National Register of Historic Places Travel Itineraries

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San Francisco during World War II, Mississippi's Indian Mounds, and Cumberland, Maryland, are just three of the more than 50 cities, towns, and rivers across the U.S. to which this website provides virtual access. In Baltimore, Maryland, a clickable map allows users to wander from the USCGC Taney (the last surviving warship present at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941) docked at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, to the house where Edgar Allen Poe lived in the mid-1830s, to the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District to learn about Baltimore's oldest public market still in operation, and on to 40 more sites around the city. Each landmark is introduced with photographs, brief essays providing historical context, and tourist information.

Some travel itineraries are grouped by theme. For example, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement presents information on Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School, Virginia's Robert Moton High School, and the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Many of these sites includes links to lesson plans in NPS's Teaching With Historic Places. Updated regularly, this website is useful for teachers, students, and tourists alike.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

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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.

American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936

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These approximately 4,500 photographs document natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Produced by American botanists between 1891 and 1936, the photos describe various ecosystems and landforms across the United States. Users can search for specific plants and some animals as well as for landforms, natural events, and weather patterns.

The collection is a bit odd in that it mixes genres and types. Clicking on the region "Pennsylvania" produces eight images, ranging from pictures of dogwoods to a photo of tree rings to three pictures of the Pittsburgh flood. A timeline and an essay on "Ecology and the American Environment" provide valuable background information as well as a bibliography. These materials are useful as record of early environmental thinking as well as a document of vanished landscapes.

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

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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.

Time Archive, 1923 to Present

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Time magazine published its first edition on March 23, 1923. This website features all 4,428 Time magazine covers published since that time. Covers can be searched by keyword or browsed by year.

Exploring Time covers from the early years shows that individuals (generally men in political leadership positions) were featured up until the late 1960s. Indeed, House of Representatives Speaker Joseph G. Cannon occupies Time's first cover, China's General Chiang Kai-shek appears several times between the late 1920s and 1940s, African leaders surface at decolonization in the late 1950s, and Ralph Nader can be found trumpeting the "consumer revolt" on a cover from December 1969.

Those interested in U.S. foreign policy (search China, Russia, Vietnam, or Latin America), popular culture and entertainment, the environment, religion, and legal history also will find valuable resources. Within each keyword search, suggestions for related topics are helpful.

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.

Remembering Jim Crow

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Created as a companion to a National Public Radio (NPR) documentary on segregation in the South, this website presents thirty audio excerpts from oral history interviews, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and 130 photographs. Materials are arranged in six thematically-organized sections that address legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site’s creators, notes, the interviews display a "marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow." Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The website presents sixteen photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. Also available are audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than ninety additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to nine related sites, and a bibliography.