Mexican-American War and the Media

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Image for Mexican-American War and the Media
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These more than 5,500 transcribed newspaper articles related to the Mexican-American War represent five newspapers from the U.S. and England. They span the period from 1845, when the U.S. annexed Texas, through 1848, when Mexico surrendered and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.

The contrast between coverage of the war in the U.S. and England is particularly striking. The Times of London fulminated against the immorality of slavery and of the southern scheme to annex Texas as a slave state, while exposing America's imperialist ambitions as, among other things, an attempt to shore up the nation's fragile stability through the escape valve of western migration. By contrast, newspapers from Maryland and West Virginia did not examine the issue of slavery in the articles included here.

Some images and links to watercolor and print collections are also available. The website provides a comprehensive bibliography on the war, but offers little historical background or contextualization beyond links to related materials and an expanded timeline.

Margaret Sanger Papers Project

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Selected materials by and about the "birth control pioneer" Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) are provided here. A link to a companion site offers approximately 200 documents dealing with The Woman Rebel, Sanger's 1914 radical feminist monthly, for which she was indicted and tried for violation of federal obscenity laws.

The project plans to digitize more than 600 of Sanger's speeches and articles. At present, there are 25 transcribed speeches, 182 newspaper articles from 1911–1921, four public statements, a letter written by Sanger in 1915, and more than 50 articles from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, some of which contain primary source materials. There are plans to add to items regularly. Materials also include 27 links to sites offering Sanger writings, a biographical essay, and a bibliography. Links to collections of images and an MP3 file of Margaret Sanger's 1953 "This I Believe" speech are also available.

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.

Black Mask Magazine

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Detail, Black Mask cover
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In 1920, journalist H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Nathan launched Black Mask, a pulp magazine designed to finance the literary magazine Smart Set, and set out to publish "the best stories available of adventure, the best mystery and detective stories, the best romances, the best love stories, and the best stories of the occult." The magazine went on to become famous for popularizing hard-boiled detective fiction, written most notably by Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Raymond Chandler.

This website celebrates the "pulp revival" with the full-text of 20 stories published in the 1920s and 1930s in Black Mask, as well as other similar magazines, including Adventure, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Dime Mystery Magazine, including Walt Coburn's "The Notched Gun" and "Scotty Scouts Around” by Raoul Whitfield. Accompanying these stories is a gallery of magazine covers and photographs of famous authors, as well as guidelines to writing Black Mask-style fiction, and essays on the pulp fiction era.

Archival Research Catalog (ARC)

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ARC offers more than 78,000 digital government resources. Materials include textual records, photographs, maps, architectural drawings, artifacts, sound recordings, and motion pictures dating from the colonial period to the recent past. ARC includes items on presidents, the military, war, immigration, Japanese-American internment, slavery, science, prisons, federal programs, the environment, the National Park Service, foreign affairs, civil rights, African Americans, and American Indians.

To begin a search, click on the yellow "search" button near the top left of the ARC webpage. The search engine is clearly organized and invites queries on specific historical materials or general themes. To access digitized materials only, check the box marked "Descriptions of Archival Materials linked to digital copies." The site continues to expand, though, as it stands, it provides an exceptional collection of government material.

American Studies Crossroads Project

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Logo, Crossroads Project
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This impressive site presents a rich array of primary and secondary material designed to foster electronic learning. The site's "Reference and Research" section furnishes an annotated, searchable gateway to hundreds of links dealing generally with American history and life, including SiteScene, a biweekly journal that reviews websites, texts of recent articles published in American Quarterly; abstracts of American Studies dissertations from 1986 to 1999, organized alphabetically by author; and links to image and document archives. Three additional sections—entitled "Community," "Curriculum," and "Technology and Learning"—offer a wealth of material concerning developments in the field of American Studies and teaching with new technologies, including essays, syllabi, bulletin boards, and newsletters.

RaceSci: History of Race in Science

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Logo, History of Race in Science
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RaceSci is a site dedicated to supporting and expanding the discussion of race and science. The site provides five bibliographies of books and articles about race and science. The section on current scholarship has 1,000 entries, organized into 38 subjects. A bibliography of primary source material includes 91 books published between the 1850s and the 1990s. Visitors can currently view 14 syllabi for high school and college courses in social studies, history of science, rhetoric, and medicine. The site links to 13 recently published articles about race and science and to 49 sites about race, gender, health, science, and ethnicity. This site will be useful for teachers designing curricula about race and for researchers looking for secondary source material.

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

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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.