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

Image
Logo, "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
Annotation

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."

American Women's Dime Novel Project

Image
Book cover, "Wild, and Willful, or a Hoiden's Love," Lucy Randall Comfort
Annotation

This site examines the changing role of women's dime novels in America from 1870 to 1920. Rather than simply collect texts or author biographies (although it does that), the site is built around the goal of analyzing the novels and placing them in historical context. A 3,000-word Overview describes the novels' growth in popularity and explains their appeal to working-class audiences. In addition, it details the Comstock campaign against dime novels that blamed novels for glorifying petty crime such as larceny. There are 250-word biographies of 24 authors who specialized in dime novels, as well as title lists for each of the authors. Except for the explanatory essay and the biographies, the bulk of the site consists of approximately 300 primary source materials, including 12 journal articles dating back to 1875. The website also offers links to three outside collections of dime novel cover art and contains a list of archives with significant collections of dime novels in their holdings (the collections include 285 novel covers), including the Library of Congress. The site includes 12 essays by 20th-century scholars examining the importance and impact of dime novels, and a chapter from an 1860s dime novel, Willful Gaynell. Despite its reliance on secondary sources rather than primary, the site provides a useful introduction to studies of 19th- and early-20th-century women's literature.

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

Image
Illustration, Cover of Comic Book, Library of Congress
Annotation

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.

Hitting the Sawdust Trail With Billy Sunday

Image
Portrait, Billy Sunday, 1916, Wheaton College
Annotation

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."

Freedom Now! An Archival Project of Tougaloo College and Brown University

Image
Brochure, Fundraising to aid. . . , 1970, NAACP, Tougaloo College Archives
Annotation

This searchable archive offers more than 250 documents from the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the struggle to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi in the early 1960s, and the continuing Brown-Tougaloo Cooperative Exchange that grew out of it. The Freedom Movement was "one of the most inspiring and important examples of grass-roots activism in U.S. history." The archive includes books; manuscripts; periodicals; correspondence; interview transcripts; photographs; artifacts; and legal, organizational, and personal documents.

The collection can be searched by document type, keyword, or topic, including black power/black nationalism, college students, gender issues, incarceration, labor issues, legislation, media, non-violence, protest, segregation, and state government. The site offers two lesson plans on the Mississippi Freedom Movement based on documents in the database, one focused on the experiences of college-aged civil rights workers during the Freedom Movement and the other on voter registration. Other teaching resources include links to five websites on teaching with primary documents, six sites related to the African-American civil rights movement, and eight related books. This site is a useful resource for researching the Mississippi Freedom Movement, the history and people of the civil rights movement, or African-American history.

LexisNexis

Image
Logo, LexisNexis
Annotation

This service provides full-text and keyword searching to more than 5,900 news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications. The database accesses current and recent issues of more than 50 major English-language newspapers, including the New York Times and The Washington Post back to 1980 or earlier. The database also offers more than 400 magazines and journals, 600 newsletters, and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts from major networks.

Legal materials include Federal and state cases, laws, codes, and regulations and law review articles. Business resources include SEC filings and reports and corporate financial information and profiles. The site also provides statistical tables of data pertaining to industries, biographical information, country and state profiles, polls and surveys, and the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Access to various parts of this enormous resource varies by subscription agreement.

Quilt Index

Image
Cotton, Spiderweb, Scrap, 1901-1929, Connecticut Quilt Search, Quilt Index
Annotation

The Quilt Index gathers together images of quilts from historical societies and other institutions, as well as individual quilters, and information on both quilts themselves and the culture and skills of quilting.

The site search lets you specify details including the contributing institution, state and time period in which the piece was made, dominant colors, cultural or ethnic provenance of a quilt, or fabric type. The wide variety of options can make an initial glance at the search page intimidating, but it effectively allows a user to browse the collection according to his or her interests. Quilters may be more interested in pattern or fabric type, whereas history educators may wish to find local quilts from time periods past.

Additional subpages under the "Search" tab offer access to a number of quilting journals from the '70s through '90s, a means of searching ephemera (sketches, swatch collections, and more), and a lesson plan search feature. Searching for history lesson plans results in four hits as of January 30th, 2012 (Appalachian culture, interviewing a quilter, reading a quilt as a historical document, and quilt symbolism). Note that this, rather than the "Lesson Plans" tab, is the easiest way to reach lesson plans intended to be used in history curriculum.

Also worth exploring are essays and galleries. The latter consists of collections of quilts arranged by themes. Example themes include quilts and human rights, Texan quilts, and Amish quilts. In contrast, essays is text heavy. Here, site visitors can find text commentary on cultural significance, historical quilting, or regional or historical quilt characteristics, for example, as well as quilt-related poetry.

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

Image
Cigarette cards, Jack Johnson, New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Annotation

A companion to Ken Burns's film of the same name, Unforgivable Blackness provides an extensive look into issues surrounding race relations, sports, and definitions of freedom during the Progressive Era. In the documentary, Burns delves into the life of Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavy Weight Champion of the World. Johnson is explored as a man unapologetic for his strength, dominance, and defiance of society’s "rules."

This well-designed website has appeal for those teaching a variety of subject matter and content at the high school level. Background information is plentiful for those unfamiliar with early 20th-century boxing history, and sections are written at an appropriate Lexile level for high school use. Fight of the Century includes an interactive link filled with photographs, music, newspaper excerpts, political cartoons, and six audio clips (Flash Player required). Discussions of political cartoons and the depictions of African Americans during the early 1900s may be necessary before viewing Fight of the Century with students. Primary sources are plentiful throughout, including full text of the Mann Act, as well as Johnson’s FBI files.

Ghost in the House and Sparring provide information concerning four of Johnson’s contemporaries, including boxers Joe Louis and Sam Langford. Knockout also details Johnson's dalliances with a number of white women, which led to his conviction under the Mann Act. While important to the overall discussion of race relations, this section and coinciding discussions should only occur with more mature high school groups. An additional section, For Teachers, includes 10 lesson plans that may be used in a range of classroom settings—from math and civics, to history and sociology. Lesson plans are well thought out and descriptive, yet still leave room for open dialogue and connections with relatable current events. The website was last updated in 2005, which has resulted in a lost connection with three of the eight website links listed under the Resources section.

Overall, this website provides an in-depth and user-friendly overview for those interested in connecting issues of race relations and the Progressive Era into their classrooms.

Slavery in Canada

Image
 Photo, William Henson escaped from slavery. . . , Daniel G. Hill, NYPL
Annotation

This website covers a topic that often goes overlooked—that slavery spread as far north as Canada.

Resources include portions of a slave autobiography; slave narratives; Underground Railroad stories and songs; articles from abolitionist newspapers; short timelines (1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1899, and 1900-present); more than 60 biographies of slaves; 10 images, including maps, photographs, artworks, and newspaper scans; radio and documentary links; and a collection of web links relevant to the topic. The included glossary and chapter quizzes are not currently working.

However, the site could prove useful for locating primary sources which attest to the geographical breadth of slavery in North America.