Presidential Elections and the Electoral College

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This website is part of the Library of Congress exhibit, "A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: United States Congressional Documents and Debates 1774–1873." It provides links to the Library's extensive holdings on American presidential elections and the electoral college.

Ten links to resources from the Library's feature "Today in History" provide 250-word discussions of noted events and include links to 20–30 online documents for each feature. These documents include presidential campaign and inauguration speeches, government documents such as the certification in Congress of the first electoral college's balloting, controversies regarding the electoral college, and journals from late-18th and early-19th century political figures like William McLay.

Keyword searches make all of the Library's digitized documents on any given subject available through this site as well. This site is ideal for researching America's first century of political history.

Toledo's Attic: A Virtual Museum of Toledo, Ohio

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This virtual museum contains resources focused on Toledo and Northwest Ohio's history from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. The site is broken into seven content areas—Tour Toledo, Essays, New Media, Exhibits, Resources, Social Media, and Links—each of which contain photographs and other sources. In the "Tour Toledo" section, visitors have the option to virtually explore the city by investigating historic sites such as churches or hotels, or past structures that once dotted the city's landscape. The section also contains a timeline tracing Toledo's role in American history from 1801 to 1984.

In the "Essays" section, browse more than 35 historical essays, which focus on topics ranging from architecture to labor history. The majority of these essays include primary sources and images, which could be used in the classroom.

The "New Media" and "Exhibit" sections offer a more hands-on presentation of Toledo history. In the "New Media" section, visitors can explore more than 70 interactive media exhibits, from slideshows to flash presentations, on a number of topics. The "Exhibits" section currently offers four virtual tours of exhibitions on industry, medicine, steelworks, and glass production.

"Resources," "Links," and "Social Media" all contain lists of other resources relating to Ohio history. Be sure to peruse the first two sections for links to dozens of local libraries, archives, and historical societies and their digital collections. The "Social Media" section provides a gateway to more than 10 social networking sites specific to either Toledo or Ohio state history.

Overall, Toledo's Attic is a gold mine for the history of this Ohio city.

River of Song

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This site is a companion to a Smithsonian series produced in collaboration with public broadcasting stations in 1999. The series, River of Song, traced the history and character of contemporary American music along the Misssissippi River, from the head of the river in Minnesota to its mouth in Louisiana. The site offers 300-word biographies of each of the approximately 40 artists and music groups featured in the four-part series. Artists featured include Minnesota folk singer John Koerner, the Ojibwe powwow drummers of the Chippewa Nation, Illinois bluegrass group the Bob Lewis Family, and Louisiana blues musician Eddie Bo. Each profile includes 3–4 photographs and links to the musicians' own or related websites and artists are also indexed by genre and name.

The Music Along the River section provides more general information about the history and character of music in the four regions along the Mississippi River. There is a roughly 750-word narrative description of the music in each region. Each regional section includes links to approximately 10 articles from past Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Cultural Studies programs and five to seven other links to informational articles about that region.

A Teacher's Guide designed to accompany a videotape or CD of the music provides over 30 different activities for elementary and middle school students, including songs and specific exercises in rhythm, scales, notes, drumbeat patterns, and chords. Though the site is frustratingly devoid of audio clips of the music presented in the series, some of the related links do provide audio samples. This site is particularly ideal for music teachers, but could also be used in history classes to discuss American culture and the development of distinctively American kinds of music.

Web de Anza

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Web de Anza presents material relating to Juan Bautista de Anza's two expeditions into Alta California that resulted in the settlement of San Francisco in 1776. The site is under development, but it is easy to navigate. Visitors will find a 700-word background essay on the historical context of the expeditions and links to seven other sites about de Anza and California history. Primary source material currently includes eight diaries and two letters, available in English and Spanish and indexed by date. This material is supplemented by a gallery of 11 portraits, 14 images of scenery relevant to De Anza's expeditions, and drawings and photographs of nine objects such as a musket of the kind that De Anza probably used.

The site also includes six photographs of re-enactments of events in de Anza's expedition. An Atlas section provides 10 trail route maps, and 20 maps of the area of de Anza's expedition. The site provides useful material for students of California history, religion, and Native Americans at every level, from elementary to graduate school.

Riverboats and Jazz

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This exhibit offers more than 30 images of the riverboats, captains, staff, and musicians who helped to entertain the public with riverboat jazz and dance music from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. Images include musicians like Pete Fountain and Fate Marable's New Orleans Band, as well as riverboats like the S.S. President and several of the Streckfus Riverboat vessels. The Streckfus company helped to popularize the concept of riverboat cruises with dance music.

Each image is accompanied by a 250-word descriptive caption, as well as information on the location of the original image. There is no table of contents or index making it difficult to find images on specific subjects or persons, but this site is useful for providing illustrations and background information on the history of jazz and popular culture in the first half of the 20th century.

The American Experience

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Visitors may browse these "website archives" to access the transcripts of 60 American Experience documentaries broadcast on PBS. In addition, the site offers transcribed interviews with the filmmakers, a timeline of events of each the of the film topic's era, and teaching guides.

Documentaries cover a wide range of topics including Harry Houdini, the Donner Party, the advent of television, and the Wright brothers. Primary source material includes pages from a colonial woman's diary, public documents from Truman's presidency, video clips of female pilots, and real audio files of three hobo songs. The site will be especially useful for teachers contemplating using films in the classroom.

Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album

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This site explores James E. Taylor's legacy as a recorder of western culture. A professional artist, Taylor's newspaper illustrations served to popularize stereotypes of the Western frontier during the post-Civil War years. Like other illustrators and writers of the period, he depicted Indian-White relations in terms of savagery versus civilization and encouraged Americans to visualize the nation's Westward expansion in heroic terms. Taylor made his own illustrations, collected photographs taken by others, and constructed scrapbooks. Following Taylor's lead, the producers of this site use albums to display his work. The site includes about 750 items, taken from the 1,100 items that appeared on Taylor's 118 album pages.

Visitors can search for images by keyword, or can browse by subject or album theme. Each album image is annotated with the date the image was made, the subject, and the creator of the image, and there is an 1,800-word introductory essay for those unfamiliar with Taylor and his work. Visitors should beware that these are high-quality images, and are therefore large files. High-speed connections will make downloading much more manageable. The photographs and images in this collection are a very useful resource for researching westward expansion.

Presidential Elections

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This site documents the American presidential elections from 1860 to 1912. For each election, the site provides a detailed, 3,000-word overview that places the election within political and cultural context, and discusses the major issues relevant to the election. The producers have also included an essay on the practice of campaigning (4,500 words): how it has changed over the centuries, how those changes have resulted in an increased democratization of the political process, and how the press has shaped the process. In addition, the site exhibits about 90 political cartoons (from Harpweek, Vanity Fair, and Puck, among others) from elections, and provides biographies for each of the candidates. Also included for each election are "Events" sections that discuss major events before, during, and after each election period.

Teachers should be aware that some materials contain racial epithets. Notwithstanding the relatively few primary sources, this site is an excellent introduction to the 1860 to 1912 elections.

Photographs of the Historic American Buildings Survey: Georgia

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Developed at the same time as the better remembered Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project, the Historic American Buildings Survey was designed to record structures and buildings of historical and cultural importance around the United States. The staff of Georgia Tech's library has created an online archive of photographs from the Buildings survey taken around the state in the middle of the 1930s. The site features a 1,400-word introductory essay Life Initiates Art: The WPA and American Culture written by Grace Agnew that traces the role of the WPA in documenting American culture and history during the 1930s.

Containing nearly 100 photographs, the images can be viewed in a scrapbook or by browsing through a list offering individual photographs. The photographs are labeled with the name of the building, the county, and the date(s) of construction. The search engine can help locate a particular building or location, such as St. Paul's Church, an 1835 photograph of an old Medical College, the governor's mansion, and a slave market. The site also features a detailed bibliography with more than 24 sources. This site is a goldmine for those interested in Georgia history and southern architecture.

Picturing Modern America Project

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It is difficult at times for young people (and people in general) to understand the past, even the more recent past of the past century or so. It seems almost banal to observe that many aspects of life have changed dramatically, and perhaps not so banal to note that many things have in fact not changed as much as we think. This fine site contains a number of interactive exercises (drawing on the vast collections of the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress) that will help deepen students' understanding of common topics in the study of modern America from 1880 to 1920 and to build their skills in analyzing primary sources.

Teachers and student alike will appreciate the "Investigations" area, which contains exercises such as "Picturing Social Change", "Modern Women", and "Picturing Prairie Life". Through the exercises, visitors will be asked a variety of questions that draw on the visual materials contained within each thematic section, such as "What brought people to the prairie?" or "Why might people have left the prairie?". Visitors also have the opportunity to build their own exhibits by choosing their own theme or question about modern America, and through choosing their own images and documents for their exhibit.