Women Artists of the American West

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This online archive features images of photographs taken by women that represent the holdings of the Women in Photography Archives located in Arcata, CA. Most of the photographs in the collection are the work of women photographers who were active between 1850 and 1997 and had some connection with the American West, particularly California.

The archive contains 17 separate collections, arranged according to four main themes: Community, Identity, Spirituality, and Locality. Each of these categories features relevant essays composed by art historians, curators, and artists. As a whole, the site offers the works and biographies of approximately 180 artists and photographers.

For educators, the site also offers a comprehensive eight-week syllabus that covers the website's four main themes.

Although navigating the website can take some getting used to, it is worth the effort. The site is a valuable resource for often lesser-know perspectives on the American West.

A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion, 1820-1890

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Focusing on 19th-century American maritime history and westward expansion, this collection of more than 160 documents from the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library provides diverse materials to explore themes such as the California Gold Rush, whaling, maritime business, migration and immigration, women's role in the West, and interactions between European migrants and native inhabitants. This Ameritech Award-winning site includes more than 25 photographs, more than 20 letters, logbooks from ships, published travel narratives, paintings, maps, and nautical charts. Provides four essays published previously in a Mystic Seaport publication, including an 1866 newspaper essay assessing Honolulu as a whaling port by youthful journalist Mark Twain.

The site is searchable by subject, name, title, and keyword, and includes an annotated bibliography of hundreds of documents in the Seaport's collections, and of 65 secondary sources. Valuable for those studying the American West, maritime history, business history, and the history of coastal and island localities.

Traveling Culture: Circuit Chautauqua in the Twentieth Century

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This site provides access to almost 8,000 documents publicizing and promoting some of the 4,500 performers who appeared on the Chautauqua circuit. Circuit performers included international cookery experts, Helen Keller, Jiujutsu masters, lecturers on Korea in the 1950s, and 12 different yodeling troupes. The pamphlets were printed between 1904 and the early 1960s, but many are undated. Each document, from one to 20 pages, is illustrated and can be viewed either by individual pages or downloaded as a PDF file. A 1,000-word essay introduces visitors to the Chautauqua phenomenon. Visitors may search the site by subject, keyword, or name. The site also contains finding aids for a larger collection of Chautauqua materials housed at the University of Iowa and links to four other sites about Chautauqua and four sites about the history of entertainment in the U.S. A bibliography of 12 books and articles on the history of Chautauqua is provided, but the site does not provide any background information about the performers. The site will be a delightful resource for historians of popular culture, entertainment, publicity, and the Chautauqua circuit.

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.

Korean American Digital Archive

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Thousands of primary materials, including documents compiled by Korean American organizations, personal papers, more than 1,900 photographs, and around 180 interviews, address the experiences of Koreans in the United States between 1903 and 1965 on this website. The materials run the gamut from organizational memos and other official documents to personal letters, wedding programs, birth certificates, and social security check stubs.

This material allows users to piece together the life histories of individual Korean Americans. They will find individuals like Soon Hyun, an activist in the Korean resistance movement against Japanese colonialism in 1919, who later moved to the United States and became a minister in Hawaii. Or Florence Ahn, a Korean American who became a prominent singer in Los Angeles. These personal biographies, in turn, allow users to examine the human dimension of the history of Asian Americans, and place individuals within a larger history.

The 3Cities Project

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A collection of 10 essays on "the modern American city as a space of representation," using New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the years between the 1870s and 1930s as focal points for interdisciplinary explorations. The essays, originally presented at the 1999 conference "New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Cultures and Representation," run from 3,000 to 12,000 words in length, include approximately 100 photographs and address topics such as the urban novel, Harlem sidewalk photographs, urban perception in the fiction of W. D. Howells, urban electronic history, how the physical redefinition of Chicago in the 1890s "presaged and enabled the virtual city of a century later," and how public art in New York and Los Angeles represented the cities and their inhabitants.

The 3Cities Project, based in the departments of American and Canadian Studies at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham, has also produced the electronic book City Sites, which offers an additional 10 multimedia essays on New York and Chicago (see separate "History Matters" entry for a detailed description of this component site).

Highly theoretical and intellectually challenging, these sites will be valuable to those studying urban history, human geography, cultural representations, and societal consequences of the transformation to modernity in American cities.

Railroad Maps, 1828-1900

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This Library of Congress American Memory site features images and descriptions of 623 railroad maps selected from more than 3,000 regional, state, and county maps in the Library's Geography and Map Division. The selected items represent the variety of cartographic styles and techniques used in maps created for a range of purposes, including railroad surveys, U.S. General Land Office maps, surveys for rights of way, general surveys for railroad company reports, maps used by commercial publications, ticket agents and the public, and route guides to encourage commerce and travel by rail.

The maps on this site were featured in the cartobibliography Railroad Maps of the United States: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Original 19th Century Maps in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, compiled by Andrew M. Modelski (1975). A descriptive summary of 50–100 words and notes on the scale, publication place and date, medium, call numbers, and repository accompany each image.

The site also includes a lengthy (3,000-word) essay outlining the history of railroads and maps, a bibliography of eight related works, and links to 15 American Memory sites containing related materials. The site can be searched by keyword and browsed by geographic location, subject, map creator, title, and railroad lines. This site is ideal for students and teachers interested in the history of railroads, cartography, and transportation in the United States.

The 19th Century in Print: Books

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This site, part of the Library of Congress American Memory project, features over 1,500 full-text images of 19th-century books digitized by the University of Michigan as part of the "Making of America" project. Books in the collection primarily date from 1850 to 1880 and cover such subjects as education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, science and technology, and poetry.

The collection is divided into seven general themes: Civil War, Slavery and Abolition, Religion, Education, Self-Help and Self-Improvement, Travel and Westward Expansion, and Poetry. Each section opens with a 200-word descriptive essay, and each book featured on the site is accompanied by notes on the author, full title of the work, date and place of publication, and the publisher.

The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject, author, and title. The site is ideal for exploring late 19th-century literature and popular culture.

The Texas Constitutions Digitization Project

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Facsimiles and transcriptions of 12 Texas Constitutions from 1824 to 1876. Constitutions include the 1824 Federal Constitution of United Mexican States, in Spanish with an English transcription; the document that joined Texas to the U.S. in 1845; the 1861 secession constitution; and the 1869 reconstruction version. Visitors may search all constitutions by subject. The site provides annotated bibliographies of 61 primary source documents and 55 books and articles about Texas constitutions. Links to 13 sites about Texas history and constitutions in general. The site is easy to navigate and will be interesting for research on legal history and the west.

Web de Anza

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Web de Anza presents material relating to Juan Bautista de Anza's two expeditions into Alta California that resulted in the settlement of San Francisco in 1776. The site is under development, but it is easy to navigate. Visitors will find a 700-word background essay on the historical context of the expeditions and links to seven other sites about de Anza and California history. Primary source material currently includes eight diaries and two letters, available in English and Spanish and indexed by date. This material is supplemented by a gallery of 11 portraits, 14 images of scenery relevant to De Anza's expeditions, and drawings and photographs of nine objects such as a musket of the kind that De Anza probably used.

The site also includes six photographs of re-enactments of events in de Anza's expedition. An Atlas section provides 10 trail route maps, and 20 maps of the area of de Anza's expedition. The site provides useful material for students of California history, religion, and Native Americans at every level, from elementary to graduate school.