Silicon Valley History Online

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Photo, Thin film, Intel Corporation, 2003, Silicon Valley History Online
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This small archive provides more than 850 images from the mid-18th century to the present of the Santa Clara Valley in California. Browse the archive or view images through six thematic groupings: agriculture (91 images); education (147 images); people (467 images); technology (182 items); transportation (125 items); and urban life (78 items). There is some overlap between the collections. Keyword and advanced searches are also available. There are seven lesson plans on the history of the Santa Clara Valley, primarily for high school. Topics include the 1906 earthquake, the history of technology, urban development, the Ohlone Indians, women in Santa Clara County, and transportation.

Western History Photography Collection

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Photo, Black cowboy and horse, c. 1890-1920, Western History Collection
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This combined archive and exhibit contains more than 100,000 images, including photographs, broadsides, posters, maps, advertisements, and other documents. There is a keyword search but no feature for browsing the entire collection. Many of the images can be browsed, however, through nine "galleries," or thematic collections of selected images. "Scenic Rails of the West" is a large exhibit with seven image galleries that include towns, touring, railroads, native culture, and national parks. The "Photos West Classics" gallery is also large and includes the most frequently requested images. Topics include children, saloons, trails and covered wagons, famous Westerners, famous Native Americans, Wild West shows, and Western life. Other galleries include "Railroads," "Building Histories," and "Native American Women." All images are accompanied by a descriptive catalog record and are available for purchase. A learning page (accessed through "news") offers 18 lessons. This website is a valuable source of images on Western figures, culture, environment, politics, and economic development. Teachers of the American West will also find valuable instructional resources.

Turning Points in Wisconsin History

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Photo, Arthur M. Vinje, April 4, 1947
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This website allows visitors to explore the history of Wisconsin through essays, primary source documents, lesson plans, and maps. The main feature is 53 presentations grouped under 10 overall topics: early native peoples; early explorers, traders, and settlers; territory to statehood; immigration and settlement; Civil War era; mining, lumber, and agriculture; Progressive Era; 20th-century wars and conflicts; prosperity, depression, industrialization, and urbanization; and response to 20th-century change. Each topic offers four or more presentations with a short introductory essay; primary sources available on the site; primary sources available elsewhere; and related links.

Documents available on the site include more than 140 books, tracts, pamphlets, or papers; more than 100 images; more than 260 articles; and more than 35 manuscripts. The site also offers 95 reference maps. There are more than 45 elementary and 36 secondary lesson plans searchable by keyword, grade level, and/or topic. The advanced search allows visitors to search by fields such as agriculture, intellectual life, and politics; or by keyword, education level, topic, presentation, or type of document. Additionally, there is a tutorial on using primary documents. This website is a good starting point for teaching or researching Wisconsin or the mid-Western region.

Tennessee Documentary History Collection, 1796-1850

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Map, Introductory graphic, 1796-1850, Tennessee Documentary History. . . site
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This archive assembles more than 1,600 primary sources, including letters, family papers, reports, and images, relating to the history of antebellum Tennessee. Visitors can browse the archive by collection or author, or they can use the simple keyword search or a variety of advanced searches to locate specific documents. Included in the collections are 142 letters, reports, and other documents, including the correspondence of Cherokee chiefs and officials such as John Ross. The archive also includes letters of such antebellum Tennessee figures as Sam Houston, James K. Polk, John Sevier, and Andrew Jackson, as well as letters to and from 12 antebellum Tennessee governors. The archive offers 79 images, many of various aspects of Cherokee village life in the mid-18th century. Though primarily focused on an audience of K-12 teachers of Tennessee history, academic historians and researchers in antebellum political and social history will also find this material useful.

Lawrence Denny Lindsley Photographs

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Photo, Victor Denny and Lawrence Lindsley. . . , 1901, Lawrence Denny. . . site
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This website presents 472 black and white photographs taken by Lawrence D. Lindsley, grandson of Seattle pioneer David Denny. Born in 1878, Lindsley began taking photographs as a child, and eventually joined a photography studio in Seattle in 1903. He continued taking photographs until his death in 1974, though most of the photographs here date from the 1880s through the 1920s. In addition to photography, Lindsley held a variety of jobs in Washington State—mining, hunting, and guiding wilderness expeditions—activities all well-documented here.

The collection is especially rich in photographs of the landscape, wildlife and settlements of Mount Rainier, Grand Coulee, Lake Chelan, the Olympic Peninsula, and Old Gold Creek. Lindsley also photographed sites around King County, revealing a Seattle that had not yet experienced the urbanization of the early-20th century. A long list of subject headings reveals that Lindsley also frequently photographed family members and friends, producing images useful for examining turn-of-the-century portraiture.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties

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Photo, John Stone playing fiddle, 1939
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This site features 35 hours of folk and popular music sound recordings from several European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-speaking communities. The Work Projects Administration California Folk Music Project collected these 817 songs, in 12 languages and representing 185 musicians, in Northern California between 1938 and 1940. The collection also includes 168 photographs of musicians, 45 scale drawings and sketches of instruments, and numerous written documents, including ethnographic field reports and notes, song transcriptions, published articles, and project correspondence.

Organized by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of the American Folk Song, this was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document folk and popular music of such diverse origin in one region. In addition to folk music of indigenous and immigrant groups, the collection includes popular songs from the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast eras, medicine show tunes, and ragtime numbers. In addition, short essays describe the California Folk Music Project and the ethnographic work of Sidney Robertson Cowell. This collection is an excellent resource for learning about ethnographic research practices as well as about cultures of various California ethnic groups.

France in America

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Image for France in America
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This bilingual website (English and French) explores the history of the French presence in North America from the early 16th century to the end of the 19th century through more than 360 manuscripts, books, maps, and other documents. Each thematic presentation—"Exploration and Knowledge," "The Colonies," "Franco-Indian Alliances," "Imperial Struggles," and "The French and North America after the Treaty of Paris"—includes a title exhibit and additional exhibits that highlight particular items in the collection. Materials can also be browsed in the collections section.

A timeline (1515–1804) organizes events in French America by explorations, colonization and development, and conflicts and diplomacy, and places them in the context of events in France. Additionally, there are eight descriptive maps that show various Indian groups in contact with the French and the changes in political boundaries in North America from before 1763 to the era of the Louisiana Purchase.

First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820

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Image for First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820
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Significant European migration into the Ohio River Valley occurred from the mid-18th century to the early 19th century and this website presents approximately 15,000 pages of related materials. Resources include books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, journals, letters, legal documents, images, maps, and ledgers. The site includes a special presentation with a 6,500-word essay on contested lands, peoples and migration, empires and politics, Western life and culture, and the construction of a Western past.

Materials address encounters between Europeans and native peoples, the lives of African American slaves, the role of institutions such as churches and schools, the position of women, the thoughts of naturalists and other scientists, and activities of the migrants, including travel, land acquisition, planting, navigation of rivers, and trade. These are valuable resources for studying early American history, cross-cultural encounters, frontier history, and the construction of the nation's past.

Center for Archaeological Studies

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Image for Center for Archaeological Studies
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Designed to showcase the work of archaeologists and their excavations at Mobile and elsewhere in Alabama, this website offers images and exhibits from several digs. Visitors can "virtually visit" archaeological sites in the town of Old Mobile, capital of the French colony of Louisiane [sic] from 1702 to 1711; the Mississippian Indian city of Bottle Creek (1100–1400); and the Indian fishing site of Dauphin Island Shell Mounds (1100–1550).

Additional sites include the French village of Port Dauphin (1702–1725); the Dog River Plantation site, home to a French-Canadian immigrant family, numerous Indians, and slaves (1720s–1848); and sites in downtown Mobile, including a Spanish colonial house (ca. 1800), an early 19th-century riverfront tavern, and antebellum cotton warehouses.

Artifacts features more than 250 images of pottery shards with accompanying descriptions. Great Links presents 30 additional websites that focus on preservation, archaeology, and Alabama history. The site also includes images and information on seven additional French colonial sites in Nova Scotia, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

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Image for Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
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Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.