The Franklin County Publication Archives Index

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This resource was designed for researchers and genealogists interested in Franklin County, MA, or social history in the late 19th century. It provides more than 12,000 articles from January 1870 to September 1873, organized by a full-text index. Gathered from the Greenfield Courier and Gazette, the articles are searchable by subject, and address topics such as African Americans, birth control, crime, cults, immigration, food, and bicycling.

The articles were chosen according to the interests of the site creator and emphasize social history and daily life. Information is also available on local court cases, cosmetics, fashion, and wife abuse. Article lengths vary from a few words to more than 700 words, but most are about 40 words. There are some explanatory comments and links within the text that provide biographical information of individuals and descriptions of 19th-century terminology, celebrations, or illnesses. The articles have been transcribed; original documents are not viewable. A valuable resource.

Red White Blue & Brimstone: New World Literature and the American Millennium

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An exhibit of 101 images with a 10,000-word essay that tracks the influence of the Book of Revelations' apocalyptic vision of history in shaping conceptions of America and its destiny for religious zealots and others from the colonial era to the present. With images primarily from published texts—covers, title pages, illustrations, and relevant pages of writing—the exhibit is divided into 14 chronological sections, each opening with a quote from Revelations and detailing its relevance in successive historical periods. The exhibit begins with the period of the English Reformation, when John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, exported to America, related contemporary political events to scripture and established a timeline that proved influential over the next 250 years. The site covers beliefs that American Indians were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; Cotton Mather's sermons as the culmination of a century of speculation about America's place in the apocalyptic scheme; early nationalist ambitions as fulfilling prophecy; and the influence of Revelations on Thomas Jefferson. The site also looks at William Miller's numerologically-based predictions of the end of the world in 1843; millennial movements in the antebellum era; urban exposÎs that conceived of American cities as present-day incarnations of Babylon; and 20th-century anti-Semitic thought. Well organized, the exhibit provides a useful introduction to students of American religion and culture of the persistence of the power of the Book of Revelations, but exaggerates its importance with the odd claim that no other book has "produced a more profound vision of America's hopes, duties, dreams, and destiny."

Lionel Hampton: His Life and Legacy

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A tribute to jazz great Lionel Hampton, this site explains the long friendship between a university and a musician (after whom the University of Idaho named the Lionel Hampton School of Music). The site includes a 1,000-word biography of Hampton, as well as a timeline of his relationship to the school. Also included are a gallery of 23 photographs and a collection of nine videos of Hampton performing and conducting teaching sessions. A PDF version of Hampton's discography rounds out the collection.

Premonition of Death

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Question

Did President Lincoln actually foretell his death to a reporter the day before he was killed?

Answer

Lincoln's former law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, who accompanied him as a bodyguard on his train ride through Baltimore at the beginning of his presidency and remained as a friend and occasional bodyguard until Lincoln's death, wrote that he was among the "two or three persons present" when the president related a disturbing dream he had "only a few days before his assassination." Lamon's account appeared in a book of anecdotal reminiscences compiled by Lamon's daughter and published in 1895 two years after his death. Some of the writings had appeared previously in newspapers, others came from Lamon's letters and an unpublished manuscript. Lamon presented Lincoln's account of the dream, he wrote, "as nearly in his own words as I can, from notes which I made immediately after its recital."

Lincoln admitted that he did not believe in dreams

In this account, Lincoln began by commenting on the abundance of dreams in the Bible and asserting, "If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days God and His angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams." In answer to a question put to him by his wife, Lincoln admitted that he did not believe in dreams, but he went on nevertheless to allude to a recent dream that "has haunted me ever since." Prodded by Mrs. Lincoln to continue, the president related that "about ten days ago" he had gone to bed late after he had stayed up "waiting for important dispatches from the front." As he began to dream, he experienced "a death-like stillness about me." Hearing the sounds of subdued sobs, Lincoln walked downstairs in search of the "mournful sounds of distress," but encountered no living person until he entered the East Room, where he found "a sickening surprise": a covered corpse resting on a catafalque, surrounded by soldiers, with mourners gazing at the body and weeping. "'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers," Lincoln related in Lamon's account, continuing, "'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!'" Lincoln then stated that he awoke soon after in response to a "loud burst of grief from the crowd," did not sleep again that night due to the dream, and "have been strangely annoyed by it since." Lamon further related that at a later encounter Lincoln insisted to him that he was not the corpse on the catafalque, a claim that has prompted political scientist Dwight G. Anderson to speculate that the dead president in the dream, in fact, was George Washington and that Washington's assassin was Lincoln himself. Washington, in Anderson's view, "provided Lincoln with an imaginary father whom he both emulated and defied," while Lincoln's haunting guilt "provided the psychological basis for Lincoln's refoundation of political authority in the United States."

Lincoln nevertheless alluded to a recent dream that "has haunted me ever since."

Yet historians Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher have cited internal inconsistencies and external evidence regarding Lamon's account that lead them to question its veracity. Lamon stated that the incident had occurred only a few days prior to the assassination, yet within Lincoln's monologue he related at one point that the dream occurred "the other night" and also "about ten days ago." The Fehrenbachers pointed out that although Lincoln stated in the account that on the night of the dream he "had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front," during the period of March 24 to April 9, he in fact had been at the front, rather than in the White House. In addition, there was no contemporaneous account of the dream following the assassination. No one mentioned it in the voluminous writings of the period, not Mary Lincoln, Lamon, anyone else at the supposed telling of the dream, or anyone to whom those who heard it may have relayed it. Despite these seeming inconsistencies, the Fehrenbachers note that Lamon's account of the dream has been quoted as fact by a number of respected authors.

Bibliography

Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865. Edited by Dorothy Lamon Teillard. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, comp. and ed., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Dwight G. Anderson, "Quest for Immortality: A Theory of Abraham Lincoln's Political Psychology." In The Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History, edited by Gabor S. Boritt and Norman O. Forness. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Prosperity and Thrift: Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy

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This exhibit assembles a wide assortment of materials from the 1920s, items loosely related to the prosperity of the Coolidge years and the rise of a mass consumer economy. The collection includes more than 400 documents, images, and audio and video clips on subjects ranging from automobiles, consumer goods, department stores, families, Motion Picture News, and the National Negro Business League, to politics.

An introductory essay provides valuable background information on the Coolidge administration with additional insight on the social and cultural context of the era. An alphabetized guide to people, organizations, and topics includes definitions and brief descriptions. This sort of material has not been widely available, and this collection is extremely valuable as a resource on the development of mass consumption.

William P. Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz

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Writer-photographer William P. Gottlieb (1917–2006) documented the New York and Washington, D.C. jazz scene from 1938 to 1948 in more than 1,600 photographs. During the course of his career, Gottlieb took portraits of prominent jazz musicians—including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, and Benny Carter—and legendary venues, such as 52nd Street, the Apollo Theatre, Cafe Society, the Starlight Roof, and Zanzibar. The site also features approximately 170 related articles by Gottlieb from Down Beat magazine; 16 photographs accompanied by Gottlieb's audio commentary on various assignments; a 4,300-word biography based on oral histories; and a 31-title bibliography. Extremely valuable for jazz fans, music historians, musicians, and those interested in urban popular culture.

Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875

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An ambitious attempt to digitize 19th-century American fiction as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography, American Fiction, 1815–1875, this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. At present, the website offers close to 3,000 texts by 1,456 authors. These include the well known, such as Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain as well as hundreds of less well-known authors. Topics include slavery, reform, education, politics, love, children, and war. Close to 800 have been fully edited and SGML-encoded so that users may access chapter and story divisions through table of content hyperlinks. The remaining texts can be read either as facsimiles of original pages or in unedited transcriptions. The ability to perform single word and phrase searches on all material in the database—whether fully encoded or not—is powerful.

Touring Turn-of-the-Century America

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The Detroit Publishing Company mass produced photographic images—especially color postcards, prints, and albums—for the American market from the late 1890s to 1924. This collection offers more than 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies and about 300 color photolithographs from this company. It also includes images taken prior to the company's formation by landscape photographer William Henry Jackson, who became the company's president in 1898. Jackson's work documenting western sites influenced the conservation movement. Although many images were taken in eastern locations, other areas of the U.S., the Americas, and Europe are represented. The collection specializes in views of buildings, streets, colleges, universities, natural landmarks, and resorts, as well as copies of paintings. Nearly 300 photographs were taken in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. About 900 Mammoth Plate Photographs include views of Hopi peoples and their crafts and landscapes along several railroad lines in the 1880s and 1890s.

USC Archival Research Center

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These varied collections document the history of Los Angeles and southern California. "Digital Archives" offer more than 126,000 photographs, maps, manuscripts, texts, and sound recordings in addition to exhibits. Nearly 1,200 images of artifacts from early Chinese American settlements in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara are available, as is the entire run of El Clamor Publico, the city's main Spanish-language newspaper from the 1850s. Photographs document Japanese American relocation during World War II and photographs, documents, and oral history audio files record Korean-American history. The archive also includes Works Projects Administration Land Use survey maps and Auto Club materials. A related exhibit, "Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future", offers collections on additional topics, including discovery and settlement, California missions, electric power, "murders, crimes, and scandals," city neighborhoods, cemeteries, Disneyland, African American gangs, and the Red Car lines.

Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read

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This site is devoted to the examination of 19th-century children in America: what they read, what was written about them, and what was written for them. "Children" includes letters, adoption advertisements, paper rewards for obedient children, 24 contemporary articles for and about children, and 14 photographs, as well as scrapbooks and exercise books. "Magazines" features illustrations, articles, editorials, and letters from 12 different children's magazines, with cover and masthead images from 173 different volumes. "Books" includes 22 articles on children and reading (including one warning children to avoid mental gluttony by not reading too much), and the full text of 29 books, including the American Spelling Book and grammar primers. Although the site is not searchable, the documents are indexed and arranged by subject. The site includes eight analytical essays written by modern scholars, a timeline covering the years 1789 to 1873 (with entries covering subjects like magazines, books, historical events, and people), and eight separate bibliographies. A "puzzle drawer" includes word games played by 19th-century children.