African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

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Image for African-American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century
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These 52 published works by black women writers are from the late 18th century through the early 20th. The full-text database offers works by late 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, late 19th-century essayist and novelist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Harriet Jacobs, a woman born into slavery who published her memoirs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in the late 19th century.

Users can browse by title, author, or type of work (fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essays). Each browse category also contains a keyword search for subjects such as religion, family, and slavery. Brief biographies of the 37 featured writers are available. This site is easy to use and is ideal for learning about African American history, women's history, and 19th-century American literature.

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd

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Photo, Prize-winning fashionable women at Beverly Wilshire Easter brunch, 1955
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Wilshire Boulevard runs for 16 miles in Los Angeles, from Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica to Grand Avenue in Downtown. This website offers an interactive journey down the length of this historic street, with more than 100 stops at parks, buildings, and historic landmarks in Westwood/Brentwood, Beverley Hills, Miracle Mile/Carthay Circle, Windsor Square/Hancock Park, Wilshire Center, and the Parks District.

Virtual visitors to Palisades Park in Santa Monica, for example, can see 14 photographs and drawings of the park, spanning from the early 1900s, through the 1940s, and to contemporary photographs, and read a brief description of the park's history. Those interested in the history of architecture will find useful a website feature that allows users to filter all monuments by architect, style, and function. The website also includes a "Memory Book," allowing users to contribute their stories about Wilshire Boulevard and read the stories of others, as they talk about their favorite pizza restaurant in Westwood or their childhood in Beverly Hills in the early 1960s.

Shays' Rebellion and the Making of a Nation

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Photography, Shay's Rebellion Monument, 15 Jul 2010, Flickr CC
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This website is the result of a collaboration among Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), the Springfield Armory, and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). The site provides a narrative of Shays’ Rebellion told through images, summaries, and primary sources—a wealth of materials for classroom teachers.

The Shays’ Rebellion website is designed to be navigated through a series of six historic scenes. Framed on either end by a prologue and epilogue, the scenes present the perspectives of key groups involved in the run-up to rebellion, as well as its aftermath. In “A Bloody Encounter,” for instance, the assault by Shays and his men on the Springfield arsenal is represented in pictures. By rolling a cursor over the image, users can learn more about the scene—the great strength of this approach is that information is contextualized and given greater meaning.

One of the most unique features on the site is that each scene is accompanied by the commentary of eyewitnesses and other figures from the time period. With background knowledge acquired from the scene and brief synopses of events, users are well prepared to understand these commentaries—an excellent use of primary sources.

The site can also be navigated by people, by artifacts and documents, or by themes and essays. Exploring it in any of these ways, however, can be a chaotic experience. The site also includes resources for extension activities like songs and music, a timeline, and a series of historic maps.

Shaping the Constitution

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Print, The Age of Brass. . . , 1869, Currier and Ives, Shaping the Constitution
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Shaping the Constitution revolves around the role of Virginia in early American military and political history.

The first section, Becoming Free and Independent States, offers an overview of the perspectives of early Virginians on the Revolutionary War. The page includes biographies of figures of note, ranging from George Washington to Billy, a slave impressed by the British Navy. Each biography offers titles and/or web links for further reading. The main draw of the section, though, is a collection of 32 primary sources—broadsides, portraits, maps, warrants, petitions, a cartoon, and more. Each primary source can be selected for additional information, a transcript, related sources, and/or a high-resolution copy of the source. One surprise worth noting is that selecting the high-res copy of the source sometimes provides a PDF file with multiple related sources, rather than just the one you may have thought you were downloading.

Each of the following sections follow a similar structure—biographies, primary sources, and a short text overview. Topics include Virginia and the Constitutional debate; Bill of Rights; and 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments.

An additional feature, located within the majority of the individual sections is a "For Educators" button. This button opens a list of lesson plans and their respective Virginia standards. Only the 15th and 19th Amendment portions of the site lack this option.

A laudable fact about this website is that it provides unpleasant sources (such as a photo of an Alexandria slave pen) as well as copies of major government documents. These sources are useful for showing precisely what facts of historical life various political decisions and amendments were created to change.

Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/25/2008 - 22:21
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Logo, Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive
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More than 1,700 texts written by or to Thomas Jefferson are available on this website, including correspondence, books, addresses, and public papers. While most texts are presented in transcribed, word-searchable format, 18 appear as color images of original manuscripts.

The site also includes a biography of Jefferson written in 1834, eight years after his death. The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, published in 1900, organizes more than 9,000 quotes according to theme and other categories. A collection of 2,700 excerpts from Jefferson's writings present his political philosophy. A wealth of searchable bibliographic listings is provided, including two previously published volumes and thousands of additional bibliographic references.

Also available are a recent dissertation on the construction of the Jefferson-designed University of Virginia (UVA), listings from the Oxford English Dictionary that show Jefferson's influence on English-language usage, and four links to UVA exhibitions on Jefferson.

Women's Studies Database

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Photo, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison
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This site, by the Women's Studies group at the University of Maryland, presents primary materials relating to women's history. Offers the texts of the 1848 "Declaration of Sentiments," and Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech, "Ain't I A Woman?" Additionally, the site furnishes essays and timelines concerning the 19th amendment, a newsletter entitled Women of Achievement and Herstory, and 39 biographical sketches, which range from approximately 75 to 150 words each. The presentation is haphazard, and the search engine is cumbersome. The site is perhaps most valuable for its examination of the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment.

Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project

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Image, Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project
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The life and work of black activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) are presented on this website. Garvey was the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and "champion of the back-to-Africa movement." Materials include 40 documents, such as correspondence, editorials, reports of U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation agents, articles from African American newspapers, and a chapter from Garvey's autobiography. Primary documents are accompanied by 15 background essays.

The website also provides four audio clips from recordings of speeches Garvey made in 1921 and 24 images, including photos of Garvey, his wife, and colleagues, and facsimiles of UNIA documents. Particularly valuable as a condensed history of Garvey's movement and also useful for those studying African American political and cultural movements in general.

Illinois Digital Archives

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Photo, Gordon Ray on the farm, Gordon Ray, 1915, Digital Past
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This website offers an archive of more than 35,000 items from 75 individual collections at nearly 30 institutions in Illinois. Items include black-and-white and color photographs, post cards, audio recordings, maps, books, newspaper articles, newsletters and bulletins, handbills, and film clips. The focus of all the collections is the history of Illinois, its places, and people. A strength of the collections is the large number of photographs of residential and commercial buildings from cities and towns throughout Illinois.

Visitors can browse the contents of all collections by city, organization, or proper name. Once in a collection, other collections can be individually browsed by selecting from the collections dropdown menu. All collections are searchable by such fields as subject, description, creator, publisher, contributors, date, type, or format. Clicking on the thumbnail image brings up a new window with a large image and descriptive data. There are also 14 exhibits on various topics such as "History of Park Ridge, 1841-1926" and "Brides of Yesteryear." This is a useful collection of primary source material on the social and cultural history of Illinois.

Indiana's Storyteller: Connecting People to the Past

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Image, Brewett, Chief of the Miami, James Otto Lewis, 1827, Indiana's. . . site
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The Indiana Historical Society's main digital archive site contains more than 34,000 images, most of which are directly related to Indiana's past, grouped into almost 30 themed collections that include photographs, prints, sheet music, manuscripts, old court documents, letters, Indiana ephemera, and maps. Also collected here are images from the Jack Smith Lincoln Graphics Collection (containing photographs, lithographs, and engravings of Abraham Lincoln) and the Daniel Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection (containing newspaper clippings, manuscripts, and other material pertaining to the Lincoln assassination). A sampler of the other collections: digitized images of the Indianapolis Recorder; manuscripts and images of James Whitcomb Riley; a collection of 900 postcards of scenes from Indiana from the first two decades of the 20th century; and fascinating panoramic photographs from the early part of the 20th century, showing church groups, picnics, army recruits, and conventioneers.

Columbus and the Age of Discovery jmccartney Thu, 09/10/2009 - 08:02
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Logo, Columbus and the Age of Discovery
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Created to help mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus's 1492 voyage to America, this site is a "text-retrieval system," offering more than 1,110 scholarly and popular articles, drawn from journals, magazines, institutions, speeches, reviews, newspapers, student papers, and "other [secondary] sources relating to various encounter themes."

The search functions are cumbersome—the articles are both indexed by portions of the author's last name and arranged by underdeveloped category designations.