Women in Journalism

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Forty-four "full-life" interviews with American women journalists are available on this website. Interviewees include women who began their careers in the 1920s through the present. Print, radio, and television journalism all are represented.

Interviews address difficulties women have encountered entering the profession and how their presence has changed the field. They also discuss political life, famous people interviewed, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, and social, ethical, and technological changes of the 20th century.

A preface and an explanation of methodology introduce the site. Each interview is linked to a photograph and brief biographical sketch of the interviewee. Interviews range from one to 12 sessions and each session is about 20 pages long. Interviews are indexed but not searchable.

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963

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This well-organized website offers more than 900 items related to Hull House—including newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, letters, memoirs, reports, maps, and photographs. Materials are embedded within a clear historical narrative that illuminates the life of Jane Addams in addition to the history and legacy of Chicago's Hull House.

Users can search the site or focus on any of the 100 topics arranged in 12 chapters that begin with settlement life in Chicago in the 1880s and end with the movement after Addams's death. Topics include the reform climate in Chicago; activism within the movement; the immigrant experience of race, citizenship, and community; education within the settlement house; and cultural and leisure activities at Hull House and in Chicago. The site provides a timeline, featuring a pictorial biography of Addams; a geographical section that includes maps of Chicago; and an image section, with 12 photograph sections and essays.

Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in 19th-Century America

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These full-text transcriptions and page images of 163 "Sunday school books" address religious instruction for youth published in the U.S. between 1815 and 1865. Materials include texts used by Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and other denominations and are searchable by subject, author, title, and keyword.

Books are categorized according to nine types: "Advice Books, Moral Tales"; "Animals, Natural History"; "Child Labor, Orphans, Poverty"; "Death, Dying, Illness"; "Holidays"; "Immigrants"; "Slavery, African Americans, Native Americans"; "Temperance, Tobacco"; and "Travel, Missionaries." There are 67 author biographies and an essay on Sunday school books. This collection offers valuable materials for studying antebellum culture, American religious history, print culture, and education.

Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture

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This well-designed, comprehensive website explores Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as an American cultural phenomenon. "Pre-Texts, 1830–1852" provides dozens of texts, songs, and images from the various genres Stowe drew upon, including Christian texts, sentimental culture, anti-slavery texts, and minstrel shows. The section on the novel includes Stowe's preface, multiple versions of the text, playable songs from the novel, and Stowe's defense against criticism.

A third section focuses on responses from 1852 to 1930, including 25 reviews, more than 400 articles and notes, as well as nearly 100 responses from African Americans and almost 70 from pro-slavery adherents. "Other Media" explores theatrical and film versions, children's books, songs, poetry, and games. Fifteen interpretive exhibits challenge users to investigate how slavery and race were defined and redefined as well as analyze how various characters assumed a range of political and social meanings.

South Texas Border, 1900-1920: The Robert Runyon Collection

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These more than 8,000 images document the history and development of South Texas and the border. The collection features the life's work of commercial photographer Robert Runyon (1881–1968). Topics include the U.S. military presence in the area prior to and during World War I and the growth and development of the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1900s.

A special section presents nine of Runyon's 350 photographs of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) in Matamoros, Monterrey, Ciudad Victoria, and the Texas border area from 1913 through 1916. "Maps of the Lower Rio Grande" offers a number of topographical and military maps depicting the region. The website also offers essays on the revolution and on Runyon.

Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

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This collection of more than 1,230 images depicts the enslavement of Africans, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and slave life in the New World. Images are arranged in 18 categories, including pre-Colonial Africa, capture of slaves, maps, slave ships, plantation scenes, physical punishment, music, free people of color, family life, religion, marketing, and emancipation.

Many of the images are from 17th- and 18th-century books and travel accounts, but some are taken from sketches within slave narratives, Harper's Weekly, and Monthly Magazine. Reference information and brief comments, often an excerpt from original captions, accompany each image. Although there is no interpretation or discussion of historical relevance, these images are valuable for learning about representations of slavery in American slave societies, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America.