Today in History

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This exhibit changes daily and includes text, images, and sound or video clips, where appropriate, for each day's event. The material comes from the Library of Congress's American Memory collections. Topics range widely and have included the establishment of Oregon as a state, Stalin's request that the U.S. invade Western Europe, and the Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanemoku's 1911 freestyle record. The site provides links to American Memory collections as well as suggestions for finding more information on the same or related topics. This attractive and well-designed site would be useful for teachers wishing to get students involved in a daily exercise in history or for teachers hoping provide a broad sense of what can count as history.

African Americans in the Harmon Foundation Collection

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This site is based on the 1997 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery featuring 20 portraits from the Harmon Foundation Collection. Real estate developer William E. Harmon (1862-1928) "one of the many white Americans who expressed his interest in the artistic achievements of black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s," established the Harmon Foundation in New York City in 1922 intending to "recognize African American achievements, not only in the fine arts but also in business, education, farming, literature, music, race relations, religious service and science." The portraits included in this exhibit were originally exhibited by the Harmon Foundation in 1944 "with the express goal of reversing racial intolerance, ignorance and bigotry by illustrating the accomplishments of contemporary African Americans. Each portrait is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of its subject.

Salem Witchcraft Hysteria: A National Geographic Interactive Site

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Part of the National Geographic Society website, this is an interactive exercise in which the visitor follows a narrative compiled from several Salem witchcraft trial accounts. These trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The site places visitors in the shoes of one of Salem's accused witches, describing conditions in the jail, the ordeal of the trial, and the accused's eventual confession to performing acts of witchcraft. The site also provides links to brief, 100-word biographies of 11 persons involved in the trials, such as young accusers Ann Putnam and Abigail Williams, slave and accused witch Tituba, and Tituba's master, Reverend Samuel Parris. The narrative leads to a positive outcome--the accused is eventually released from prison--but it offers an optional link to discover what may have happened to a prisoner who refused to confess his or her guilt. The site also contains links to a discussion forum and to an "Ask the Expert" page which allows visitors to pose questions to Richard Trask, Danvers, Massachusetts, archivist and curator of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. There is also a four-item bibliography of recent works on the Salem trials. This site contains no primary documents, yet it is useful for conveying to younger secondary school students the sense of the panic that surrounded the trials.

Through Our Parent's Eyes: Tucson's Diverse Community

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The ethnically diverse history of Tucson, Arizona is celebrated here in sections on the Hispanic, Native American, African American, Chinese, and Jewish heritage of the area. A 1000-word essay on the Hispanic history of Tucson is complemented by the four histories, from two to 100 pages, of local families. An exhibit of traditional arts in the Mexican American community includes photographs of houses, piñatas, and ten video clips of low-rider cars. Sources on Native Americans include 12 oral histories (300-600 words), about food and culture. The history of African Americans in the Tucson area from the 16th to the 19th century is recounted in an 1,800-word essay. A collection of 22 biographies (120-800 words) and summarized oral histories offer more personal details of African American life in Tucson. The collection of material about Chinese Americans in Tucson includes four biographies (600-1,200 words) and seven video clips of interviews with a Chinese American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. The journey made by one Jewish family from Russia in the 19th century to Tucson in the 20th is recounted in a 4,700-word illustrated essay. The site will be useful for research in ethnicity and the history of the west.

U.S. Women's History Workshop

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This site is designed to provide high school and college teachers with primary source material for teaching women's history. The site provides 13 assignments based on more than 50 documents, primarily illustrations from 19th-century magazines. Two profiles of early women's rights activists include biographies (100-650 words) and 13 articles written by the two about women's rights. Other documents on the site include humorous poetry, advertisements, letters to editors, and excerpts from 19th-century essays about women's rights. A scholarly article (3,000 words), illustrated with 13 prints and cartoons, discusses dress and perceptions of dress in the 1850s and 1860s. Another essay (1,100 words), illustrated with six cartoons, addresses gender and politics in mid-19th century America. The site is somewhat disorganized, but will be a useful resource for teaching women's history.

Promise of Gold Mountain: Tucson's Chinese Heritage

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This is a collection of material about the history of Chinese-Americans in Tucson, Arizona. It is one of five sections in an exhibit about ethnic diversity in Tucson. The site includes four 600-1,200-word biographies of Chinese-Americans in Tucson. Chinese-American history in the Tucson area is discussed in three 600-word essays about the railroads, farming and small business, and the development of Chinatowns in Tucson. Highlighted text in each essay links to three to ten photos. There are seven video clips of interviews of 20 seconds to two and a half minutes with and about a Chinese-American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. A page of sources lists eight books and articles about Chinese settlement in the west. The site will be useful for research about Asian-Americans, the west, and ethnicity in general.

American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920

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This Library of Congress American Memory site features more than 2800 lantern slides representing the work of American landscape and architectural designers from 1850 to 1920. The slides are drawn from the Frances Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Featured designers include Harvard Landscape and Architectural faculty members Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Bremer F. Pond, and James Sturgis Pray, as well as other American designers like Charles Downing Lay and M.S. Sayer. Images include views of cities, buildings, parks, estates, gardens, and houses throughout the country. Information on the location, source, collection, date, and repository of the original image accompanies each slide. Also included on the site are facsimiles of 275 building and garden plans, 219 maps, and eight models of various locations. Brief (roughly 500-word) essays and over 20 images outline the work of Charles Downing Lay, M.S. Sayer, and Frederick Law Olmsted. The site also offers a bibliography of 11 works related to photographs of architecture and landscape design; a 1000-word essay with 18 photographs of Harvard buildings from 1860 to 1905; and a 750-word essay on the history and manufacture of lantern slides. This site provides a variety of images for those interested in examining American architecture and landscape design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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

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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

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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.

Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers

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This site highlights Orville and Wilbur Wright's pioneering aviation work that led to the world's first powered, controlled, and sustained flight. The collection contains approximately 49,000 digital items, including correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and 300 glass-plate photographic negatives. The papers cover the years 1881-1952, although the years 1900-1940 are especially well represented. The diaries offer detailed records of the brothers' ideas, as well as their successes and failures; and photographs include the first flight, taken at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. The materials are particularly valuable because the brothers so carefully documented their work and ideas, and because they corresponded so often with members of their family.

The site includes a Wright Brothers timeline and a Wright family tree. This site would be of particular use to anyone interested in the Wright Brothers or the history of flight, but is also useful in examining the role of photography in history and invention.