Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century

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The Presidential Timeline curates and presents primary sources drawn from twelve Presidential Libraries and Museums, institutions housing and presenting archival materials for the presidents from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. Under "Interactive Timeline," you can choose any of the 12 presidents—Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or William Jefferson Clinton—and explore his life.

Timelines consist of at least two sections: "Early Life and Career" and "Presidency." All timelines except Roosevelt's, Kennedy's, and Clinton's also include a "Post-Presidency" section. Marks on the timeline indicate events of interest in the president's life and career; click on a mark to read a brief summary of the event, and to view primary sources (a + sign in the mark indicates primary sources are available).

Browse "Exhibits," also under "Interactive Timeline," for more than 30 collections of short essays, accompanied by 2–6 primary sources per essay, covering major events and topics related to the presidents' lives and careers. Topics covered stretch from "The Stock Market Crash, October 1929" to "William J. Clinton and the Supreme Court, 1993-2001."

Try the "Gallery" to search more than 1,500 primary sources (including artifacts, maps and charts, video, photographs, sounds recordings, and documents) by keyword, library of origin, date, or source type.

The "Educators" section includes 14 ready-to-go activities, on topics ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Iran Hostage Crisis to Bill Clinton's visit to Little Rock Central High School. Students and teachers can view pre-selected primary sources online in each activity, with suggested rubrics, applicable standards, and links to related sources also included. "Resources" links out to 16 websites recommended for history and primary sources, education, and technology, while "Multimedia" rounds up more than 50 audio and video primary source clips for download.

If you can't access the interactive Flash version of the timeline, try the HTML "Text Version" that includes the same primary sources.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library

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Established by Ronald Reagan, the Reagan Foundation preserves Presidential history and is "dedicated to the promotion of individual liberty, economic opportunity, global democracy, and national pride." Its online presence provides both primary and secondary sources on the life and presidency of Reagan.

Visitors can follow a timeline of Reagan's life in Life and Times, and read five short essays (800–1,000 words) on his domestic, foreign, and economic polices, Mikhail Gorbachev, and "Reagan the Man" in The Presidency. Search or browse Reagan's speeches, with both transcripts and video recordings and search or browse quotes drawn from his speaking in Reagan Quotes and Speeches. The entries of his White House Diary from 1981–1989 may also be browsed, and a separate subsection on Nancy Reagan provides a timeline of her life and brief essays on her relationship with Ronald Reagan and her political causes.

The Reagan Foundation's Archives make only a fraction of their holdings available online. However, visitors can access fast facts on Reagan and his presidency; browse a selection of photos of the President and the First Lady, organized by topic; or search or browse (by month) the Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, which includes statements, speeches, and papers released by the Office of the Press from 1981–1989.

The Archives' For Educators section includes several document-based lesson plans, as well as curriculum based on current museum exhibits.

Useful for educators looking for both introductory material to Reagan and his presidency and more specific primary sources.

Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington 1898

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On November 10, 1898, Wilmington, NC, experienced what has come to be known as the only coup d'etat in United States history, when white supremacist members of the Democratic Party overthrew the municipal government and killed anywhere between six and 100 African Americans in the city, which at that time had a large, thriving African American population supported by the biracial Republican Party.

This website narrates the history of this event, from the rising racial tensions surrounding the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments and court disputes over miscegenation and interracial marriage, through the contentious election politics of 1898 that pitted the Democratic Party, supported by white supremacists, against the Republican and Populist Parties that represented African American interests at the local level, and the riot on November 10, through the legacy of the riot in the months and years to come, including the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws.

Each section is illustrated with links to primary sources, including political cartoons, newspaper clippings, laws, court cases, and photographs of prominent Wilmington African Americans.

The website also includes the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report published in 2006 by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources' Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which includes maps, photographs, and other primary source materials, and a link to an interactive map allowing visitors to visualize the events of November 10, 1898.

Washington State Digital Archives

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This massive archive contains more than 84.5 million documents, more than 26 million of which are fully keyword searchable, from Washington State and local agencies. These documents include contracts, birth, marriage, military, naturalization, death, cemetery, and census records, land records and surveys, oaths of office, maps, photographs, power of attorney records, and date from the late 19th century to the present.

A detailed list of collections is available through the Collections section. Here, users will find detailed information on all record collections, including dates and counties available, and options to search by county or within sub-collections.

The casual user may want to begin with several browsable featured collections, which contain photographs from the Spokane city planning department, audio recordings of the Washington House of Representatives Committee Meetings, and 200 photographs of daily life in the Big Bend region of the Columbia Basin.

Useful for teachers and historical researchers interested in many aspects of life in the West, and those interested in genealogy with connections to Washington State.

Ulysses S. Grant Digital Archive

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The largest public archive of Ulysses S. Grant correspondence to date, the collection includes letters, research notes, artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia. Topics cover Grant's childhood, military career, and experiences in the Civil War through his presidency and post-White House years.

The bulk of the collection is made up of 31 full-text searchable, digitized volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John Y. Simon, these volumes comprise thousands of letters spanning from 1837, just before Grant left for the Military Academy at West Point, to his death in 1885. The volumes also contain photographs, a chronology of the correspondence, and annotations.

In addition to the extensive Papers, the collection provides a sampling of digitized material from the U.S. Grant Association, including 14 multi-page compilations and 11 political cartoons from sources such as Harper's Weekly and Puck. Items include detailed, linked metadata to assist in tracking source provenance and connecting to related sources. Additionally, all items are keyword searchable and can be browsed by format, date, or title.

Land of (Unequal) Opportunity

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While many are familiar with the 1957 Little Rock High School integration crisis, far fewer students of U.S. civil rights history may be aware of the longer history of that struggle in Arkansas. This website includes more than 460 documents and images, including cartoons, court decisions, photographs, newspaper articles, letters, and essays related to that history. For example, an essay on the meaning of relocation written by a high school student at Arkansas's Jerome Relocation Center in 1943 brings a more personal perspective to the story of internment, as the student describes the ways in which members of her community have struggled between the "fighting spirit" and the "giving up spirit." Users new to civil rights history in Arkansas may want to begin with the extensive timeline that describes events from the arrival of slaves in Arkansas in the 1720s to a 2006 State Supreme Court ruling that struck down a ban on gays serving as foster parents. The website also includes 10 lesson plans geared for middle school students that make use of the website's resources—such as a speech given by Governor Oral Fabus in 1958. An extensive bibliography of secondary sources related to many aspects of civil rights, including African American, gay and lesbian, and women's issues, Japanese relocation, religious intolerance, political rights, and anti-civil liberties groups and issues, is also available.

U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994

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[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This vast archive includes many documents and reports produced by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and published between 1817 and 1980, for a total of more than 355,000 items. These items include 48,000 maps, 9,000 illustrations, thousands of reports, and numerous records of committee hearings and floor proceedings. All items are full-text searchable and can be browsed by subject, such as education, economics, food and agriculture, health, Indian affairs, armed forces and conflicts, environment and natural resources, and social issues. Within each of these broad categories, there are hundreds of subject headings, such as "animal welfare" (83 items), "alien labor" (306 items), and "ordnance testing" (353 items). The "Indian Affairs" category, for example, presents thousands of items on agencies and organizations relating to Indian affairs, Indian reservations, treaties, names of Indian tribes, as well as documents relating to hundreds of laws and supreme court cases. There is also a bill number search, an alphabetical list of names of all acts of Congress, and a listing of all documents by U.S. Congress session. All documents can be downloaded in PDF format. In addition, a separate browse feature entitled "Serial Set Maps" facilitates access to thousands of maps from counties and cities across the country. Many of these date to the Civil War-era or later and include images of forts and depictions of field operations. Readex plans to expand coverage through 1994.

Platte River Basin in Nebraska

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The Platte River begins in the Rocky Mountains and flows the length of central Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri River to the east. This website provides 40 diverse documents about the history, geology, and hydrology of the Platte River, ranging in date from an 1843 report by the U.S. Secretary of War entitled "An Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains," to a 302-page report published in 1993 by the Nebraska Geological Survey entitled, "Flat Water: A History of Nebraska and Its Water." The majority of documents date to the 1970s, many of which were published by government agencies such as the Missouri River Basin Commission or the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, detailing investigations into ground water usage and water resources management. There are also several documents on legal issues surrounding water rights and outdoor recreation. These materials are accompanied by 13 links to websites offering information about water resources, including the University of Nebraska's Water Center and Water Sciences Laboratory, as well as the Missouri River Basin Project, created to plan for the conservation and use of Missouri River water resources. Especially useful for those interested in the history of development projects surrounding water resources.

The Dramas of Haymarket

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Curated by Carl Smith, Professor of English and American Studies at Northwestern University in a collaborative effort with the Chicago Historical Society, this rich site provides an online exhibit commemorating one of the most notorious incidents in late-nineteenth-century labor history, the Haymarket Affair. On May 4, 1886, two workers were killed in a struggle between police and locked-out union members at the McCormick Reaper factory. On May 5, 1886, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a group of Chicago policemen sent to control the ensuing protest, killing seven. This site is an online exhibit of selected materials from the Chicago Historical Society's Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. Organized in the form of a drama, the site contains a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue, all arranged chronologically.

The prologue, "Whither America," covers the period between Chicago's Great Fire in 1871 through 1880, with emphasis on the railroad strike of 1877 and other developments in the radicalization of American workers. Act I, "Subterranean Fire," discusses the widening class divisions and resulting rising level of violence in America. Act II, "Let Your Tragedy be Enacted Here," recounts the demonstrations of 1886, the protestors' meeting, and the bombing. Act III, "Toils of the Law," covers the legal proceedings beginning with the "red scare" and police "witch hunt" following the bombing and continuing through the sentencing of the convicted anarchists in October 1886. Act IV, "Voice of People," relates the legal and public appeals ending with the executions of 1887. Act V, "Raising the Dead," moves from the funerals of the executed men to Governor John P. Altgeld's pardon of the surviving defendants in 1893.

The epilogue, "Drama Without End," deals with the contested heritage of Haymarket, including centennial events in 1986. Each part consists of a 500-word interpretive essay and topical sections including a total of over 50 visual materials, such as images of artifacts, photographs, and engravings of the people involved in the Haymarket Affair, and over 30 facsimiles of selected manuscripts and printed materials. Each "Act" contains a final section that includes full-text transcriptions of documents from the Haymarket Digital Collection. The site also includes virtual tours of the Haymarket area and of Forest Home Cemetery, where a monument to the convicted men is located, and audio recordings of contemporary labor songs. This site is beautifully contextualized, well-presented, and easy to navigate. It contains a keyword search engine as well as a table of contents.

Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson

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In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act (1867), which prohibited a president from unilaterally removing any officials for whom Senate approval was required for appointment. Part of Professor Douglas Linder's Famous American Trials website, this exhibit examines Johnson's impeachment trial and his narrow escape from conviction and removal from office. Linder provides a 1500-word account of the trial and includes a chronology of events in Johnson's presidency, from his election as Abraham Lincoln's vice president in 1864 to his death in 1875. The site includes background information on the process of impeachment, such as the relevant articles of the United States Constitution and James Madison's notes on the framers' Constitutional Convention debates over the impeachment process.

The site also includes full-text verions of the Articles of Impeachment against Johnson, the Senate's rules of procedure for the impeachment trial, and the Senate trial record, including all arguments, documentary evidence, testimony, and the final vote. There are also excerpts from the Congressional Globe of the opinions of six senators, both for and against impeachment, and a map that shows the regional splits in the votes for and against impeachment. The site also provides links to the Harper's Weekly account of the trial, including biographies of 28 key figures in the trial, 90 editorials, 47 news articles and briefs, 47 illustrations, 27 political cartoons, and one illustrated satire. A brief bibliography includes six scholarly books, one video, and two internet sites with information on the Johnson impeachment trial. The Harper's Weekly section also provides a link to a "Teaching Impeachment" exercise in which students can simulate an impeachment trial. This rather complicated role play exercise requires considerable research and strong analytical skills, but would be accessible for very advanced high school and survey classes. This is an ideal site for researching constitutional history, Reconstruction, and the presidency.