Posters: American Style

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An exhibit of 20th-century poster art relating to three subjects: commerce, propaganda, and patriotism. Presents approximately 135 posters, arranged into four thematic categories: "American Events"; "Designed to Sell"; "Advice to Americans"; and "Patriotic Persuasion." The selections--which concentrate "on major artists and images that have endured in our collective memory"--include 100-word biographical sketches of artists, short introductions for each category, and other pertinent background information. Special focus is directed to posters on the 1939 World's Fair, the war in Vietnam, the Black Panther movement, the moon landing, the motion picture Vertigo, the poem "Howl," Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address and Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. Audio files and photographs related to these topics are included. The site also contains a 4,000-word essay by curator Therese Heyman, discussing the history and concept of poster art, notes on the process of production, and a discussion of the impact of posters. A site of particular interest to art historians and scholars of popular culture.

Keffer Collection of Sheet Music, ca. 1790-1895

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Sheet music, "The Hippopotamus Polka," L. St. Mars, 1848-1858
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This site provides more than 2,500 musical scores, mostly published in the United States from 1790 to 1895, drawn from the Edward I. Keffer Collection. The collection is particularly strong in music by Philadelphia artists like Benjamin Carr, Benjamin Cross, and Alexander Reinagle. Although most of the works are American popular songs and piano music, there are also works by famous European composers, operas, and music for other instruments. The site also includes 867 illustrations from the sheet music. All music and illustrations are searchable by topic, composer or lithographer, and publisher. The site includes a list of three related collections at the University of Pennsylvania, three related websites, and a bibliography of 18 related scholarly works. The site is ideal for those interested in 19th-century American music and popular culture.

American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning

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This site introduces the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML), an organization located at the City University of New York (CUNY) that "seeks to revitalize interest in history by challenging the traditional ways that people learn about the past," with a particular emphasis on labor history and social history. The site includes information about ASHP/CML books, documentary films, CD-ROMs, Internet projects, and educational programs, as well as five articles by staff members and numerous links to history resources.

"Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City" presents selected photographs, illustrations, and accompanying short explanatory texts intended for use with a ASHP/CML documentary of the same name. Among the Project's current endeavors is "an intellectual and spatial exploration of P. T. Barnum's American Museum," entitled The Lost Museum, which burned down under mysterious circumstances in 1865. With the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, ASHP/CML produces History Matters.

American Journeys

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Image for American Journeys
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These 181 firsthand accounts of North American and Canadian exploration range from Viking stories such as The Saga of Eric the Red from circa 1,000 CE to journal entries written in the early 19th century on a trapping expedition in the Southwest. Documents include the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Materials include rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives.

Users can browse the full archive or by expedition, settlement, geographic region, and U.S. state or Canadian province. Each document is individually searchable and accompanied by a short background essay and a reference map. There are also 150 images available, including woodcuts, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Highlights follows the collection chronologically and connects moments in American history with eyewitness accounts.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

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Image for Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
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The complete facsimile and transcript versions of the March 1925 Survey Graphic special "Harlem Number," edited by Alain Locke, is presented here. Locke later republished and expanded the contents as the famous New Negro anthology. The effort constituted "the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community" of the 1920s.

The journal is divided into three sections: "The Greatest Negro Community in the World," "The Negro Expresses Himself," and "Black and White—Studies in Race Contacts." The site also includes essays by Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson; poems by Countee Cullen, Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes; and quotations from reviews of the issue.

September 11, 2001, Documentary Project

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Drawing, The Crying Towers, 2001, Hannah Beach, Library of Congress
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The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project represents the "shortly after" reaction of U.S. citizens and others regarding the World Trade Center, Flight 93, and Pentagon attacks of the 11th of September 2001, as gathered by ethnographers at the request of the American Folklife Center. The collection of responses started the 12th of September and continued for several months.

Here, you can listen to and/or watch nearly 200 audio and visual oral histories, access 21 written narratives—such as that of one woman who missed her train the morning of the attack and, as a result, was not in the WTC as she normally would have been—and view 45 photographs and drawings, many of the latter of which display children's perspectives. The videos are all from Naples, Italy, providing a look at 9/11 from outside of the country.

Sources can be browsed by type, title, or subject, as well as keyword searched.

Classroom Connection offers a list of Library of Congress and external related resources, as well as a grade level, state, and subject search which can show you how the collection relates to your particular curriculum standards.

Throughout the Ages

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Photo, A small boy with chicks on a farm. . . , 1932, New York State Archives
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Throughout the Ages was created to meet the primary source needs of New York state K-6 history teachers. The site collection includes more than 500 photographs, letters, paintings, advertisements, and maps.

To navigate the site, choose an area of interest and subtopic (for example "leisure" under the heading "community"), and scroll to a source of interest. The source will offer a caption. In some cases, historical context, focus questions, and the correlating New York state standards will also be listed. Be sure to click on each of these section titles, as items such as resources and historical background only display once selected.

One feature to look into is the automatic handout maker. For each image, you can automatically generate a handout by selecting any or all of the following categories: caption, historical background, standards/key ideas, historical challenge, interdisciplinary connections, and resources. For some images, these will already be filled out. For others, you can type anything you want for all, some, or one of those categories. Don't worry about deleting existing text if you don't want it on your handout. It will be back the next time you load your page.

New York Philharmonic Digital Archives

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Score, Beethoven, Complete Strings Quartet, Leonard Bernstein, NY Philharmonic
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The New York Philharmonic Digital Archive contains materials dating back to 1842 and the original concert of New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S.

Sources available include business papers, images, programs, and scores. Other source types are in planning. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to browse the collection. You can either search for specific keywords, or leave the keyword box empty and select a source type—for example "Images." This will give you a list of all of the archive images to sift through. There are then menus on the left to help you pare the search down. However, the array of choices in the menus themselves is so extensive that patience is required to navigate the collection effectively.

That said, if you have anything specific that you are looking for, or you have time to explore, this website is potentially an invaluable source for music history. Scores may be the most use in the classroom, as they essentially give you an interactive (if you're willing to teach a song) form of period text.

Taking the Mystery out of Copyright

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Screenshot, Taking the Mystery out of Copyright
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Taking the Mystery out of Copyright provides a very brief introduction to copyright and the history of intellectual property. If you need anything beyond the very basics, unless you are interested in the major historical milestones leading to current copyright protection, this site probably will not meet your needs. However, if all you want to do is introduce the idea of copyright to very young students, you may find the site useful.

Visitors can select one of four sections. Copyright Exposed is a short animated video set to funk music which provides the basic idea that copyright "has got your back" when you produce a creative work. Files on Record provides a timeline of intellectual property history. Each milestone is accompanied by a primary source from the Library of Congress's collections. Here, you can read a few sentences on the Licensing Act of 1662 or the 1990 Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act. Reading the Fine Print offers two- to five-sentence answers on applications of copyright—protection of ideas, copyright on items you find, copyright on the Internet, when people can use your work without asking, the right to use a small sample of another work, and the reasons for registration. Steps to Copyright informs readers on how to register copyright (make something, fill out the form, pay the appropriate fee, and send nonreturnable copies).

HSI: Historical Scene Investigation

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Photo, [Mary A. Shanley, New York City detective. . . ], 1937, LoC
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HSI was created in order to facilitate the use of primary sources in history education. By using the concept of historians as detectives, the site has collected several "cases" for students to examine using a pre-vetted set of related primary sources. The site describes the HSI model as having four steps:

  1. Becoming a Detective—basic context and introduction of an overarching question
  2. Investigating the Evidence—examining primary sources
  3. Searching for Clues—answering questions which organize analysis of primary sources
  4. Cracking the Case—presentation of an evidence-based conclusion and questions formed by the investigation

Site navigation is not as intuitive as it could be. Be prepared to use the "back" button frequently. That quibble aside, the site offers a good variety of cases—the March on Frankfurt, children in the Civil War, refusal to attend the Constitutional Convention, slavery in Virginia, school desegregation, the Boston Massacre, the demise of Jamestown, the dropping of the bomb on Japan, Elvis and Nixon's meeting, a genealogy case, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and Nathaniel Bacon. There is also a fictional murder/cause-of-death case which can be used to introduce students to the process and way of thinking which each of the historical cases requires.