Through Our Parent's Eyes: Tucson's Diverse Community

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The ethnically diverse history of Tucson, Arizona is celebrated here in sections on the Hispanic, Native American, African American, Chinese, and Jewish heritage of the area. A 1000-word essay on the Hispanic history of Tucson is complemented by the four histories, from two to 100 pages, of local families. An exhibit of traditional arts in the Mexican American community includes photographs of houses, piñatas, and ten video clips of low-rider cars. Sources on Native Americans include 12 oral histories (300-600 words), about food and culture. The history of African Americans in the Tucson area from the 16th to the 19th century is recounted in an 1,800-word essay. A collection of 22 biographies (120-800 words) and summarized oral histories offer more personal details of African American life in Tucson. The collection of material about Chinese Americans in Tucson includes four biographies (600-1,200 words) and seven video clips of interviews with a Chinese American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. The journey made by one Jewish family from Russia in the 19th century to Tucson in the 20th is recounted in a 4,700-word illustrated essay. The site will be useful for research in ethnicity and the history of the west.

U.S. Women's History Workshop

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This site is designed to provide high school and college teachers with primary source material for teaching women's history. The site provides 13 assignments based on more than 50 documents, primarily illustrations from 19th-century magazines. Two profiles of early women's rights activists include biographies (100-650 words) and 13 articles written by the two about women's rights. Other documents on the site include humorous poetry, advertisements, letters to editors, and excerpts from 19th-century essays about women's rights. A scholarly article (3,000 words), illustrated with 13 prints and cartoons, discusses dress and perceptions of dress in the 1850s and 1860s. Another essay (1,100 words), illustrated with six cartoons, addresses gender and politics in mid-19th century America. The site is somewhat disorganized, but will be a useful resource for teaching women's history.

Promise of Gold Mountain: Tucson's Chinese Heritage

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This is a collection of material about the history of Chinese-Americans in Tucson, Arizona. It is one of five sections in an exhibit about ethnic diversity in Tucson. The site includes four 600-1,200-word biographies of Chinese-Americans in Tucson. Chinese-American history in the Tucson area is discussed in three 600-word essays about the railroads, farming and small business, and the development of Chinatowns in Tucson. Highlighted text in each essay links to three to ten photos. There are seven video clips of interviews of 20 seconds to two and a half minutes with and about a Chinese-American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. A page of sources lists eight books and articles about Chinese settlement in the west. The site will be useful for research about Asian-Americans, the west, and ethnicity in general.

Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers

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This site highlights Orville and Wilbur Wright's pioneering aviation work that led to the world's first powered, controlled, and sustained flight. The collection contains approximately 49,000 digital items, including correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and 300 glass-plate photographic negatives. The papers cover the years 1881-1952, although the years 1900-1940 are especially well represented. The diaries offer detailed records of the brothers' ideas, as well as their successes and failures; and photographs include the first flight, taken at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. The materials are particularly valuable because the brothers so carefully documented their work and ideas, and because they corresponded so often with members of their family.

The site includes a Wright Brothers timeline and a Wright family tree. This site would be of particular use to anyone interested in the Wright Brothers or the history of flight, but is also useful in examining the role of photography in history and invention.

Spain, The United States, and The American Frontier: Historias Paralelas

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This collection of primary and secondary sources explores the history of Spanish expansion into North America from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas; across the modern-day American West; and north to Alaska. There are more than 200 primary sources, including numerous texts, 118 maps, manuscripts, and first-hand accounts, all written between 1492 and 1898. Some of the highlights include La Florida del Inca, an account of the Hernando de Soto expedition through Florida and the southeastern part of North America, along with the Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth to San Diego, published in 1848 as a special report to the United States Congress. All documents are available in English and many of the documents are available in Spanish, as well. The collection is searchable by keyword and title and can be browsed. These documents are valuable for understanding Spanish-North American interaction.

The Perilous Fight: America's World War II in Color

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A complement to the four-hour PBS television series, this site presents unseen footage of World War II, the first war recorded primarily on color film. It brings the wartime experience of Americans on the battlefield and home front vividly to life through original color film clips and photographs. The site is divided into four main areas, including Battlefield, Psychology of War, the Home Front, and Social Aspects. Each section allows visitors to navigate through the different subtopics, read excerpts from diaries and letters, view nearly 250 photographs available for the first time, and watch rare color film clips of the period.

"Battlefield" includes homage to Pearl Harbor as well as film footage of covert American operations. "Psychology of War" contains a section entitled "The Atomic Option" that presents a video montage of images of an atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki, Japan. Within this section, there is also a video of a Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. "Homefront" includes five subsections, including censorship and migration. "Social Aspects" includes African Americans, Asians, Women, and Anti-Semitism. The footage of German American youth in New Jersey in the 1940s marching with fascist flags is very compelling. Visitors will also find an interactive timeline, essays on rediscovering the film footage, and a teaching guide for educators Those interested in this unforgettable period of history will find this site instructive.

The Official Leonard Bernstein Site

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This site is dedicated to the legacy of Leonard Bernstein, one of America's foremost conductors of classical music in the 20th century. The "Life's Works" section consists of the Red Book," a comprehensive listing of his many compositions, a 124-page discography that catalogs 826 of Bernstein's recordings, a 1,500 word biography, and a timeline. In "The Studio," the other main section, there are 13 black-and-white photographs of Bernstein, his family, friends, and colleagues and 24 excerpts of interviews, writings, and speeches of and by Bernstein. Users can also view lyrics of six songs from "A Wonderful Town" and handwritten and typed draft scripts from the "Young Peoples' Concerts."

Highlights of this site are ten personal letters dating from 1943, four telegrams, including one from Humphrey Bogart to Bernstein, and eight images of Bernstein's preliminary notes for various musical and educational projects including an original image of Bernstein's personal copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with his annotations in the margin. Users may also view 14 video clips from films and television programs, including seven home videos filmed in the early 1940s and Bernstein's well-known "Norton Lectures" at Harvard. This site is rounded out with a collection of 20 audio clips from the conductor's many recordings. Those with a passion for American music will find that this site has a wealth of information. For the novice, however, its cluttered presentation is difficult to navigate.

Forests, Fields, and the Falls

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This site illustrates the ways in which the late 19th-century history of Minnesota is tied to the rise of and connection between four industries: lumbering, sawmilling, farming, and flour milling. The site uses a comic book-like format (large picture panels with minimal text), and incorporates the diaries and personal recollections of four Minnesotans who participated as lumbermen, sawyers, farmers, or flour millers. The colorful format attracts attention and the short presentations are appropriate for younger viewers (elementary, middle, and even high school students). The site relies primarily on Flash to present the stories, but viewers can also read and view the stories in HTML.

Each segment provides links to outside resources (about 40 in all) for additional information. Explanatory links define terms that might be unfamiliar to visitors, suggest topics for discussion, and offer additional supporting materials (for example, the site links internally to approximately 50 period photographs and diary entries). Teachers may find useful the nine suggestions for classroom activities, such as analyzing photographic evidence or examining the perspective of one of the storytellers.

University of Missouri-Columbia: Digital Library Collections

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This archive makes available varied material on English, American, and Missouri history, including speeches, pamphlets, plat books, and government documents. The collection of Daniel Webster speeches offers more than 100 items that, in addition to his addresses and speeches in Congress, include sermons, addresses, orations, and speeches in his honor, as well as some correspondence. The Fourth of July orations collection contains more than 100 items, including orations by John Quincy Adams, Charles F. Adams, and Daniel Webster. The site also offers a collection of more than 110 Missouri county plat books published in 1930, a collection of various items of Missouriana, and a group of four miscellaneous texts that includes an 80-page text on the liberty of the press published in London in 1812. The collection of 17th- to 19th-century British religious, political, and legal tracts contains more than 400 documents and pamphlets published primarily during the English Civil War. Each collection can be individually searched. For anyone researching 17th- and 18th-century transatlantic history, the political history of New England, or the history of Missouri, this is a collection worth consulting.

Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA: A Documentary History

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Designed to document American scientist Linus Pauling's role in the early 1950s race to discover the structure of DNA, this site contains more than 800 primary sources. Some 650 documents and photographs provide an unusually frank glimpse into Pauling's life; much of the correspondence in the collection is between Pauling and other front runners in the race (Watson and Crick, for example, and Rosalind Franklin). In addition to the documents and photographs, the site includes 16 of Pauling's published papers, 15 unpublished manuscripts and notebooks, and 22 audio and video clips of Pauling. There is a thorough chronology, which details the personal and professional dimensions of Pauling's life, including his troubles with the State Department and their refusal to issue him a passport on the basis of national security. Professional rivalries and personal jealousies, as well as victories and triumphs, are all documented in correspondence and in video interviews.

Although Pauling lost the DNA race, he was eventually awarded two Nobel Prizes. In addition to a typical search feature, Linus Pauling Day-By-Day allows viewers to learn about events and to examine selected correspondence relevant to any given day, from January 1952 through December 1953.