Carrie Chapman Catt Girlhood Home and Museum

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Carrie Chapman Catt's childhood home is a good starting place for research about her work in the suffrage movement. The site provides a 900-word biographical essay of Catt, seven photographs of the 1865 Iowa farmhouse where she grew up, and a 300-word essay about the house, but its primary use is as a gateway to material about Catt and the suffrage movement. The site provides links to more than 100 archival sites, including a collection of 15 recordings of Catt speaking about suffrage. Bibliographies list 20 books, articles, and speeches by Catt, 15 books, articles, and dissertations about Catt, and 24 movies and television documentaries about suffrage. In addition, the site presents a 1,200-word essay by archivist David McCartney about FBI files on Catt.

By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

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Logo, "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
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A collection of 38 images relating to the women's suffrage campaign, including individual portraits, photographs of parades, newspaper cartoons, and anti-suffrage items. Searchable by keyword and arranged into subject and name indexes, the site also includes a lengthy timeline, "One Hundred Years Toward Suffrage," a bibliography, and a list of related holdings in the Library of Congress. This site is the "pictorial partner" to the documents in "'Votes for Women': Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Collection, 1848-1920."

Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project

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Photo, Portrait of Irene Parsons, circa 1945, University of North Carolina
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The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project provides access to a wide variety of sources related to the role of women in the military. These document the female war experience, how male-female integration has changed the armed forces, and more.

Sources available through this collection include diaries, oral histories, uniforms, military patches, scrapbooks, posters, books or pamphlets, photographs, and letters. The oral histories alone number more than 300, and are available as transcripts.

There are three ways to access the site content. You can either run a keyword search; select a military branch or related organization—Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, Navy, Red Cross, Cadet Nurse Corps, or foreign and/or civilian; or select a conflict—World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Post-Vietnam/1980s, or Gulf War/War on Terrorism. Selecting a branch or conflict will provide a list of the types of sources available, as well as how many of each there are. Select your source type of interest to see the individual items.

American Women

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Lithograph, "Swan dive," Mabel W. Jack, 1939.
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Designed as a gateway for researchers working in the field of American women's history, this site provides easy access to an online version of the Library of Congress' 2001 publication American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. The structure of the 456-page guide is maintained and enhanced through hyperlinks and full-text searching. Most of the digital content featured in "American Women" was not digitized solely for the site; rather, it is either linked to or displayed elsewhere on one of the Library's many web pages. The expanded resource guide allows users to easily move across the Library's multiple interdisciplinary holdings and provides guidelines on searching for women's history resources in the Library's catalogs; advice on locating documents relating to women within the American Memory collections; and a valuable tutorial for discovering women's history sources in the Library's online exhibitions.

The research guide also contains five essays that explore several aspects of women's history. They include an introduction by historian Susan Ware and a short piece describing the 1780 broadside "The Sentiments of An American Woman." The newest addition to the site is an audiovisual Web broadcast lecture featuring Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, editor-in-chief of the Jane Adams Papers Project at Duke University, and Esther Katz, editor-in-chief of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University. This site is an important resource for any student or researcher studying American women's history.

African American Women

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Photo, Elizabeth Johnson Harris, African-American Women
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Writings of three African American women of the 19th century are offered in this site. Features scanned images and transcriptions of an 85-page memoir by Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867-1923), a Georgia woman whose parents had been slaves, along with 13 attached pages of newspaper clippings containing short prose writings and poems by Harris; a 565-word letter written in 1857 by a North Carolinia slave named Vilet Lester; and four letters written between 1837 and 1838 by Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on an Abingdon, VA, plantation.

The documents are accompanied by three background essays ranging in length from 300 to 800 words, six photographs, a bibliography of seven titles on American slave women, and eight links to additional resources. Though modest in size, this site contains documents of value for their insights into the lives of women living under slavery and during its aftermath in the South.

Across the Generations: Exploring U.S. History through Family Papers

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Photo, Edward Kellogg Dunham, Sr., with daughter Theodora, Wilhelm (?), 1897
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This collection from one of the nation's leading repositories for sources on women's history features photographs, letters, account books, diaries, legal documents, artwork, and memorabilia generated by four prominent northeastern families from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. The four families—the Bodmans, Dunhams, Garrisons, and Hales—are white, middle-class families, and their experiences represent only a portion of American society in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This site features 63 documents and images gathered from the families' papers ,and there are two ways to navigate them: by family or by one of four themes (Family Life, Social Awareness and Reform, Arts and Leisure, and Work). Each family or theme has its own page, with short (350–500 word) interpretive text combined with excerpts from the documents. Each excerpt is accompanied by links to the entire document—both a scanned image and a transcription.

The theme "family life" contains documents that reflect courtship patterns over the 19th century, childrearing practices, and 19th-century gender roles. "Social awareness and reform" features items related to the abolition of slavery and changing perceptions of race, and women's suffrage. Some of the materials within "arts and leisure" reflect increased opportunities for professional women artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The "work" theme includes materials that demonstrate the barriers women faced within the workplace. This site, when supplemented with additional resources, can help show students how to use family papers to study U.S. history.

Historical World War II Photos

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Photo, Lt. John W. Wainwright Of Marshall, Texas. . . , NARA
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NOTE: Unpublished as too commercial, 2/8/12

Historical World War II Photos claims to be the largest free collection of World War II photographs available online, digitized from the National Archives.

The downside to the site is that it's unclear whether registration is free or not. One page claims that you can sign up for a free seven-day trial, while the actual registration page simply states that the site is free.

Regardless of registration cost ambiguity, there is still plenty to do without signing up. Access to the photographs is free, and you can search by keyword or using a list of topics located on the main page. Once you find a photograph that you are interested in, you can select it for a large copy. Then click on "About image" in the toolbar above the photo for a list of information on the work—source, author, caption, location, categories, and more. If registered users have accessed the photo, they may have added annotations, such as comments, names of individuals pictured, and text transcriptions; connections, links to small informative pages; and spotlights, which appear to be notices that one or more users have marked the photograph as being of interest.

Take a look at a sample connection on Kristallnacht. The page offers a timeline, links to all the photos listed as related, facts, stories, and links. This information appears to be largely user-generated, so it would require fact-checking; but it could be a handy way to connect photographs to the bigger picture or to find photographs related to a particular event, person, or topic.

Without registering, all of the above can be accessed. What you can't do is participate in annotating, spotlighting, linking connections, or uploading your own World War II photos.

Even without the annotations, this website would be worth your time. The search system is easy to use, and breaks results down into categories, helping you to narrow your search.

Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s

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Illustration, Cover of Comic Book, Library of Congress
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This site features two "special presentations" and presents hundreds of primary materials relating to baseball in America. Materials include letters, manuscripts, trading cards, lobby cards, newspaper images, photographs, advertisements, sheet music, and transcripts of interviews, speeches, and television broadcasts. The first presentation, "Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson, 1860s-1960s," furnishes approximately 30 documents and photographs in a 5-section timeline that examines the history of Jackie Robinson's entry into the major league baseball. It includes material on the Negro Leagues, the nature of baseball's color line, Robinson's career as a Brooklyn Dodger, and his role as a civil rights activist.

A second presentation, "Early Baseball Pictures," presents 34 images dealing with baseball from the 1860s to the 1920s divided into five sections. The site also includes an annotated bibliography comprised of 82 titles and a list of six links to related resources. While limited in size and focus with regard to general baseball history, this site is valuable as an introductory look at Jackie Robinson's life and the topic of race in American sports history.

Architecture and Interior Design for America: 1935-1955

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Photo, Charles E.F. McCann residence, Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, LoC
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A photo archive of more than 29,000 images, produced by architectural photographers Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner. Gottscho and Schleisner were commissioned to document the work of architects, sculptors, and artists for individuals and institutional clients, such as House Beautiful and House and Garden magazines. The collection specializes in views taken primarily in the northeastern United States--many in the New York City area--and in Florida. Subjects include homes, stores, offices, factories, and historic buildings. Also of note are 100 color images of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. As the introductory text points out, the assembled group of photographs can "serve as a document of social change from a particular vantage point of the middle and upper classes of society."

Hitting the Sawdust Trail With Billy Sunday

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Portrait, Billy Sunday, 1916, Wheaton College
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This site provides information about the American evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935). A 400-word biographical essay, accompanied by seven images, traces Sunday's background. A 750-word essay with 22 images describes selected exhibit items, including 26 photographs of Sunday, eight photographs of Sunday's associates, 9 photographs and a blueprint of Sunday's tabernacles, a prayer pamphlet, a clippings scrapbook, samples of press coverage, and sermon notes. Many of these items are presented as images, not as readable texts. The site furnishes researcher information on the Sunday Papers, held at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois, and includes a link to a website with an audio file of a Sunday sermon on "booze."