The Social Museum Collection at Harvard University

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Harvard University's Social Museum was established in 1903 as part of the University's newly-formed Department of Social Ethics, devoted to the comparative study of social conditions and institutions in the United States and abroad. This website presents more than 6,000 images from the Social Museum's collection, including photographs, pamphlets, prints, and architectural drawings. Images are available though an extensive search function, with a keyword search, artist list (including photographers Lewis Hine and Francis Benjamin Johnston), and 37 topics (e.g. anarchism, charity, government, health, education, housing, Socialism, and war). Also available is an online exhibit that introduces three of the Social Museum's primary subjects of study: Poor Relief, Social Justice, and Industrial Betterment. This section can serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the progressive era and early 20th-century social reform movements in the United States and abroad.

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.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800

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This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering more than 36,000 items and 2.3 million pages on all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century American life. It is comprised of a range of publications helpful for researching social, cultural, intellectual, and religious history, as well as political and military history, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, charters and by-laws, cookbooks, maps, narratives, novels, plays, poems, sermons, songs, textbooks, and travelogues. It is especially useful for the history of printing, as it contains an exhaustive list of printers, booksellers, and publishers active in this time period as well as images and the full-text of most of the books, pamphlets, and broadsides they helped create.

Users can browse the imprints by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century North America.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

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These materials come from a museum with approximately 4,000 pieces of racist memorabilia donated from Pilgrim's personal collection. Envisioned as an educational resource for scholars and students, this site contains most of the images within the museum collection, including sheet music, ashtrays, children's book covers, salt and pepper shakers, postcards, dolls, and matchbooks. The exhibit is divided thematically into 11 sections, including racist cartoons; Jezebel stereotypes; the tragic mulatto; and caricatures of the brute, picanninny, nigger, tom, mammy, coon, and golliwog. Each section includes a scholarly essay that provides historical context for the anti-black caricatures. For those interested in further research, the summaries (most between 2,000 and 4,000 words) offer extensive footnotes with primary, secondary, and online sources.

Of the 30 images within "The Brute Caricatures," users will find the covers of Charles Carrolls' The Negro a Beast, published in 1900, and D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation of interest. There are 142 picanninny images, including Buckwheat and the cover of the children's book "Little Sambo." There are images of 50 "Uncle Tom," 87 "Mammy," and 90 "Jezebel" caricatures, both cinematic and commercial. More than 100 pictures and objects bear the appellation "nigger," and 118 19th- and early-20th-century racist cartoons (2 Quicktime and 2 RealMedia) are available. The exhibit includes a radio interview with Dr. Pilgrim, along with links to 13 scholarly essays and relevant newspaper articles. The site will be of special interest to those researching the history of racist memorabilia.

Worthington Memory, Online Scrapbook

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Currently provides more than 122 images of objects, documents, and photographs pertaining to the history of the town of Worthington, OH, founded in 1803 by a group of families migrating from western Connecticut and Massachusetts. The site creators plan to add more materials in the future, including digitized versions of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and oral histories. Users may search by subject, title, or keyword in bibliographic records—which include abstracts of up to 100 words for each item—or browse the collection by decade or 27 categories covering aspects of the social, economic, cultural, civic, and environmental history of the town. Includes links to 22 related sites. Useful for those studying local history.

Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators

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Approximately 75 items that tell the story of pioneering African American flyers, their contributions to the World War II effort, and racial discrimination they suffered. The site is arranged into four sections containing narratives of approximately 350 words each with hyperlinks leading to related images, mostly photographs. The exhibit also includes reproductions of posters, newspaper articles, insignias, advertisements, personal accounts, government documents, and letters. Searchable by keyword, decade, exhibit section, media, or name of plane. The reproduction quality of some of the items is poor; several newspaper articles are so blurred they are virtually unreadable.

Includes two lesson plans for grades 5-12, links to nine related sites, and an 11-title bibliography. The site will provide students with a brief introduction to an often neglected aspect of African American and aviation history.

The Commercial Closet

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Advertised as "the world's largest collection of gay advertising," this site provides video clips, still photo storyboards, descriptive critiques, and indexing to more than 600 television and print media ad representations of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Users can access ads by year; brand; company; business category; themes; region; agency; target group (gays or mainstream); and portrayals ("what the imagery/narrative conveys about gayness") categorized as vague, neutral, positive, or negative. Although the earliest ad is from 1958, the majority are drawn from the past 10 years. The creator, a business journalist, notes that "the project is also creating a historic document that charts the burlesquing of the gay community, and the move toward more positive and inclusive portrayals." Visitors with an interest in gay history, popular culture, consumer culture, and advertising can do their own charting with the materials provided.

The Capital and the Bay, ca. 1600-1925

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This site offers published books selected from the Library of Congress' general and rare book collections in an "attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century." Contains 139 books, a few by well-known figures, such as Edwin Booth, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, but most by little-known residents and visitors to the region. Includes memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, books of letters, journals, poems, addresses, reports, speeches, travel books, sermons, books of photographs, and promotional brochures. In addition to Washington, D.C., the cities of Baltimore, MD, and Richmond, VA, are featured.

A special presentation entitled "Pictures of People and Places from the Collection" consists of selected illustrations organized in three sections of 10 images each on Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The site includes 10 works dealing with slavery—a number of which were written by former slaves—and approximately 10 works dealing with encounters between whites and Native Americans. Includes links to 22 related sites. A valuable collection for those studying ways that Washington, D.C., and neighboring regions have been described in print over several centuries.

AdFlip

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Adflip is an archive of more than 6,000 print advertisements published from 1940 to the present. The site is privately financed and was created by two individuals who felt that "print advertising captures the essence of society at any given time." Products advertised include everything from dog food to DeSotos. The site may be searched by year, product type, and brand name. Many ads may be sent as electronic post-cards for free. For each ad, the site tells when and in what publication it appeared. A 170-word introduction describes the site. There are 17 search categories, from automotive to travel, and eight themed categories such as comic books and obsolete products.

A top ten collection changes daily and features ads that the site creators find funny. Visitors may also search a collection of ads indexed by publication. This collection includes 65 magazines and comic books, from Archie to Wired. The site does not give information about advertising agencies. This site will be useful as primary source material for research on advertising, consumer culture, and material culture, but note that the pages of this site download very slowly.

The Daguerreian Society

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This is the home site of the Daguerreian Society, an organization "Dedicated to the history, science, and art of the daguerreotype," a 19th century mode of photography used primarily for making portrait images. The galleries include more than 40 historical daguerreotypes and 14 modern images. In addition to portraiture, the site also features some daguerreian landscapes, and each image is accompanied by a 50-word descriptive caption as well as the date, subject, and photographer information. The site also provides an index of almost 100 20th-century texts on daggeureotypes; a bibliography of more than 300 pieces of daguerrian literature; a 1,000-word history of daggeureotypes by Society member Kenneth E. Nelson; a 1,000-word description of the daguerreian process from an 1887 issue of the Scientific American; and an 1854 pamphlet that provides an illustrated tour of a daguerrian manufactory. There are also more than 30 links to related sources. For those interested in the history of photography and portrait art, this site is very informative.