Naval History and Heritage Command

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The Naval History and Heritage Command collects, preserves, and presents the history of the U.S. Navy in physical locations throughout the U.S. and online. Teachers will be most interested in "Resources & Research," a rich collection of primary and secondary sources related to naval history, including photographs, paintings, documents, oral histories, historical overviews, chronologies, and bibliographies. Teachers may want to start with "Photograpy," "Web Exhibits," or "Commemorations," some of the richer and more navigable sections. "Photography" features an online library of selected images on subjects including recruiting posters, albums and scrapbooks, women in the U.S. Navy, aircraft, naval insignia, individual ships, and more. "Web Exhibits" gathers together more than 20 curated collections of resources on topics from the Civil War to Japan/U.S. Navy relations; resources vary by exhibit but include documents, photographs, videos, related articles, oral histories, and links to off-site resources. "Commemorations" features collections of resources related to specific events, including the bicentennial of the War of 1812, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the Battle of Midway, and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Teachers may also find unique primary sources in "Art." The Naval Art Gallery offers more than 25 galleries including "Women in Uniform" and "The Invasion of Normandy." Additionally, the "Archives" section provides downloadable Commander Naval Forces Vietnam (COMNAVFORV) monthly summaries from 1966 to 1973 and links to other archives holding material on the U.S. Navy. "Navy Department Library" makes available naval documents from 1775 to the present day (note that the documents are presented chronologically by topic, with no distinction between primary and secondary sources). "Diversity" directs visitors to collections on women, African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans in the U.S. Navy. "Videos" indexes more than 90 video clips, some primary sources and some secondary. "Ships Histories" provides brief histories of specific ships, indexed by name, and "Aviation" provides data on different types of aircraft and aircraft carriers. "Bios" features more than 100 essays with images on naval figures. Teachers will need patience to navigate the site and uncover the primary sources available.

ProQuest Information and Learning

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This fee-based service provides a range of resources. There are a large number of secondary sources, including more than 2,500 scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and trade publications, with full-text access and searching capabilities available for approximately half. "Historical Newspapers" offers an enormous body of primary sources, including access to the following: The New York Times (1851–2001), The Washington Post (1877–1988), The Wall Street Journal (1889–1986), The Christian Science Monitor (1908–1991), and The Los Angeles Times (1881–1984). For recent history, there are articles from more than 500 newspapers worldwide from the 1980s to the present. These include specialized publications from the worlds of business, education, medicine, religion, and sciences and reference resources. ProQuest offers subscribers a variety of product "modules," so materials described above may not be available at all institutions.

Readex Digital Collections

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Hundreds of thousands of documents spanning four centuries of American history are available in this large archive. Broadsides, ephemera, pamphlets, and booklets are available from 1639 to 1900. More than 1,300 newspaper titles, representing all 50 states, range in date from 1690 to 1922. U.S. Senate and House of Representatives reports, journals, and other documents are available from 1817 to 1980. Legislative and executive documents from the Early Republic are also included. The entire body of documents is keyword searchable, and, in addition, each collection can be searched and browsed individually. These documents shed light on many aspects of American social, political, economic, and cultural history, and can provide a valuable window into the daily lives of early Atlantic peoples. The collection of broadsides and ephemera is especially useful for exploring the history of printing in the United States, as all titles can be browsed by bookseller, printer, or publisher.

Lakota Winter Counts

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This anthropological exhibit displays, explains, and interprets the Lakota pictorial histories known as winter counts. Featuring a searchable database of winter count images, a documentary about Lakota history and culture, and video interviews with Lakota people, website visitors can view images from 10 winter counts and examine their symbols in detail by year with curator comments. Visitors are also able to examine the various symbols used by the winter count keepers to represent plants and animals, ceremonies, health, trade goods, places, people, the U.S. government, and the sky. "Who Are the Lakota" offers a historical overview of Lakota history in 10 segments that include the Lakota and the Sioux people, Lakota origins, westward migration, horse-centered culture on the northern Great Plains, important conflicts and treaties, confinement to the Great Sioux Reservation, and subsequent land cessions.

Colonial Connecticut Records, 1636-1776

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This scanned and partially searchable version of the 15-volume Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from April 1636 to October 1776, was originally published between 1850 and 1890. Users can search documents by date, volume, and page number. Each of the 15 volumes, covering consecutive time periods, includes alphabetical, hyperlinked subject terms for browsing. The site also provides access by type of material: charters, documents, inventories, laws, letters, and court proceedings. Keyword searching may be available in the future, but even without this option, the site offers a wealth of accessible material on politics, legal matters, Indian affairs, military actions, social concerns, agriculture, religion, and other aspects of early Connecticut history.

USC Archival Research Center

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These varied collections document the history of Los Angeles and southern California. "Digital Archives" offer more than 126,000 photographs, maps, manuscripts, texts, and sound recordings in addition to exhibits. Nearly 1,200 images of artifacts from early Chinese American settlements in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara are available, as is the entire run of El Clamor Publico, the city's main Spanish-language newspaper from the 1850s. Photographs document Japanese American relocation during World War II and photographs, documents, and oral history audio files record Korean-American history. The archive also includes Works Projects Administration Land Use survey maps and Auto Club materials. A related exhibit, "Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future", offers collections on additional topics, including discovery and settlement, California missions, electric power, "murders, crimes, and scandals," city neighborhoods, cemeteries, Disneyland, African American gangs, and the Red Car lines.

Battle Lines: Letters from America's Wars

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This annotated collection of more than 30 letters addresses the personal and political costs of war. Letters cover conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Iraq and are divided thematically into five sections: "Enlisting," "Comforts of Home," "Love," "Combat," and "The End of the War." Letters come from well-known military figures, such as Douglas MacArthur and Robert E. Lee, as well as ordinary veterans, such as Peter Kiterage, one of the 5,000 African Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War. The thematic organization allows users to chart changes and continuities over 200 years of American history. Each letter is read aloud so students can listen as well as read. In addition, a "magic lens" feature provides transcriptions over the original handwriting to help students decode the letters.

Digital Vaults

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The National Archives and Records Administration holds more than 10 billion items addressing the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the U.S. This interactive website makes more than 1,200 of those items available, including official documents, personal accounts, images, maps, and ephemera. Browsing is easy from the main page which presents a rotating cast of eight archival items—from an early engraving of the Declaration of Independence, to a top secret document on dropping the atomic bomb, to an image of Navajo code talkers.

More than 550 tags and a keyword search render the items accessible to those interested in specific topics, such as "Abraham Lincoln" (20 items), NASA (19 items), and "Yellowstone National Park" (three items). Each item is accompanied by a brief annotation providing historical context and related tags, further facilitating browsing. All items can be zoomed for highly detailed viewing and rendered printer-friendly for classrooms without computer access.

The website also provides a variety of tools allowing users to collect and manipulate items. "Create" presents the opportunity to make individualized posters and movies out of any item or group of items from the website. After a free login, users can save and email these creations for future use.

Rutgers Oral History Archives

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This collection of oral history interviews centers on men and women who served overseas and on the home front during World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold War. The project was started to learn more about the war from ordinary people. The archive contains 444 full-text interviews, primarily of Rutgers College and Douglass College (formerly New Jersey College for Women) alumni and many of these interviews were conducted by Rutgers undergraduate students. Interviewees were selected to investigate the effects of the G.I. Bill on American society. The easily navigable site provides an alphabetical interview list with the name of each interviewee, date and place of interview, college of affiliation and class year, theater in which the interviewee served, and branch of service, if applicable. The list also provides "Description" codes, including military occupations such as infantry and artillery members, nurses, and civilian occupations.

Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read

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This site is devoted to the examination of 19th-century children in America: what they read, what was written about them, and what was written for them. "Children" includes letters, adoption advertisements, paper rewards for obedient children, 24 contemporary articles for and about children, and 14 photographs, as well as scrapbooks and exercise books. "Magazines" features illustrations, articles, editorials, and letters from 12 different children's magazines, with cover and masthead images from 173 different volumes. "Books" includes 22 articles on children and reading (including one warning children to avoid mental gluttony by not reading too much), and the full text of 29 books, including the American Spelling Book and grammar primers. Although the site is not searchable, the documents are indexed and arranged by subject. The site includes eight analytical essays written by modern scholars, a timeline covering the years 1789 to 1873 (with entries covering subjects like magazines, books, historical events, and people), and eight separate bibliographies. A "puzzle drawer" includes word games played by 19th-century children.