A Cybrary of the Holocaust

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Oil on Canvas, Marching Out to Work, Mieczyslaw Koscielniak
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Created in 1995, this site presents an impressive body of primary and secondary source materials about the Holocaust. Offers an wide range of contemporary and historical resources, including more than 100 images from concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto; more than 30 drawings and paintings by Holocaust survivors; interactive maps of two concentration camps; the text of the 1942 Wannsee Protocols; four interviews with historians; lesson plans for teaching about the Holocaust to school children; background essays; survivor narratives, poetry, and literature; letters, speeches, and posters by Nazi perpetrators; and scores of links. A sophisticated search engine guides users through the site's poorly organized and sometimes confusing interface. The site's author is a website marketing consultant. Particularly useful for secondary school teachers seeking to design student projects, this is an extremely rich collection of material.

IWitness

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Film still, Ellis Lewin, 4 December 1996, IWitness
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IWitness is an incredible resource for educators intent on bringing awareness and analysis of the Holocaust to their classroom. The site offers more than 1,000 video testimony clips from Holocaust survivors, liberators, and others. These videos can be browsed by topic (from "Anti-Jewish Laws" to "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising") or searched by name or topic. Searching provides a few benefits for lesson planning. For one, video search results will play the portion of a clip containing information related to your search, making it easy to decide if the result is actually relevant to your classroom plans. In addition, searches may reveal related materials such as photographs of artifacts in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum collection or encyclopedia articles providing additional information and context.

You can also register as an educator or a student. Educators can assign activities and view student work (only viewable by the specific student and the teacher). Students can watch videos on items such as understanding testimony and archives or editing video interviews in an ethical manner. Activities that call for video editing allow students to save clips into a library for future use in their projects and prepare their own videos using video-editing tools which are part of the website—no download needed.

For a quick introduction to the site, consider watching the six-minute demonstration video linked at the top of the About Us page.

Interested in learning more about IWitness? Read teacher Brandon Haas's Tech for Teachers article.

Helen Keller Kid's Museum

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Photo, Helen and Anne playing chess, 1900, American Foundation for the Blind
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The main feature of this website is an exhibit presenting the story of Helen Keller's life through five exhibits. Each exhibit offers text and photographs that examine a different period of her life from childhood through her career as a champion of the blind and a world figure. Together, the exhibits contain more than 30 photographs. "Who Was Helen Keller" offers a short Helen Keller biography; a recommended reading list with 19 books, including seven works by Helen Keller; a link to a free version of Keller's The Story of My Life; some fun facts and quotes; and a link to the Helen Keller Archives. The site also includes a chronology of Keller's life. This website is an excellent aid to teaching children the inspiring story of Helen Keller's life.

Anne Sullivan Macy: Miracle Worker

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Photo, Anne Sullivan stands with Helen Keller, c. 1893, AFB
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This website is dedicated to the life and legacy of Anne Sullivan Macy, who, in the words of the site's authors "was a pioneer in the field of education." The exhibition tells her story through an introduction and five galleries, each focused on a different period in the inspiring story of Macy's life, including galleries on her childhood and her work teaching Helen Keller that became the basis for the play The Miracle Worker. The galleries feature excerpts from Macy's correspondence and writings, quotes contained in various biographies, and passages about Macy from Helen Keller's Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy. The full-text of many of Macy's letters are available. All 47 images can be viewed in a larger size and are accompanied by descriptions. The site also offers a brief, one-page biography of Macy; a chronology of her life; and a recommended reading list with 10 books (two for children). An outstanding introduction to the life of this extraordinary teacher.

HarpWeek: Explore History

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Image, "Get Behind Me, Satan!," Nast, T., Harper's Weekly, 17 Feb., 1872.
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[FREE AND SUBSCRIPTION]

These 22 exhibits present free access to a wealth of texts and images on a variety of subjects dealing with 19th-century American history. Each section provides illustrations, articles, editorials, and overviews. Materials include four exhibits on politics and elections, including the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Six exhibits deal with race and ethnicity, including slavery and Chinese Americans. Three exhibits offer material on business and consumer culture, such as advertising history and tobacco.

Additional exhibits include "The American West"; "A Sampler of Civil War Literature"; "Russian-American Relations, 1863–1905"; and "The World of Thomas Nast." A subscription-based website presents the entire run of Harper's Weekly. With free registration, Nineteenth-Century Advertising presents an archive of 40,000 advertisements that appeared in Harper's Weekly.

Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands

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Photo, Class on coconut growing. . . , Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands
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This website offers more than 50,000 slides and photographs that document the history of the American period in Micronesia from 1947 to 1988. The image collection can be browsed or the visitor can sample the types of images in the collection through 12 short animated image tours. The topics of the image tours give an idea of the variety of images available in the collection: parades, dancing, voting, agriculture, stone money, canoes, architecture, women, leaders, education and children, health and hospitals, and men. The only search capability on the site is a Google search of the photograph description files. Additional resources include a map of Oceania and a link to the Hawaii War Records Archive. This archive is a useful source of images for those researching, writing, or teaching the cultural history of the Pacific Islands.

Digital Archive Collections at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library

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Image, Digital Archive Collections at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library
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These 29 collections document the history of Hawaii and Micronesia from 1834 to the 1990s. "Annexation of Hawai'i," for example, contains thousands of pages of documents concerning the U.S. plan to annex Hawaii, realized in 1898. Materials include the 1,437-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; Congressional debates on the Hawaii Organic Act, passed in 1900 to establish a territorial government; and Hawaiian anti-annexation petitions and protest documents from 1897–98.

"Hawaii War Records" presents 880 photographs documenting the impact of World War II on Hawaii and its people. The "Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands" photo archive provides 52,000 photographs on programs in education, health, and political and economic development in the 2,100 islands of Micronesia administered by the U.S. from 1947 to 1994. The website also includes a collection of 16 Hawaiian-language newspapers.

The History Box

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Photo, Pushcart peddler in Lower East Side, NY, early 1900s, The History Box
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A gateway and an archive of numerous articles on New York history, this site "focuses a particularly long lens on the early history of political and economic events, panics, riots and other related matters affecting or contributing to New York City's development and growth." Its main feature is the New York state and New York City directories. (The U.S. directory is currently unavailable.) The New York state directory offers more than 700 links and more than 60 articles organized under 21 topics that include the arts, cities and counties, ethnic groups, military, societies and associations, transportation, women and their professions, and worship.

The New York City directory offers more than 5,200 links and more than 700 articles organized under 58 topics that include architecture, the arts, business matters, city government, clubs and societies, crime and punishment, education, ethnic groups, 5th Avenue, Harlem, immigration, New York City panics, real estate, temperance and prohibition, and Wall Street. The visitor can search the entire site or each directory by keyword. This site is a good starting point for researching the history of New York. It should also be useful for literary scholars, writers, and historical societies.

Online Archive of California

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Photo, Joseph Sharp, 1849 gold miner of Sharp's Flats, Online Archive of CA
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This archive provides more than 81,000 images and 1,000 texts on the history and culture of California. Images may be searched by keyword or browsed according to six categories: history, nature, people, places, society, and technology. Topics include exploration, Native Americans, gold rushes, and California events.

Three collections of texts are also available. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive furnishes 309 documents and 67 oral histories. Free Speech Movement: Student Protest, U.C. Berkeley, 1964–1965 provides 541 documents, including books, letters, press releases, oral histories, photographs, and trial transcripts.

UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office offers full-text transcripts of 139 interviews organized into 14 topics including agriculture, arts, California government, society and family life, wine industry, disability rights, Earl Warren, Jewish community leaders, medicine (including AIDS), suffragists, and UC Black alumni.

Oral History Research Center

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Photo, "The Kim Sisters at a table in Reno"
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Established in 1905, Las Vegas, NV, officially became a city in 1911. Its growth and development over the course of the 20th century is documented through this diverse collection of oral histories. Eight oral histories, in video, audio, and transcript format, expose aspects of daily life in early Las Vegas from the 1930s to the 1960s. Las Vegas showgirls Anna Bailey, Carol Baker, Betty Bunch, Sook-ja, Ai-ja, Mia Kim, and Virginia James discuss working conditions on the Las Vegas strip in the 1960s and 70s as well as their involvement with prominent shows, the racial integration of showrooms, and the growth of the Las Vegas Korean community. Present-day Las Vegas comes to life through oral histories and videos of six women in their 70s and 80s who tap dance together several times a week at the West Las Vegas Arts Center. Segregation, integration, the Nevada Test Site, and local history in Las Vegas are the focus of the oral history roundtable with Rose Hamilton and four other women who grew up together in Las Vegas and remain friends to this day.