Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research

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This gateway website was created by English professor Alan Liu. It contains over 70 pages of links to humanities-related resources on the internet and provides a guide to online resources in 26 subject categories, including anthropology, legal studies, history, women and gender, and minority studies.

Each link is subdivided. For example, the Minority Studies link is divided into 11 subcategories, including African American, Chicano Latino Hispanic, and Native American history. The History category is subdivided into 19 sections, such as Family History, Military History, and national and regional categories like North America, with subheadings for Canada and United States. The United States history subheading contains over 500 links to primary documents from all periods of American history.

This site contains both primary and secondary resources, and there is a History Teaching Resources link that provides resources for teachers of World History, syllabi for women and gender-related courses, and a guide to using historical places as teaching tools. The site is easy to navigate and contains a keyword search engine.

Pluralism and Unity

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Presents a wide array of materials that explore "the struggle between these two visions" of pluralism and unity in early 20th-century American thought and life. Arranged into six major sections: The Idea of Pluralism; The Idea of Internationalism; Culture and Pluralism; Labor and Pluralism; Race and Pluralism; and Gender and Pluralism.

The site links to major sites on such topics as ethics, politics, culture, sociology, anthropology, religion, economics, imperialism, hegemony, world systems theory, the League of Nations, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, the Niagara Movement, NAACP, KKK, unions, strikes, modernism, the genteel tradition, localism, and ragtime.

Outlines the perspectives of important public figures including William James, Eugene Debs, Randolph Bourne, Daniel DeLeon, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Horace Kallen, Scott Nearing, Max Eastman, William Cowper Brann, Madison Grant, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Charles S. Peirce, Margaret Mead, Woodrow Wilson, John Reed, and Irving Berlin.

Although many of the site's direct links to texts by these figures are no longer operable, users can access sites containing important writings through the "Concepts" section of each of the six major parts. Also includes 12 audio components and dozens of photographs.

For its inclusion of links to many extremely useful sites from a variety of perspectives, this site will be valuable to those studying early 20th-century American ideas and debates and their resonance throughout later times.

The Internet African-American History Challenge

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Features illustrated biographical sketches, each approximately 400 words in length, of 12 notable 19th-century African Americans—Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman, Henry McNeal Turner, John Mercer Langston, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Ann Shadd, Nat Turner, Richard Allen, and Sojourner Truth.

Includes three interactive quizzes, based on information contained in the biographies, divided into three levels of difficulty.

Also provides guidelines for classroom use, including directions for setting up an "online grade book." The site's creators plan to add sketches and quizzes on notable 20th-century African Americans.

This user-friendly site is a useful tool for introducing African American history to young students.

Women's History: The 1850 Worcester Convention

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To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the First National Women's Rights Convention, held in 1850 in Worcester, MA, this site provides an archive of documents relating to the convention, including eight speeches, 15 newspaper accounts, 14 letters, and selected items from the proceedings.

Also offers three speeches from the 1851 convention, as well as a host of other resources concerning the 19th-century woman's movement more generally. Diary entries, government reports, tracts for and against suffrage, poems from Godey's Lady's Book, and the full text of several books are included, such as The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility (1856).

On an ongoing basis, the site presents essays about and selections by formerly well-known advocates for women's rights who since have been forgotten; currently the works of Jane Grey Swisshelm and Caroline Wells Healy Dall are featured.

Also includes links to 24 related websites.

Comprehensive with regard to the 1850 convention, and useful for more general resources devoted to the mid-19th-century women's rights movement.

WestWeb: Western Studies and Research Resources

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This gateway offers a wide range of links to primary and secondary documents, bibliographies, maps, images, and other resources for the study and teaching of the American West. Its 31 topics include agriculture, economics, the environment, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, military history, political and legal history, religion, settlement, technology, and water. Also highlights six selected "outstanding sites."

Well-designed, comprehensive, and easy to navigate, the site also furnishes syllabi and additional teaching materials and suggestions.

Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices

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An exhibit of primary source material relating to slavery from the late 18th century to emancipation in the 19th century.

It reproduces or describes 33 documents, such as a broadside announcing a reward for the return of a runaway slave, a map delineating slave labor on an indigo plantation, a New York bill of sale for the purchase of a slave in 1785, and an 85-page memoir written in 1923 by Elizabeth Johnson Harris, an African American woman from Georgia who relates stories and experiences of her parents and grandparents, who had been slaves. The site "showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute."

Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers and Artists of Color

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Descriptive information about the lives and works of 136 "women writers of color in North America" is provided in this site, designed primarily for high school and college classroom use. Offers introductory material, including images, bibliographies, quotations, biographical sketches, and critical views with regard to writers such as Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Evelyn Lau, Winona LaDuke, Terry McMillan, and Alice Walker.

While the site concentrates primarily on 20th-century figures, it also contains 10 entries on women from the 19th century, including Sarah Mapps Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The material is arranged into four indexes: name, birthplace, racial/ethnic background, and significant dates. Annotated links to 18 related resources are included.

The site relies on contributions from interested students and teachers, and promises to grow to more than 500 entries in the future.

Photographs from the Fred Hulstrand and F. A. Pazandak Photograph Collections

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Furnishes approximately 900 photographs from two collections at the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University. A professional photographer from northeastern North Dakota who sought to document the settlement of the Great Plains produced the "Fred Hulstrand History in Pictures Collection." The "F. A. Pazandak Photography Collection" includes photographs taken by a southeastern North Dakota farmer as mechanization began to change his family farm. Images portray everyday rural and small town life, mostly from 1880-1920, and include shots of farmers, farm machinery, children, one-room schools, and workshops. The site also provides a historical overview of North Dakota, a 300-word history of farm machinery companies, and presentations entitled "Implements Used on the Farm," "Schooling," "Women," "Sod Homes," "Immigrants," "Steam Engines and Tractors," "Hired Hands," and "Golden Age of Agriculture." An annotated bibliography of 61 titles provides a guide for further research. This site includes important visual documentation on changes in rural communities and farming practices during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Center for Working-Class Studies

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Introduces an organization begun in 1996 that "creates social spaces for civic and academic conversations on working-class life and culture and its intersections with other identities and serves as a clearinghouse for information on working-class culture, issues, and pedagogy." The site presents information about the Center, its outreach programs and electronic discussion network; a 1,000-word essay defining working-class studies and commenting on recent trends; six course syllabi; online student exhibitions for a course on "Working in Youngstown," which deals with the history and representations of work in "Steeltown, U.S.A." and throughout the U.S.; 88 abstracts of papers presented at the 1999 conference on "Class, Identity, and Nation"; 84 partially annotated links to related resources, including 24 for museums on working-class and labor history; and a bibliography organized into 24 thematic categories such as "Working-Class Fiction," "Class as Culture," "Class Perception in the U.S.," and "Class and Sexuality." A useful site for introducing students to discussions of class and labor issues in American history.

First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920

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Features 141 texts relating to the culture of the American south "from the viewpoint of Southerners," during the latter half of the 19th and beginning decades of the 20th centuries, " a period of enormous change." Focusing on the voices of women, blacks, laborers, and Native Americans, the site offers a variety of documents--including ex-slave narratives, travel memoirs, personal accounts and diaries, and autobiographies, such as Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America (1843). Includes some materials published prior to 1860. Provides a 31-title bibliography, with some resources geared toward young readers, and links to 13 related sites. Part of the University of North Carolina's digital library project, Documenting the American South, which is described further in its own History Matters entry.