Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

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Sheet music, I'm Going Back to Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1913
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This American Memory project, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Duke University, provides a window on American culture between 1850 and 1920 by offering more than 3,000 pieces of sheet music from Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. These musical pieces represent American history and culture through a variety of music types including minstrel, protest, sentimental, patriotic, and political songs, bel canto, spirituals, dance music, vaudeville, and musical pieces.

The collection is particularly strong in antebellum Southern music, Confederate imprints, and Civil War music and includes a large collection of piano marches, opera excerpts, waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles as well.

In addition to the music and lyrics, each item includes an image of sheet music cover illustrations, which provide further perspective on contemporary ideas about politics, patriotism, race, religion, and sentiment. Descriptive remarks, including notes on the composer, publication information, repository, and a transcription of lyrics accompany each item.

The site also offers a 750-word essay; a link to Duke University's home page for sheet music collections; a 1,000-word essay that defines sheet music as a cultural medium and outlines the history of music publishing in the U.S.; a bibliography of more than 150 works on the history of sheet music, composers, musicians, and performers in the U.S.; and links to five other American Memory collections with related materials.

The site is searchable by keyword and browseable by composer name and subject. Students and teachers researching American cultural history or the cultural significance of music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will find this site useful.

Florida Heritage Collection

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Graphic, Florida Heritage Collection
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This project provides a collection of more than 280 digitized materials documenting the history of Florida from pre-contact to the present. It includes materials relating to Florida history, culture, arts, literature, and social sciences in a number of major thematic areas, including Native American and minority populations, exploration and development, tourism, natural environment, and regional interests. These materials are drawn from the archives, special collections, and libraries of the 10 state universities in the Florida system.

Items include family papers, local history books and booklets, diaries, advertising materials, and Civil War letters, business records, maps, and photographs. Many of the materials are regional or local in scope.

The site also includes an extensive (5000-word) Florida history narrative timeline from pre-contact (before 1492) to the present. A user guide and tutorial are provided, and the documents are searchable by county name, keyword, subject, author, or title. The search engine has an option for listing either electronic holdings only or all collection holdings under a particular subject. Entries in the electronic catalog include the archive in which the original is located as well as a 20-word description of the item and its contents.

Note that a few links are still under construction with no completion date indicated. The site is ideal for researching Florida's state and local history.

Earliest Voices: A Gallery from the Vincent Voice Library

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Photo, William Jennings Bryan delivering the Cross of Gold speech...
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A collection of 19 audio clips of speeches recorded by seven turn-of-the-century public figures—William Jennings Bryan, Eugene V. Debs, Thomas Edison, Samuel Gompers, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Booker T. Washington. The clips last between one and seven minutes each; all but one were made between 1900 and 1920. Subjects of the speeches include politics, reform, socialism, isolationism, trusts, the gold standard, U.S. military force, labor issues, and race relations. The site includes transcripts of the speeches as well as 150-word biographies and three photographs of each speaker.

Through digitization, technicians have improved the sound quality of these recordings, some of which had become nearly inaudible. An opportunity for users to experience the oratorical powers of influential men from the early 20th century.

New Jersery History Partnership Project

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Portrait, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Huntington, NJ History Partnership Project
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This project was designed to teach U.S. history through New Jersey history. Currently, materials are organized under two themes. "American Revolution" contains 10 lectures and nine lesson plans, seven images of New Jersey historic sites such as Liberty Hall and Morven, 47 primary source documents on topics such as women, African Americans, the state constitution, the Quakers, and the Lenape, seven video clips on topics such as republican motherhood, the Great Awakening, and the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and an interactive exercise on the 1776-1777 campaign in New Jersey. Lesson plan topics include revolutionary heroes, African American quest for freedom, and the Battle of Trenton. A timeline integrating U.S. and state history events from 1734 to 1807 is also included.

A less extensive thematic section "Market Revolution" offers a lecture, a lesson plan, and a video clip on New Jersey's transportation revolution, seven primary source documents that include an 1839 map of New Jersey and a map of the Morris Canal, and a timeline. Links are provided to three partner institutions, eight history centers or organizations, and 30 New Jersey history centers, organizations, or historic sites. This website provides useful resources for those teaching the 18th- or early 19th-century history of New Jersey.

Vietnam War Era Ephemera Collection

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Cover, Helix, Vol. 2, no. 3 (October 20, 1967), Walt Crowley, U of WA
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This small but interesting archive of 232 items "contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. They reflect the social environment and political activities of the youth movement in Seattle during that period." The collection can be browsed in 24 thematic categories that include Vietnam protests, human rights, gay rights, feminism and women's issues, racism, socialism and labor, farm workers, peace candidates, environment, religion, fanaticism, "Age of Aquarius," civil liberties, freedom of speech, anarchy, communism, pro-Vietnam War, and Palestinian protests. Basic keyword and advanced searches are available. This website is a useful resource for researching the history of campus protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

Benjamin Franklin: In His Own Words

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Mezzotint, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, 1763, Edward Fisher, LoC
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This exhibition "indicates the depth and breadth of Franklin's public, professional, and scientific accomplishments," offering documents, letters, books, broadsides, and cartoons. Eight sections exploring periods or aspects of Franklin's life are focused around items from the Library's collections with accompanying explanatory text.

Topics include Franklin's role in events prior to the Revolution, his role in the Continental Congress, his role as a diplomat in Paris and in negotiating the Treaty of Paris, his role in the early republic as President of Pennsylvania and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, his life as a scientist and inventor, and his activities as a printer and writer. There are more than 60 documents and other items available in the exhibition. There is also a Benjamin Franklin chronology from 1706 to 1790, a bibliography with 11 books and seven books for young readers, and four links to related websites. A good starting point for researching Franklin's life or the political and diplomatic history of colonial America or the early United States.

Library of Congress: Webcasts

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Photo, introductory image, Library of Congress Webcasts
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This video archive assembles Library of Congress webcasts in one easily accessible location. The biography and history section offers 159 webcasts of talks by historians, writers, commentators, and political figures, including historians Joseph J. Ellis, John Hope Franklin, Jill Lepore, Lawrence W. Levine, David McCullough, and Robin Shields and writers and commentators David Brooks and Andrea Mitchell. The wide variety of subjects discussed include Vietnam, Iraq, Abraham Lincoln, early American printers and the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor, the national character, early African American life, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The section on government has 67 webcasts by current and former government officials, such as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, George Shultz, and David Weinberger. Subjects include intellectual freedom, global democratic governance, and guardianship and the First Amendment. Moreover, the site offers 56 webcasts on culture and the performing arts and 305 webcasts on poetry and literature. There are also sections on religion, science and technology, and education. This website is a useful resource for information on historical subjects from the historians and authors who have written about them.

The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at UNC

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Letter, John and Ebenezer Pettigrew. . . , May 4, 1795, page 1, True and. . .
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This site offers 121 edited documents written by students at the University of North Carolina between 1795 and 1868. Documents include letters, speeches, diary excerpts, compositions, and poems. Annotated transcriptions and images of handwritten pages are provided. The collection can be explored through 15 essays divided into six chapters, each covering a different period with links to the associated primary documents. Essay titles include "Early Student Rebellions," "Slaves and Servants," "Writing in the Academy," and "The Debating Societies."

The collection can also be browsed in its entirety or by name, topic, events, organizations, places, publications, genres, or authors. The collection can be searched by keyword or advanced search. Four introductory essays offer an overview of the collection as well as short essays on the value of documentary histories and possibilities for future research. Links to 20 published sources are provided as well as a bibliography of source materials. See also Documenting the American South.

Madison: Celebrating 150 Years

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Photo, Irene Castle in Uniform, WWI or later, Madison: Celebrating 150 Years
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In 2006, Madison, WI, celebrated the 150th anniversary of its incorporation as a city. To mark the occasion, this website features 6,952 images, several articles and documents, maps and information on Madison's buildings, and links to virtual exhibits, entreating users to investigate Madison's past. This diverse collection of materials highlights both the experiences of the American Indian groups that had lived in the Madison area for many thousands of years, as well as those of the Yankee, English, Irish, German and Scandinavian settlers who began to arrive in 1837.

Visitors can view a map of American Indian village and mound sites, built for burial and ceremonial purposes, which are still visible around the city today. Also available are the recollections of George W. Stoner, one of the first settlers to arrive in Madison, through which one can learn about the construction of the city's first buildings and businesses, its first election, and its first suicide. Moving into the 20th century, visitors can also learn of the Federal Government's attempts to enforce Prohibition in Madison, which one official described as "queen of the bootleggers." This website is useful for those interested not only in Wisconsin history, but also in the history of urbanization in the United States more generally.

Literature and Culture of the American 1950s

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Image for Literature and Culture of the American 1950s
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This collection of more than 100 primary texts, essays, biographical sketches, obituaries, book reviews, and partially annotated links explores the cultural, intellectual, and political trends of the 1950s. Organized alphabetically and according to lesson plans, this eclectic collection of readings is structured around a few landmark texts and topics, including McCarthyism and anticommunism, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960), William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), feminism, Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and conformity in universities.

Materials include substantial excerpts from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (1959) and the Encyclopedia of the American Left, in addition to retrospective analyses of the postwar period.