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.

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.

The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II

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Photo, Fat Man plutonium implosion nuclear weapon, The Atomic Bomb. . .
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The site presents more than 90 primary source documents on the first use of nuclear weapons and the end of World War II. The documents are organized under eight topics that include background on the atomic project, target definition, debates on alternatives to first use and unconditional surrender, the Japanese search for Soviet mediation, the Trinity Test, the first nuclear strikes, and the problem of radiation poisoning. Additionally, the site's editor has provided commentary on some of the documents pointing out how they have been interpreted and a short introductory essay that explains the historical context of the documents and the questions they raise. A printable version of the briefing book is also available.

Liberty Rhetoric and 19th-Century American Women

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Print, Early 19th Century Woman
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Prepared by Catherine Lavender, Professor of History at the College of Staten Island, this site teaches students about 19th-century women's use of "liberty rhetoric,"—the way of speaking about the relationship between the citizen and the state—to argue for their own liberties. The site focuses on three topics. The first section offers seven documents, two poems, and three images depicting origins of liberty rhetoric in the Revolutionary tradition. The second section provides nine documents and five images tracing the operations of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the liberty rhetoric that the female mill workers used during their strikes in 1834 and 1836.

This section also offers a Lowell Girl Pictorial Gallery with ten images of Lowell and the working lives of the young women who flocked to the mill town to experience some measure of autonomy and to earn money in the mills. The third section provides the text of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and compares it to the Declaration of Independence as an expression of liberty rhetoric.

Also provides five links to other sites, including the Library of Congress National American Women's Suffrage Association Collection and the Rochester University Susan B. Anthony Center's History of the Suffrage Movement. This site is easily navigable and provides high-quality primary document case studies on these three events in women's history.

Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World

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Logo, Gifts of Speech
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Charting changes in women's rhetoric in the public realm from 1848 to the present is possible through this archive of more than 400 speeches by influential, contemporary women. These include prominent female politicians and scientists, as well as popular culture figures. There is an emphasis on the United States (particularly after 1900), including speeches from women as diverse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Ayn Rand. A nearly complete list of Nobel lectures by women laureates provides access to acceptance speeches.

The search function is particularly useful for pulling speeches from a diverse collection into common subject groups. It also allows for the study of the language of women's public debate by following changes in the use of particular metaphors or idioms, such as the concept "motherhood."

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement

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Logo, Documents From the Women's Liberation
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A collection of more than 50 documents--including journal and newspaper articles, speeches, papers, manifestoes, essays, press releases, a minute book, organization statements, songs, and poems—concerning the women's liberation movement, with a focus on U.S. activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Organized into eight subject headings—General and Theoretical; Medical and Reproductive Rights; Music; Organizations and Activism; Sexuality and Lesbian Feminism; Socialist Feminism; Women of Color; and Women's Work and Roles—and searchable by keyword. Includes five related links. Selected primarily by Duke University professor Anne Valk, with assistance from Rosalyn Baxandall (SUNY, Old Westbury) and Linda Gordon (University of Wisconsin, Madison). Useful for those studying women's history and late 20th-century radical movements.

Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s

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Illustration, Cover of Comic Book, Library of Congress
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This site features two "special presentations" and presents hundreds of primary materials relating to baseball in America. Materials include letters, manuscripts, trading cards, lobby cards, newspaper images, photographs, advertisements, sheet music, and transcripts of interviews, speeches, and television broadcasts. The first presentation, "Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson, 1860s-1960s," furnishes approximately 30 documents and photographs in a 5-section timeline that examines the history of Jackie Robinson's entry into the major league baseball. It includes material on the Negro Leagues, the nature of baseball's color line, Robinson's career as a Brooklyn Dodger, and his role as a civil rights activist.

A second presentation, "Early Baseball Pictures," presents 34 images dealing with baseball from the 1860s to the 1920s divided into five sections. The site also includes an annotated bibliography comprised of 82 titles and a list of six links to related resources. While limited in size and focus with regard to general baseball history, this site is valuable as an introductory look at Jackie Robinson's life and the topic of race in American sports history.

Hitting the Sawdust Trail With Billy Sunday

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Portrait, Billy Sunday, 1916, Wheaton College
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This site provides information about the American evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935). A 400-word biographical essay, accompanied by seven images, traces Sunday's background. A 750-word essay with 22 images describes selected exhibit items, including 26 photographs of Sunday, eight photographs of Sunday's associates, 9 photographs and a blueprint of Sunday's tabernacles, a prayer pamphlet, a clippings scrapbook, samples of press coverage, and sermon notes. Many of these items are presented as images, not as readable texts. The site furnishes researcher information on the Sunday Papers, held at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois, and includes a link to a website with an audio file of a Sunday sermon on "booze."

Black Past

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Photo, Chester Himes (1909-1984), Black Past
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This is a large gateway website that organizes and links to more than 400 other websites that focus on African American history. These range from websites that offer collections of primary historical documents to websites useful to researchers in other ways, such as African American genealogical websites, and the websites of Historically Black Colleges, historical sites and museums, and various African American media outlets.

The website itself also contains a large amount of material—an online 1500-entry encyclopedia of people, places, and events in African American history; the texts of 125 speeches by African Americans; the texts of 100 court decisions, laws, and government documents that bear on the African American past; timelines of African American history; audio tapes from the 1963 Open Housing hearings in Seattle; and summary accounts of important events in African American history.

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

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Photo, "Paddy Wagon," "Irish Echo," v. 71, n. 49, p. 4, December 9-15, 1998
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This collection of essays, documents, and bibliographies addresses Atlantic slavery, resistance, and abolition. Source Documents includes about 200 speeches, letters, cartoons, graphics, and articles (visitors may browse by author, date, subject, or document type—no searching), that document slavery in the Americas. Bibliographies contains about 12 detailed bibliographies by scholars of slavery and abolition that can be used in teaching or studying in this area, as well as links to book reviews on the internet. A Scholars Forum posts a 4,500-word featured essay by a noted scholar, and visitors can read past essays as well. Teachers may find useful a Curriculum section, where lesson plans are available, including one for the Amistad affair. It includes a timeline of abolition, a narrative of the incident and the subsequent trials, and an essay. Tangled Roots uses a 1,000-word essay to examine the history shared by Irish Americans and African Americans in America. Neither the most complete digital archive nor the greatest collection of essays, this site is nonetheless a valuable resource for the most recent scholarship of American slavery and abolition.