The Berkeley Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of Berkeley, California. To this end, the society operates a history center.
The center offers exhibits.
Wes Cowan of PBS's History Detectives introduces some of the causes of the Civil War, including arguments over states rights and territorial expansion.
The Cloverdale Historical Society is dedicated to preserving the historical heritage of Cloverdale, CA, and the surrounding area. The society is headquartered in the Gould-Shaw House, which also serves as a historic house museum and houses the society's historic archives.
The society offers exhibits and guided tours of the Gould-Shaw House, as well as research resources and special events. The website offers visitor information, a history of the Gould-Shaw House, a history of Cloverdale, and a calendar of events.
Iron Mission State Park Museum tells the story of development in Iron County when in the 1850s, Brigham Young sent Mormon missionaries here to mine and process iron. Museum displays include horse-drawn vehicles used from 1850 to 1920 and a collection of pioneer artifacts. An iron industry exhibit features the only known remaining artifact from the original foundry—the town bell. In addition to the permanent collections, changing special exhibits highlight artists from the local region, as well as rarely seen artifacts from the museum's collections. Other items of interest include several historic cabins, a large collection of horse-drawn farm equipment, and a replicated pioneer household. In addition, Iron Mission now manages the historic ruins of Old Iron Town, an iron foundry west of Cedar City that operated in the 1860s—1870s.
The site offers exhibits, tours, and occasional recreational and educational events.
The Mesa Historical Museum was opened in 1987, and is located in the buildings of the old Lehi School, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum chronicles the history Mesa, Arizona.
The museum offers field trip programs, exhibits, educational programs, and special events such as historic home tours. The website offers a history of the museum, visitor information, an online exhibit, a collection of oral histories, and an events calendar.
The Lemhi Pass is located in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest is the largest national forest in Montana, and contains miles of trails as well as the scenic Beartooth Mountains.
The forest offers a wealth of outdoor activities, including hiking, skiing, backpacking, camping, and fishing. The forest also offers an educational trunk, the Birch Creek Center, which is a residential outdoor educational center, and summer camps. The website offers information regarding all activities offered by the park, visitor information, and curriculum guides. In order to contact the national forest via email, use the "contact us" link located on the left side of the webpage.
Did individual African American activists spark the Civil Rights Movement?
Textbooks are silent about defining race and racism, even though the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements were efforts to challenge and eliminate racism. Rather than addressing the outrage of systematically being denied basic human rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, while citizens in a democracy, textbooks suggest that individual African Americans were merely sad or angry because individual white people did not want to fight wars, play baseball, learn, ride public transportation or eat lunch with them.
The most important lessons of the modern Civil Rights Movement will not be gained from passively reading textbooks. Examining primary sources will place students closer to the scenes of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements. Too often Dr. King is represented in textbooks as the person who was sent to save African Americans from racism, or the most powerful leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement, or as a political moderate. Instead, he was one of many powerful leaders.
Textbooks define segregation benignly with little reference to the ways in which northern and southern state governments and businesses systematically – and over the course of several decades -- reinforced an ideology of white supremacy through violence. Other groups of people affected by these same laws and practices – including American Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Jews and Arabs – are seldom included in textbook discussions of racism. These absences strip away the underlying motivation for collective anger and social action.
Textbooks present the modern Civil Rights Movement in the same way as other U.S. social movements -- a spontaneous, emotional eruption of saintly activists led by two or three inspired orators in response to momentary aberrations in the exercise of democracy. In particular, textbooks imply that, until World War II, African Americans had been relatively content with social, economic, and political conditions in the U.S. Then, suddenly, African Americans were angered that they could not fight on battlefields, play baseball, attend schools, or sit on buses with whites. Further, African Americans were the only people to observe and protest these conditions. Finally, to act on their discontent, African Americans required instructions from a benevolent federal government, or a single charismatic or sympathetic leader. A more accurate telling of the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement indicates that the “river of purposeful anger” has been long, wide and well populated.
The modern Civil Rights Movement is often marked as beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation or the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in Montgomery, AL and ends with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (Or, more recently, with the election of President Barack Obama). In some textbooks, the context for this movement are the years following the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V.
In 1968, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense established a chapter in Seattle, one of the first outside of California. This website, devoted to portraying the history and collecting the memories of that chapter, is "the most extensive online collection of materials" for any Black Panther Party chapter. It includes 13 oral histories and brief biographies of key Black Panther Party members, 53 photographs documenting Black Panther events in the late 1960s, more than 100 news stories covering Party activities from 1968 to 1981 (four years after the Party was dissolved), testimony and exhibits from the 1970 Congressional Hearings investigating the Party, and all five issues of the Seattle Black Panther Party "Bulletin." A "Slide Show" highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with Black Panther Party history.
This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides extensive materials that can serve as historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle, 13 other "Special Sections" on topics such as segregation in Seattle, and 37 in-depth essays on historical topics such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In addition, a "For Teachers" section provides eight lesson plans using the website's material for middle and high school students.
The museum collects, preserves, interprets, and displays historical and cultural materials related to the westward expansion, to Wyoming pioneers in particular, and to the west in general. Today, the 15,900-square-foot facility consists of the main building as well as the original cabin, two school houses, a rebuilt gristmill, and a shelter. The collections include pioneer and ranching memorabilia, textiles, and an extensive Native American artifact and decorative art display.
A second website for the museum can be found here.
The museum offers exhibits, research library access, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Located in an historic engine house, the Kansas Firefighters Museum displays vintage firefighting vehicles and equipment.
The museum offers exhibits and research archive access.