Supreme Court Historical Society

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This site is designed to preserve and disseminate the history of the Supreme Court, from its first session in 1789 to the present. The main section presents the history of the Court, including a detailed timeline with biographical sketches of the chief and associate justices and the history of major decisions during the tenure of each Chief Justice. "How the Court Works" includes 17 short essays (150-700 words each) on the term of the justices, the types of cases they hear, and the role of the Chief Justice. In this section, users will find the text of opinions from 411 cases (130 from the Warren Court, 160 from the Burger Court, and 121 from the first seven years of the Rehnquist Court) heard by the Supreme Court between 1955 and 1993. There are also recordings of 10 sample cases, including Roe v. Wade. "Publications" features four articles, Historical Society yearbooks from 1976 to 1990, and six digitized volumes that include the memoirs of Henry Billings Brown. For students and instructors, the "Learning Center" is an excellent resource. It presents three cases for and about students and four landmark cases that illustrate the development of the Court's gender discrimination doctrine. There are also activities and lesson plans on key Supreme Court cases, for example Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. The site provides several quizzes, along with a multimedia presentation about President Franklin Roosevelt and the 1937 Supreme Court controversy. This material will be useful to anyone interested in studying the Supreme Court, the court's history, and various justices.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

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This teaching site was developed "to support the teaching of landmark Supreme Court cases, helping students explore the key issues of each case." The site features 17 pivotal Supreme Court cases, including Marbury v. Madison (1803), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Korematsu v. United States (1944), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and Roe v. Wade (1973). Each case offers a "resources" section featuring such material as teaching recommendations, background summaries, a link to the full-text majority opinion, and excerpts from the majority and dissenting opinions. An "activities" section contains short activities and in-depth lessons. The site also includes instructions for general teaching strategies, including moot court, political cartoon analysis, and website evaluation. The site also offers material on key concepts of constitutional law including federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances, equal protection of the laws, judicial review, due process, the commerce clause, and the necessary and proper clause. An excellent resource for teaching the legal history of these important Supreme Court cases and the issues surrounding them.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2008 - 11:31
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The heart of this collection about President Lyndon Baines Johnson is a group of 77 oral history interviews (up to 200 pages each) with members of Johnson's administration, Congressional colleagues, journalists, civil rights leaders, and a historian. The website provides 14 audio files, including telephone conversations, State of the Union addresses, Johnson's speech to Congress following the Kennedy assassination, and an excerpt of his television address announcing his decision not to run for a second term.

Also available are transcripts of 25 speeches; 50 "days of" diary entries; and the 99 National Security Action memoranda issued during Johnson's presidency relaying foreign policy directives and initiating actions. There are 150 photographs and one campaign advertisement. Biographical information is furnished in two chronologies. An exhibit from the Johnson museum provides an essay about events in Johnson's lifetime.

Prosperity and Thrift: Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy

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This exhibit assembles a wide assortment of materials from the 1920s, items loosely related to the prosperity of the Coolidge years and the rise of a mass consumer economy. The collection includes more than 400 documents, images, and audio and video clips on subjects ranging from automobiles, consumer goods, department stores, families, Motion Picture News, and the National Negro Business League, to politics.

An introductory essay provides valuable background information on the Coolidge administration with additional insight on the social and cultural context of the era. An alphabetized guide to people, organizations, and topics includes definitions and brief descriptions. This sort of material has not been widely available, and this collection is extremely valuable as a resource on the development of mass consumption.

Profiles in Science

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These documents, exhibits, photographs, and essays tell the history of 26 prominent 20th-century scientists, physicians, and experts in biomedical research and public health. The site is divided thematically into "Biomedical Research," "Health and Medicine," and "Fostering Science and Health." The collections include published and unpublished items, such as books, journals, pamphlets, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audiotapes, video clips, and other materials. Each exhibit includes introductory narratives and biographies of each scientist and a selection of noteworthy documents. The collections are particularly strong in cellular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, with attention to health and medical research policy, application of computers in medicine, science education, and the history of modern science.

The History of Social Security Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/14/2008 - 11:31
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The Social Security program and the institutional history of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and its contribution to the welfare of the American public are presented on this site. It contains a vast collection of oral histories, audio recordings, and primary documents of the SSA. The audio and video clip section includes radio debates on the merits of the Social Security program taped during 1935, Lyndon B. Johnson's remarks on the passage of the Medicare bill in 1965, and Ronald Reagan's remarks at the signing of the Social Security Amendments of 1983. Also available are Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's recorded telephone conversations that reference Social Security and Medicare. Another notable feature is the 37 oral history interviews conducted by SSA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Additional oral history collections are featured, providing information about the 1977 creation of Health Care Financing Administration and policy issues involving the Medicare and Social Security programs.

The Jack London Online Collection

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The full-text versions of more than 40 works by Jack London (1876–1916), a prominent early 20th-century writer who was also involved in the socialist movement, are available here. Materials include famous fiction, such as The Call of the Wild (1903), and lesser-known works, such as War of the Classes (1905), a collection of speeches London delivered on behalf of socialism. The website includes 20 novels, 19 short story collections, two collections of essays, three plays, and six additional published nonfiction works. The website is keyword searchable. In addition to providing the writings of Jack London, there is plenty of biographical and historical information about London and his times. Outside resources are suggested, divided into those suitable for students and those for teachers. Combining London's original works with other contextual materials provided by the site could be valuable for studying early 20th-century American literature and journalism and its relation to radical political and social currents of the time.

William P. Gottlieb: Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz

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Writer-photographer William P. Gottlieb (1917–2006) documented the New York and Washington, D.C. jazz scene from 1938 to 1948 in more than 1,600 photographs. During the course of his career, Gottlieb took portraits of prominent jazz musicians—including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, and Benny Carter—and legendary venues, such as 52nd Street, the Apollo Theatre, Cafe Society, the Starlight Roof, and Zanzibar. The site also features approximately 170 related articles by Gottlieb from Down Beat magazine; 16 photographs accompanied by Gottlieb's audio commentary on various assignments; a 4,300-word biography based on oral histories; and a 31-title bibliography. Extremely valuable for jazz fans, music historians, musicians, and those interested in urban popular culture.

Race and Place

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This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

Native American Documents Project

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These four collections of data and documents address Federal Indian policy in the late 19th century. The first set includes eight annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from the 1870s, along with appendices and a map. The second set, Allotment Data, traces the Federal "reform" policy of dividing Indian lands into small tracts for individuals—a significant amount of which went to whites—from the 1870s to the 1910s. This set includes transcriptions of five acts of Congress, tables, and an essay analyzing the data.

The third set includes 111 documents on the little-known Rogue River War of 1855 in Oregon, the reservations set up for Indian survivors, and the allotment of one of these reservations, the Siletz, in 1894. The fourth set provides the California section of an ethnographic compilation from 1952.