Data & Information Services Center: Online Data Archive

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Logo, Online Data Archive
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Provides 43 social science statistical data studies on a variety of topics. Created as a service to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the site includes 12 studies dealing with Wisconsin-related topics, 14 additional studies on American subjects, and 15 studies dealing with general or international matters. Subjects pertaining to American history include Slave Movement during the 18th and 19th Centuries; Irish immigrants in Boston in 1847 and 1848; Characteristics of Census Tracts in Nine U.S. Cities, 1940-1960; the growth, consumption habits, and finances of American families in the 1950s and 1960s; financial characteristics of consumers in the early 1960s; premarital sexuality in 1973; Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982; urban racial disorders of the 1960s; class characteristics of U.S. Council of Foreign Relations members, 1922-1969; and the role of the American family in the transmission and maintenance of socioeconomic inequality. (See separate "History Matters" entries for above-listed hyperlinked sites.) Valuable for those studying American social history, especially in the Cold War period.

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.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820

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Introductory graphic, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy
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Provides detailed data on more than 100,000 slaves and free blacks in Louisiana from 1718 to 1820 gathered from notarial documents by historian Dr. Gwendolyn Hall. Users can search by name of slave, master's name, gender, epoch, racial designation, plantation location, and place of origin. Each record retrieved pertains to an individual slave. Information was compiled from documents created when slaves arrived by ship, were bought and sold, reported as runaways, testified in court cases, manumitted, and at the death of masters and in other circumstances. As French and Spanish records often were more detailed than those kept by the British, the amount of information provided is relatively extensive. Some records contain as many as 114 fields with information on name, birthplace, gender, age, language group, alleged involvement in conspiracies, skills, family relationships, and illnesses, among other categories. Dr. Hall's analysis documents 96 different African ethnicities of slaves in Louisiana during this period.

The site additionally offers tables and graphs presenting Dr. Hall's calculations concerning the data collected and presents results from three useful searches: on African names, individual slaves involved in revolts or conspiracies, and runaways. Seven examples of original documents are displayed, and downloads of complete databases on Louisiana slaves and free blacks are available. An extremely valuable site for professional historians, anthropologists, geneticists, and linguists, in addition to people conducting genealogical searches.

African Americans in Massachusetts

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Image, African Americans in Massachusetts: Case Studies of Desegregation in...
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This site features primary documents related to the 19th-century desegregation of the Boston and Nantucket, MA school systems. It includes a timeline with links to 71 expandable and downloadable primary sources. The documents consist of census records, maps, reports of the local school committees, and articles from William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. The site also contains a bibliography with more than 30 items. Designed to develop student critical thinking skills, materials encourage middle and high students to understand different points of view. For example, students can study petitions from those supporting desegregation and petitions from those in opposition. In addition students will better understand the relationship between Massachusetts' early desegregation cases and the 20th-century Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Complete with primary sources and lesson plans, the site not only offers useful curriculum for lessons in America's long march to free and integrated public education but helps students identify how contemporary debates about education parallel the 19th-century Massachusetts desegregation cases.

Characteristics of Census Tracts in Nine U.S. Cities, 1940-1960

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Logo, Data & Information Services Center
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A 28-page study, including charts, of 1960 census data compiled according to residence areas, or "tracts," within the cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Also provides census data for 1940 and 1950 with regard to Chicago and Detroit. Offers raw data and percentage computations on total population of tracts, number of males and females, African-American ethnicity, foreign origin, age, marital status, income level, education, units of substandard housing, rent amounts, employment figures, and salary levels. Also provides medical-related data, such as numbers of hospitals, hospital beds, pharmacists, and types of physicians in each tract. Of use for those studying mid-20th-century urban history. See "History Matters" entry Data and Program Library Service: Online Data Archive for information on other social science studies available at this site.

Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982

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These materials were collected for a study on the attitudes, backgrounds, goals, and experiences of volunteers participating in a 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration effort. Resources include questionnaires submitted prior to and following the project, as well as a follow-up survey conducted in 1982.

Participants were queried about why they volunteered, what they expected, their attitudes regarding race and politics, images they held of the South, expectations they had regarding the African American community, personal memories and effects of their participation, and subsequent attitudes regarding civil rights, violence, and social change. These resources offer insight into the Civil Rights Movement and some sociological aspects of American reformers.

Union Army Project

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This site presents medical and mortality statistics and records related to 35,747 white males who served in the Union Army during the Civil War. All were eligible for Federal pensions later in life. These materials a part of a larger study attempting to create "lifecycle datasets" to explore the effects of lifestyle and biomedical interventions on the human life span.

The website presents three datasets based on different sources of information: Military, Pension, and Medical Records. These are compiled from wartime and pension application records; Surgeon's Certificates, with information from detailed physical examinations; and Census Records from 1850, 1860, 1900, and 1910. Individual soldiers were tracked through various data sources with unique Army identification numbers. The site includes a 2,000-word essay that discusses the scientific and historical background for the study and a 700-word summary of significant results.

Library of Virginia Digital Library Program

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More than 1.2 million items on Virginia and life in the South are available on this website, including 40,000 photographs and maps, 350,000 court documents, and 800,000 manuscripts. Manuscripts include governors' letters, land office grants, Revolutionary War bounty land warrants, Confederate pensions, and disability applications. Several complete collections are available, as well as 25 exhibits on Virginia history.

Users can find photographs that document buildings and people; patents and grants submitted to the Virginia Land Office between 1623 and 1992; Northern Neck Grants and Survey forms filed between 1692 and 1892; military records, including Revolutionary War state pensions material and World War I History Commission Questionnaires; WPA Life Histories; and Virginia Religious Petitions from 1774 to 1802. Exhibits deal with topics including the legacy of the New Deal in Virginia; resistance to slavery; Virginia roots music (with seven audio selections); Thomas Jefferson; John Marshall; Virginia's coal towns; and political life in the state.

HERB: Social History for Every Classroom

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Photo, Before-and-After Photograph. . . , War Department, NARA
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HERB consists of three TAH projects, History for All, History Matters, and Our American Democracy, as well as a wide variety of non-TAH collections, primarily related to social history. If you're wondering where the name came from, HERB's namesake is Herbert Gutman, a labor historian and co-founder of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, which has been involved with K-12 education since 1989.

On HERB, you can keyword search for resources such as prints, posters, advertisements, and other artworks; oral history transcripts; statistics; documentary-viewing guides; timelines; activities; worksheets; explanation by historians; letters; songs; and more. From the main page, you can also browse by selecting your time period of interest or a major theme—immigration and migration, civil rights and citizenship, slavery and abolition, work, reading supports, expansion and imperialism, gender and sexuality, Civil War, or social movements.

Search results do not give suggested grade levels for any of the materials, including classroom activities, so be prepared to do some thinking about what might be best for your classroom's collective interests and ability levels.

History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web

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Providing a host of resources on U.S. history survey, the three main features are: WWW.History, Many Pasts, and Making Sense of Evidence.

WWW.History provides an annotated guide to more than 1,000 high-quality websites covering all of U.S. history. Users can browse websites by time period or topic and can search by keyword.

Many Pasts offers more than 1,000 primary sources in text, image, and audio, from an exchange between Powhatan and Captain John Smith to comments by the director of the Arab American Family Support Center in Brooklyn after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Making Sense of Evidence offers eight guides with interactive exercises designed to help students learn to analyze various kinds of primary sources, including maps, early film, oral history, and popular song. These guides offer questions to ask and provide examples of how to analyze kinds of evidence. There are also eight multimedia modules that model strategies for analyzing primary sources, including political cartoons, blues, and abolitionist speeches.