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.

We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement

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A "National Registry of Historic Places Travel Itinerary" covering 42 places of significance with regard to the postwar African-American civil rights movement. Churches, colleges, private homes, places of business, neighborhoods, and government offices, primarily located in the South, are each described in 300-word entries illustrated with one or two photographs. An introductory 5,000-word essay offers a narrative history of the movement with annotations to specific sites. Focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, with no attempt to cover civil rights struggles of groups other than African Americans. A few sites cover events and persons active prior to the 1950s, such as Ida B. Wells's home in Chicago and the W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington, MA.

Users can access sites from a map of the U.S. or by a list organized by states. Information for visiting each site is also provided, as is a list of 39 related websites and a 34-title bibliography. The site's creators note that the places were nominated by states and thus "do not represent a systematic effort to survey, identify, and list all important civil rights sites in the National Register." A useful way to introduce students to civil rights history.

Heading West and Touring West

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This site is home to two related exhibits about the exploration and settlement of the American West. "Heading West" is a collection of 15 maps produced between 1540 and 1900 and divided into five categories: imagining, exploring, settling, mining, and traveling. A 700-word essay introduces the exhibit and each image is accompanied by 50-400 words of explanation. The site links to 16 other sites about exploration and maps of the West. "Touring West" is a collection of materials about performers who toured the west in the 19th century. It is divided into five sections: travel, abolitionists, railroads, recitals, and heroics. Visitors will find 3 images in each section and 50-400 words of explanation. The images include prints and photographs of performers, programs, and promotional posters. An introductory essay of 500-words describes the collection. The site offers 15 links to sites about performance. Both exhibits will be useful to those interested in the West, performance, or search of illustrations.

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.

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.

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Rare Books c. 1820-1910

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This American Memory website traces the history of the Upper Midwest (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) from the 17th century to the early 20th century, through 138 volumes drawn from the Library of Congress General Collection and the Rare Books and Special Collection Division. Selected works include first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, and colonial archival documents that depict the region's land and resources, cross-cultural encounters, experiences of pioneers and missionaries, soldiers, immigrants, reformers, growth of communities, and development of local culture and society. Each work is available in full-text transcription or page image, and is accompanied by notes giving the title, author, publication information, and a 300–350 word summary of the contents.

The site also offers a 2,000-word essay on the history of the Upper Midwest that covers the discovery, exploration, settlement, and development of the region from pre-contact to the early 20th century; a regional map dated 1873; links to more than 40 related websites; and a bibliography of nine related works, three of which are ideal for younger readers. The site can be searched by keyword and browsed by author, subject, and title. For those interested in the history of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region, this site offers some informative resources.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902)

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The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper was published from 1841 to 1955 and was revived for a short time from 1960 to 1963. This website covers the period from October 26, 1841, to December 31, 1902, representing half of the Eagle's years of publication.

Approximately 147,000 pages of newspaper, in various digital formats, are available. Access can be gained either by date of issue, keyword, or by eight subjects (African American history, Bridges, Crime, Draft Riot, Spanish American War, Women and Women's Suffrage, Arts and Entertainment, and Holidays). A timeline contains detailed information about the creation and development of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. For an overview, users can browse the newspaper in five-year increments.

The Uses & Abuses of the Constitution

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Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life has released a special issue on the United States Constitution. It provides a roundtable discussion of several questions concerning the uses and abuses of the Constitution in contemporary American political affairs. The eight essays are divided into four sections: Electoral College, The Clinton Impeachment, The Second Amendment, and Women and the Constitution.

The Bush vs. Gore controversy is tackled by distinguished professor Rogers Smith, while other leading scholars such as Jack Rakove and Linda Kerber address the role of the Constitution in landmark cases, the Clinton impeachment, the gun control debate, and the rights of women. The essays are a readable length, between 2,500 and 3,500 words, and offer a "common-place" for academic and non-academic readers alike.