Arizona State Museum

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Presenting a virtual alternative to the museum in Tucson, this site allows visitors to experience the indigenous cultures of Arizona and the greater southwest. The Online Exhibitions section offers a plethora of digital programs and resources, including Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest, With an Eye on Culture: The Photography of Helga Teiwes, and The Pottery Project: Explore the Arnold and Doris Roland Wall of Pots.

The Paths of Life section features a virtual reality tour of the exhibit that consists of 22 panoramas of the museum space with accompanying text. This presentation enables online visitors to vividly examine the origins, lifestyles, and contemporary lives of 10 Native American Indian tribes from the American Southwest and/or northern Mexico.

The With an Eye on Culture photography exhibit features more than 50 photographs, along with explanatory notes and video footage of interviews with some Native American subjects.

The Pottery Project enables vistors to virtually explore the Arizona State Museum's Wall of Pots. According to the Museum, the primary purpose of this exhibit is to "illustrate continuity and change over nearly two millennia of pottery making in the Southwest." For this reason, the Wall of Pots showcases both protohistoric and contemporary pottery. Visitors can view the collection column by column, and even explore individual shelves.

However, these are just a few examples of the resources complied by the Arizona State Museum. Younger students might enjoy the What Would Frida Wear? section, which allows users to dress a virtual paper doll of the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, in indigenous clothing and read about her life. Interested in more games like this? Pop over to the Explore Culture Online page for informative podcasts, videos, reading lists, and a ton of other engaging activities and useful information.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States

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This website is dedicated to the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, presenting material on his political ideas and his life through three main sections. "The Homestead" includes a 1,000-word introductory essay with six photographs. The richest section, on the history of Coolidge, includes a chronology of his life. An archive of speeches from his time as governor of Massachusetts to his time as President is also available. They consist of 28 early speeches, 20 during his tenure as governor, 11 from him as vice-president, and 31 presidential addresses. Twenty-one essays (800 to 1400 words) include "Coolidge the Victim?" by Hendrik Booraem V and "The Day Harding Died" by Frank Greene. Also available is a compilation of Coolidge quotes arranged alphabetically from "advancement" to "xenophobia." Visitors may access 20 papers presented at a 1998 conference on Coolidge and reprinted in The New England Journal of History. The papers average 1,000 words and include topics such as Coolidge's relationship with the Northampton Irish and his presidential legacy.

Under "Ask the President," visitors could ask Jim Cooke, an actor who has played Coolidge in a one-man play since 1985, questions about the President's life. Today, the archives remain available.

Thomas Eakins: American Realist

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An exhibition of 18 works by one of America's great artists, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), with annotations of 100-300 words on each image. Eakins, known for applying Paris-learned Beaux-Arts techniques to realistic depictions of his own Philadelphia milieu, often painted persons engrossed in everyday actions: sailboats racing and oarsmen rowing on the Schuykill River; surgeons overseeing students operating on patients; a concert singer performing; a baby playing; and coach horses trotting through Fairmont Park. Although most of the images —which date from 1871-1902—are reproductions of paintings, the exhibit also includes a preparatory drawing, a photograph of the artist's anatomical casts, and two photographic studies, one influenced by the pioneer motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. As the exhibition text notes, scholars have recently discovered that Eakins used projected photographs to create his works.

Also included are expressive portraits of Eakins' friends and contemporaries, including poet Walt Whitman, who wrote that Eakins was "not a painter, but a force"; controversial anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; and sculptor William Rush engaged in transforming a nude model into a mythic image. Valuable for students of the history of art and for those interested in realistic depictions of late 19th-century life and culture in Philadelphia.

Selected Historical Decennial Census Population and Housing Counts

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More than 40 historical census reports, including decennial reports dating back to 1790, are available for download on this website as PDFs. Historical statistics address topics such as population totals by race, urban or rural status, educational attainment, and means of transportation to work, among others.

There are also histories of the 21 U.S. census questionnaires produced from 1790 to 2000, including instructions to census marshals dating back to 1820. Comparative tables show which censuses included specific questions on subjects, such as ancestry and mental disabilities, and whether respondents were deaf, blind, insane, feeble-minded, paupers, literate, or convicts. Additional information includes state and territorial censuses, mortality schedules produced for a number of 19th-century censuses, population at the time of each census, and supplemental censuses taken at various times on free and slave inhabitants, Indian populations, unemployment, and housing.

Because of the PDF format, the reports take a number of minutes to download. These materials are useful for those needing demographic information or researching the history of census taking and the development of census categories.

Worthington Memory, Online Scrapbook

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Currently provides more than 122 images of objects, documents, and photographs pertaining to the history of the town of Worthington, OH, founded in 1803 by a group of families migrating from western Connecticut and Massachusetts. The site creators plan to add more materials in the future, including digitized versions of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and oral histories. Users may search by subject, title, or keyword in bibliographic records—which include abstracts of up to 100 words for each item—or browse the collection by decade or 27 categories covering aspects of the social, economic, cultural, civic, and environmental history of the town. Includes links to 22 related sites. Useful for those studying local history.

Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting

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Presents 470 audio excerpts of interviews and 3,882 photographs compiled in 1994 by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress during a study of occupational culture in Paterson, NJ. The project—sponsored by Congress—explores ways that the industrial heritage of Paterson, with manufacturing roots going back to the 18th century, still affects present-day community life and culture with regard to work practices and leisure activities. Audio files are available in three formats, accompanied by bibliographic records with word-searchable summaries and subject headings. The site includes five essays—from 2,500 to 5,000 words in length with photographs—by project fieldworkers on African American family businesses in Paterson; an ethnography of a single workplace—Watson Machine International, a manufacturing film established in 1845; business life along a single street—21st Avenue, home to Italian and Hispanic communities; a traditional Paterson food—the hot Texas wiener; and remembrances by retired workers.

Offers a 27-title bibliography, annotated links to 32 related sites, and a glossary of specialized terms. Valuable for those studying the intersection of labor and ethnic history, urban history, and the functioning of historical memory.

U.S. Intelligence Policy Documentation Project

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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.

Kiowa Drawings

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Presents more than 600 drawings by Kiowa Indians—a tribe originally from the Southern Plains—from the 19th and 20th centuries. While many are on traditional buffalo hide, more recent drawings are on paper. These drawings illustrate "tribal social and artistic traditions" as well as the history of contact and conflict. The first of five sections includes 45 drawings created by Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe warriors imprisoned in the 1870s. The largest section offers more than 400 images commissioned by anthropologist James Mooney in the late 19th century as illustrations for his field notes. Additional sections include the Silver Horn pictorial calendar, composed of images used to track time and illustrate stories, and Silver Horn Target Record Book, with images of "warfare, courting, personal dress, the Sun Dance, and stories of the mythical trickster figure, Saynday." The final section offers material by the "Kiowa Five," artists who studied at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1920s and helped establish contemporary Indian painting. Useful for those studying American Indian history, culture, life, and art.

Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators

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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

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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.