Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800

Image
Annotation

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering more than 36,000 items and 2.3 million pages on all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century American life. It is comprised of a range of publications helpful for researching social, cultural, intellectual, and religious history, as well as political and military history, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, charters and by-laws, cookbooks, maps, narratives, novels, plays, poems, sermons, songs, textbooks, and travelogues. It is especially useful for the history of printing, as it contains an exhaustive list of printers, booksellers, and publishers active in this time period as well as images and the full-text of most of the books, pamphlets, and broadsides they helped create.

Users can browse the imprints by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century North America.

September 11, 2001: Attack on America

Image
Annotation

This site is an extensive collection of some 2,000 primary texts related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It features documents in the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government, and includes press releases, briefings, legislation, executive orders, proclamations, and public laws.

The documents (with factual errors corrected in annotations) have been collected from sources such as the White House, Departments of State, Defense, Transportation, and Justice, the European Union, NATO, and the OAS. Users can browse the long list, arranged chronologically, or can pull up documents via a variety of drop-down menus. They may also search the collection by keyword, or jump directly to a particular date from September 2001 through April 2002.

Comprehensive and well-organized, this is a valuable site for those researching the political and legal aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

The Crisis of the Union

Image
Annotation

This archive contains material related to "the causes, conduct, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War." The collection contains more than 220 books, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, and other printed material from 1830 to 1880. The entire archive can be browsed by author, date of publication, title, or subject. Abstracts of the titles are available. Using a built-in viewer, each document can be viewed in its original format (or downloaded in PDF form), and visitors can zoom in or out.

Visitors may browse issues of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, peruse the 1852 Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, or view dozens of Thomas Nast cartoons. Finally, visitors can also search the entire archive by keyword, subject, graphic element, or date. Visitors looking for comprehensive Civil War, Abolition, or Reconstruction sites will find more complete collections elsewhere; but this site's convenience, as well as its collection of early-19th-century tracts, make this a valuable resource.

The Annexation of Hawaii: A Collection of Documents

Annotation

Thousands of pages of documents concerning the U.S. plan to annex Hawaii, realized in 1898, have been digitized and presented in searchable form, with more material promised in the future. One section contains the 1,436-page Blount Report of 1894-95, initiated by President Grover Cleveland on the history of relations between the U.S. and Hawaii and the planned annexation. Another section offers Congressional debates on the Hawaii Organic Act, passed in 1900 to establish a territorial government in Hawaii. Hawaiian anti-annexation petitions from 1897-98 are available as are 10 anti-annexation protest documents, including six written to American officials by Queen Liliuokalani from 1893 to 1897. The site provides search capabilities within each section and across all materials. Although the site provides little context beyond the documents, the texts offer a rich resource for exploring the diplomatic history of early American imperialism, debates within Congress, and resistance in Hawaii.

United States Early Radio History

Image
Annotation

This website contains articles and extracts about early radio and related technologies in the United States from 1897-1927. It is organized chronologically and divided into 24 sections. Each section is a long-form essay, containing numerous hyperlinks to reproductions or transcriptions of original primary documents, including documents relating to the efforts to provide entertainment and news over the telephone in the first decades of the 20th century. Essays vary in length, most 1,000 - 2,000 words, and many are original essays by the site's creator. The first section offers an overview of the individuals, activities, and technical advances that characterize the early 20th century. The subsequent sections include essays entitled "The Electric Telegraph" and "Radio at Sea." The latter argues that navigation was the first major use of radio and it helped to reduce the isolation of ships and save lives. There are also essays about the early development of the radio industry and the radio during World War I. "Early Government Regulations, 1903-1946" contains 18 documents covering early international and national control of radio and the final section on U.S. radio history covers such topics as "Washington D.C. AM Station History" and "Mystique of the Three-Letter Callsigns" about U.S. radio and television station call letters.

The site is a fascinating place for those interested in the early history and development of the radio and its subsequent effects on related technologies.

Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection

Image
Annotation

The U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission demonstrated in 1900 that the mosquito transmitted yellow fever. This archive is an extensive compilation of 5,500 items related to the Commission's findings. Documents span from 1850 to 1966 and include correspondence, reports, photographs, and artifacts. The site is organized into sections pertaining to six key individuals: Walter Reed, Jesse W. Lazear, Henry Rose Carter, Jefferson Randolph Kean, Albert E. Truby, and Philip S. Hench. Each section includes an introduction (800 to 1,000 words) and is searchable by date, series, subject, or keyword.

In addition, there is a 4,800-word essay entitled "United States Army Yellow Fever Commission." The Walter Reed Series (1874-1936) and the Reed Family Additions (1877-1902) comprise Reed's original letters concerning his seminal work with yellow fever in Cuba. The Jesse Lazear Series and Henry Rose Carter Series, which span from the 1860s to 1930s detail the men's involvement with the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba and their careers in public health. The other series include personal and professional correspondence and research during the period of the Yellow Fever Commission's work in Cuba. A separate section entitled "Books" contains a first edition biography of Walter Reed and a 1941 version of Walter Reed, Doctor in Uniform, a biography for young adults. "Highlights" comprises a sampling of 30 unique documents, many of which comment on the importance of the Cuban American relationship. Those interested in exploring the history of medicine and science, social history, military history, public health policy, tropical medicine, and biomedical ethics will find this site of great interest.

Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology

Image
Annotation

This site contains the full text of the 185 primary documents, roughly a 600-page book, dealing with urban planning. Dozens of journals, conference reports, books, official documents, and other sources are easy to navigate. In addition to the key word search engine, the site includes a topical bibliography that provides more than a dozen headings, and alphabetical and chronological bibliographies. Each entry also has a link to the full text of the document. Essays discuss a broad range of issues, including surveys of the state of urban planning, discussions of how urban improvements should be made, and details of the legal issues of land use regulations. Each document includes a brief (about 1,000 words) general introduction that sets the material in historical perspective. The selections on the site include Frederick Law Olmstead's commentary on the City Beautiful movement and continue to his son's discussion of housing developments in 1919. This site will prove useful to anyone concerned with urban planning or urban history and especially valuable to those studying how urban planning developed through World War I.

U.S. Intelligence Policy Documentation Project

Image
Annotation

Presents histories of two secretive U.S. intelligence organizations—the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA)—and documents the use of satellite imagery in U.S. intelligence operations. Material is organized into three electronic briefing books. The site includes 23 documents from 1961 to 1996 on the creation of the NRO—established in 1961 to coordinate U.S. reconnaissance efforts; 24 documents from 1950 to 2000 on the NSA, created to manage and control U.S. communications intelligence activities; and 14 satellite photographs with a 4,400-word essay on the history of U.S. satellite imagery from 1960 to 1999. The NSA briefing book offers President Truman's 1952 memo establishing the agency and additional documents concerning topics such as North Vietnam military strategy, India's atomic energy program, the global surveillance network known as Echelon, and concerns about possible infringement by the agency of privacy rights of U.S. citizens. Satellite photographs show sites in the Soviet Union, the Sudan, Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan.

Includes links to information on three microfiche sets of related documents and three books on the history of U.S. intelligence operations by the site's creator, Jeffrey T. Richelson. Valuable for those studying the effects of technological developments on the history of U.S. espionage activities and international relations during and after the Cold War.

Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators

Image
Annotation

Approximately 75 items that tell the story of pioneering African American flyers, their contributions to the World War II effort, and racial discrimination they suffered. The site is arranged into four sections containing narratives of approximately 350 words each with hyperlinks leading to related images, mostly photographs. The exhibit also includes reproductions of posters, newspaper articles, insignias, advertisements, personal accounts, government documents, and letters. Searchable by keyword, decade, exhibit section, media, or name of plane. The reproduction quality of some of the items is poor; several newspaper articles are so blurred they are virtually unreadable.

Includes two lesson plans for grades 5-12, links to nine related sites, and an 11-title bibliography. The site will provide students with a brief introduction to an often neglected aspect of African American and aviation history.

The Joshua Lederberg Papers

Image
Annotation

Provides nearly 12,300 documents pertaining to Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and microbiologist Joshua Lederberg (b. 1925), acclaimed for his work in molecular biology and the genetics of bacteria. Most of the material dates from 1945 to the present. Includes more than 10,300 pieces of correspondence, more than 550 articles, 19 lab notebooks, 228 newspaper columns, 48 speeches, 55 monographs, 28 essays, 32 official reports, 83 photographs, and 9 video clips. An exhibit orients visitors to Lederberg's important work in bacterial and cellular genetics, artificial intelligence and expert systems, exobiology ("the study of life outside the atmosphere"), emerging infectious disease and biological warfare (Lederberg was a critic of biological warfare research), and health and the future. The site is fully searchable. Valuable for those studying the history of science and social policy.