Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History

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History Link is an encyclopedia of the history of Seattle and King County, WA. A timeline of 180 "Milestones" connects visitors to 500-word historical essays on topics in Seattle-area history from before 1851 to 2000. "People's Histories" presents roughly 150 memoirs and oral histories (1000 to 16,000 words) of Seattle residents of diverse class and ethnic backgrounds, including Squamish and Nordic. There are 18 "Magic Lantern" photographic essays ranging from one image and 40 words to 50 images and 300 words. Special collections have been arranged in 17 folios, which cover topics such as Martin Luther King's 1961 visit to the city and the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in 1999. The WTO archive contains 19 articles of 100 to 2000 words on the history of radicalism in Seattle and the WTO protests of 1999 and 2000. This archive also contains 48 photographs of the protests taken by History Link staff.

Visitors may take four Cybertours of the city in which they click on sections of a map and connect to one or two images and 300-word descriptions of local history. "Then and Now" contains 49 before-and-after photographs of Seattle landmarks with 300-word essays on the history of each location. The site is easy to navigate and can be searched by subject. In March 2003, HistoryLink added a database for all of Washington state. It is an excellent resource for all levels of scholars interested in the history of the Northwest or oral history.

Korean American Digital Archive

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Thousands of primary materials, including documents compiled by Korean American organizations, personal papers, more than 1,900 photographs, and around 180 interviews, address the experiences of Koreans in the United States between 1903 and 1965 on this website. The materials run the gamut from organizational memos and other official documents to personal letters, wedding programs, birth certificates, and social security check stubs.

This material allows users to piece together the life histories of individual Korean Americans. They will find individuals like Soon Hyun, an activist in the Korean resistance movement against Japanese colonialism in 1919, who later moved to the United States and became a minister in Hawaii. Or Florence Ahn, a Korean American who became a prominent singer in Los Angeles. These personal biographies, in turn, allow users to examine the human dimension of the history of Asian Americans, and place individuals within a larger history.

Camping With the Sioux—Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher

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This site presents two fieldwork journals written by anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher during her six-week stay with a group of Dakota Sioux women in 1881. The journals are indexed by date and can be searched or read as a narrative.

Visitors will find a 1,000-word biographical essay about Fletcher and a bibliography of sources, including three books, three Smithsonian collections of related materials, five collections of papers, and six links to sites about Sioux Indians and 19th-century anthropology of the Sioux. A gallery of 36 photographs contains pictures of Fletcher, her two travelling companions, scenes of Sioux life, and portraits of Sioux Indians, including Sitting Bull.

In her journals, Fletcher transcribed 14 folk tales related by her Sioux hosts. These tales are indexed by title and presented separately as well as in the journals. The site offers unique sources particularly useful for students of Native American history, women's history, and the history of anthropology and ethnography.

The 3Cities Project

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A collection of 10 essays on "the modern American city as a space of representation," using New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the years between the 1870s and 1930s as focal points for interdisciplinary explorations. The essays, originally presented at the 1999 conference "New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Cultures and Representation," run from 3,000 to 12,000 words in length, include approximately 100 photographs and address topics such as the urban novel, Harlem sidewalk photographs, urban perception in the fiction of W. D. Howells, urban electronic history, how the physical redefinition of Chicago in the 1890s "presaged and enabled the virtual city of a century later," and how public art in New York and Los Angeles represented the cities and their inhabitants.

The 3Cities Project, based in the departments of American and Canadian Studies at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham, has also produced the electronic book City Sites, which offers an additional 10 multimedia essays on New York and Chicago (see separate "History Matters" entry for a detailed description of this component site).

Highly theoretical and intellectually challenging, these sites will be valuable to those studying urban history, human geography, cultural representations, and societal consequences of the transformation to modernity in American cities.

Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978-1996

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This colorful Library of Congress American Memory site brings together selected items from two American Folklife collections, the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection and the "All American Quilt Contest" series, sponsored by Good Housekeeping magazine and Coming Home, a division of the direct mail retailer Land's End.

The Blue Ridge Collection consists of 229 photographs and 181 interviews recorded in 1978 with six Virginia and North Carolina quiltmakers. These items illustrate the art of quiltmaking within the context of daily life in Appalachia. The Quilt Contest materials, from contests held in 1992, 1994, and 1996, include images of approximately 180 prize-winning quilts from across the U.S. The quilts represent a wide variety of styles, traditions, and materials used in the practice of the craft.

The exhibit is divided into three sections. Speaking of Quilts offers an essay (2,000 words) on the making of these two collections and the tradition of quiltmaking. Blue Ridge Quilts features the audio files of interviews and photographs of the six Appalachian quilters practicing their craft, along with a 500-word biography of each featured quiltmaker. Each audio clip is accompanied by brief (150-word) descriptive notes. The Quilt Contest section includes a roughly 2,000-word essay describing the contests and featuring a gallery of images of 180 prizewinning quilts.

The site offers a handy glossary of more than 50 terms and a selected bibliography of approximately 60 monographs and periodicals related to the history and craft of quiltmaking. It can be searched by keyword and browsed by quiltmakers and subjects. This beautiful site is useful for students researching American and Appalachian culture, not to mention those who simply love the art of quiltmaking.

Toledo's Attic: A Virtual Museum of Toledo, Ohio

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This virtual museum contains resources focused on Toledo and Northwest Ohio's history from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. The site is broken into seven content areas—Tour Toledo, Essays, New Media, Exhibits, Resources, Social Media, and Links—each of which contain photographs and other sources. In the "Tour Toledo" section, visitors have the option to virtually explore the city by investigating historic sites such as churches or hotels, or past structures that once dotted the city's landscape. The section also contains a timeline tracing Toledo's role in American history from 1801 to 1984.

In the "Essays" section, browse more than 35 historical essays, which focus on topics ranging from architecture to labor history. The majority of these essays include primary sources and images, which could be used in the classroom.

The "New Media" and "Exhibit" sections offer a more hands-on presentation of Toledo history. In the "New Media" section, visitors can explore more than 70 interactive media exhibits, from slideshows to flash presentations, on a number of topics. The "Exhibits" section currently offers four virtual tours of exhibitions on industry, medicine, steelworks, and glass production.

"Resources," "Links," and "Social Media" all contain lists of other resources relating to Ohio history. Be sure to peruse the first two sections for links to dozens of local libraries, archives, and historical societies and their digital collections. The "Social Media" section provides a gateway to more than 10 social networking sites specific to either Toledo or Ohio state history.

Overall, Toledo's Attic is a gold mine for the history of this Ohio city.

River of Song

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This site is a companion to a Smithsonian series produced in collaboration with public broadcasting stations in 1999. The series, River of Song, traced the history and character of contemporary American music along the Misssissippi River, from the head of the river in Minnesota to its mouth in Louisiana. The site offers 300-word biographies of each of the approximately 40 artists and music groups featured in the four-part series. Artists featured include Minnesota folk singer John Koerner, the Ojibwe powwow drummers of the Chippewa Nation, Illinois bluegrass group the Bob Lewis Family, and Louisiana blues musician Eddie Bo. Each profile includes 3–4 photographs and links to the musicians' own or related websites and artists are also indexed by genre and name.

The Music Along the River section provides more general information about the history and character of music in the four regions along the Mississippi River. There is a roughly 750-word narrative description of the music in each region. Each regional section includes links to approximately 10 articles from past Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Studies programs and five to seven other links to informational articles about that region.

A Teacher's Guide designed to accompany a videotape or CD of the music provides over 30 different activities for elementary and middle school students, including songs and specific exercises in rhythm, scales, notes, drumbeat patterns, and chords. Though the site is frustratingly devoid of audio clips of the music presented in the series, some of the related links do provide audio samples. This site is particularly ideal for music teachers, but could also be used in history classes to discuss American culture and the development of distinctively American kinds of music.

Web de Anza

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Web de Anza presents material relating to Juan Bautista de Anza's two expeditions into Alta California that resulted in the settlement of San Francisco in 1776. The site is under development, but it is easy to navigate. Visitors will find a 700-word background essay on the historical context of the expeditions and links to seven other sites about de Anza and California history. Primary source material currently includes eight diaries and two letters, available in English and Spanish and indexed by date. This material is supplemented by a gallery of 11 portraits, 14 images of scenery relevant to De Anza's expeditions, and drawings and photographs of nine objects such as a musket of the kind that De Anza probably used.

The site also includes six photographs of re-enactments of events in de Anza's expedition. An Atlas section provides 10 trail route maps, and 20 maps of the area of de Anza's expedition. The site provides useful material for students of California history, religion, and Native Americans at every level, from elementary to graduate school.

Riverboats and Jazz

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This exhibit offers more than 30 images of the riverboats, captains, staff, and musicians who helped to entertain the public with riverboat jazz and dance music from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. Images include musicians like Pete Fountain and Fate Marable's New Orleans Band, as well as riverboats like the S.S. President and several of the Streckfus Riverboat vessels. The Streckfus company helped to popularize the concept of riverboat cruises with dance music.

Each image is accompanied by a 250-word descriptive caption, as well as information on the location of the original image. There is no table of contents or index making it difficult to find images on specific subjects or persons, but this site is useful for providing illustrations and background information on the history of jazz and popular culture in the first half of the 20th century.

Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album

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This site explores James E. Taylor's legacy as a recorder of western culture. A professional artist, Taylor's newspaper illustrations served to popularize stereotypes of the Western frontier during the post-Civil War years. Like other illustrators and writers of the period, he depicted Indian-White relations in terms of savagery versus civilization and encouraged Americans to visualize the nation's Westward expansion in heroic terms. Taylor made his own illustrations, collected photographs taken by others, and constructed scrapbooks. Following Taylor's lead, the producers of this site use albums to display his work. The site includes about 750 items, taken from the 1,100 items that appeared on Taylor's 118 album pages.

Visitors can search for images by keyword, or can browse by subject or album theme. Each album image is annotated with the date the image was made, the subject, and the creator of the image, and there is an 1,800-word introductory essay for those unfamiliar with Taylor and his work. Visitors should beware that these are high-quality images, and are therefore large files. High-speed connections will make downloading much more manageable. The photographs and images in this collection are a very useful resource for researching westward expansion.