming polymers, but also such treasures as ads and publicity shots of women modeling nylon stockings and swimsuits (including "Miss Chemistry" at the 1939 New York World's Fair), and news photos of the riotous early sales of nylon stockings.

Other topics include the early development and use of computers by Univac, IBM, and Remington Rand, aerial photos of the Mid-Atlantic seaboard; automobiles; Lukens Steel Company; ship building; and coal mining.

17th-Century Colonial New England

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Logo, 17th Century New England
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Offers more than 235 annotated links, within 20 categories, to documents and materials about the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, and more broadly, 17th-century New England. Categories include primary sources, bibliographies, references for young readers, teaching materials, museums, Native Americans, witchcraft, religious heterodoxies, and Hollywood versions of history. In addition to links, the site's creator, a novelist and descendant of accused witch Rebecca Nurse, provides nine documents from the trials; an account of one witchcraft trial written by Cotton Mather; four documents from Salem court records; an annotated bibliography with 26 titles; a table listing more than 200 people accused of witchcraft with their place of residence, year of accusation, and jurisdiction; and a discussion of historical inaccuracies in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and the recent film version. As the site is checked regularly for dead links, it can be a valuable gateway to sites on 17th-century American cultures, religions, and social life.

Origins of American Animation

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Logo, Origins of American Animation
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This site traces the development of early American animation through a collection of 21 animated films from the years 1900 to 1921. The films, including several media--clay, puppet, cut-out animation, and pen drawings--indicate the "connection between newspaper comic strips and early animated films." In addition, these "tiny, often satiric, films tell much about the social fabric of World War I-era America." Films can be viewed in RealMedia, MPEG, or Quick Time formats. Part of the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, drawn from collections in the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

Finding Precedent: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

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Portrait, Andrew Johnson
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This archive provides material from Harper's Weekly relating to the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson, including 90 editorials by George William Curtis and 47 articles by other writers. There are 27 political cartoons, 17 by Thomas Nast, and 47 additional illustrations of people and events. The site provides biographical essays (300-500 words) and portraits of 28 major figures in the impeachment. John Adler, Harper's publisher, wrote five essays (100-600 words) to introduce visitors to the site and the political issues affecting the impeachment. There are 24 sections on the arguments involved in the hearings. Within each section, there are between five and 100 articles from Harper's discussing issues such as conspiracy, moral judgment, the New Orleans riot, partisanship, statesmanship, and the tenure of office act. Articles and editorials are also arranged chronologically. An "Impeachment Simulation Game" is provided for use in the classroom. This site is easy to navigate and will be a useful resource for anyone researching Johnson's impeachment or late 19th century politics.

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection

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Photo, Josh and Henry Reed, 1903
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Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, was a legendary fiddler of traditional Virginia Appalachian folk tunes. In 1966 and 1967, folklorist Alan Jabbour recorded Reed's music, and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress makes 184 of these sound recordings available through this American Memory online exhibit. The sound recordings are accompanied by 200-250-word descriptions of the history and origins of each musical piece, along with information regarding the features, genre, instrumentals, performers, location, and date of each recording. The site also includes 19 pages of field notes and images and transcripts listing the songs, including bullet-point notes about Reed's life and musical contributions. There are 69 transcriptions of musical pieces with roughly 150-word descriptive notes on the tune histories and musical features. A 3500-word essay about Reed's life and influence on fiddle music includes eight photographs. A bibliography lists over 200 related scholarly and journalistic publications on Reed's music and folk music in general, and the site also includes a list of approximately 70 musical terms. This site is ideal for investigating American folk culture and music, as well as the 20th-century resurgence of fiddle music.

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942

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Photo, Fisherman in Key West
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From 1937 to 1942, members of the Florida Writers Project, the Florida Music Project, and the Joint Center on Folk Arts of the Works Project Administration documented the wide variety of cultures throughout Florida through the folk songs and folk tales of the African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic peoples living in Florida. The American Memory Project at the Library of Congress now offers a selection of the multiformat ethnographic field collection that represents these diverse cultures. The online exhibit includes 376 sound recordings of folk songs such as blues, fishing boat and railroad gang work songs, children's songs, dance music, and religious music. Each recording includes descriptive information on the duration of the sound clip, where the piece was performed and the performers involved, brief (10-15 words) special notes about the piece, ethnic group(s) represented, language(s) in which the piece was performed, instrumentation, and when and where the piece was created.

The collection also includes 24 "life history" interviews of Floridians from specific ethnic backgrounds, 65 images and transcripts of correspondence, two recording logs, and 25 transcriptions of song texts. Two 2000-word essays on Florida folklife and the Works Project Administration in Florida help to contextualize the online exhibit. Also included are a bibliography of over 120 scholarly works, a list of 18 related websites, and a 1000-word guide to the ethnic and language groups of Florida. Visitors can browse this site by performer, audio or manuscript title, and geographic location. For those interested in folk life and culture, Florida history, and the variety of WPA projects during the New Deal, this easily navigable site is a good resource.