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

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Logo, "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
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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."

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

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

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

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Cigarette cards, Jack Johnson, New York Public Library Digital Gallery
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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.

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

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Photo, "Paddy Wagon," "Irish Echo," v. 71, n. 49, p. 4, December 9-15, 1998
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This collection of essays, documents, and bibliographies addresses Atlantic slavery, resistance, and abolition. Source Documents includes about 200 speeches, letters, cartoons, graphics, and articles (visitors may browse by author, date, subject, or document type—no searching), that document slavery in the Americas. Bibliographies contains about 12 detailed bibliographies by scholars of slavery and abolition that can be used in teaching or studying in this area, as well as links to book reviews on the internet. A Scholars Forum posts a 4,500-word featured essay by a noted scholar, and visitors can read past essays as well. Teachers may find useful a Curriculum section, where lesson plans are available, including one for the Amistad affair. It includes a timeline of abolition, a narrative of the incident and the subsequent trials, and an essay. Tangled Roots uses a 1,000-word essay to examine the history shared by Irish Americans and African Americans in America. Neither the most complete digital archive nor the greatest collection of essays, this site is nonetheless a valuable resource for the most recent scholarship of American slavery and abolition.

Famous American Trials: "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials 1931-1937

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Photo, Scottboro Boys with attornery Leibowitz
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Part of the "Famous Trials" site created by Law Professor Douglas O. Linder, this collection provides documents, photographs, essays, and information about the controversial trials of nine African American youths for allegedly raping two white women on a train in the Depression South. Contemporary materials include 20 excerpts from the trials; 22 contemporary news articles; 10 appellate court decisions; eight letters; 28 photographs; 16 quotes from participants and others commenting on the trials; a political cartoon; and a postcard.

Also offers two essays by Linder of 6,000 and 18,000 words each; 20 biographies ranging from 100 to 1,000 words each on participants in the trials, political figures, and historians who have chronicled it; and a bibliography of 30 entries, including five links to related sites. Of value to those studying American race and gender history, the South, legal history, and Depression America.

Nixon and Sports

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Photo, Nixon in the Crowd at a Baseball Game
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This site explores the not-so-obvious relationship between Richard Nixon's interest in sports, his politics, and his reputation as a public figure. Professional historian Nicholas Sarantakes designed the site as the electronic version of a forthcoming book. A timeline from 1969 to 1974 provides descriptions (5-20 words) on sports-related and other important events in Nixon's presidency. Watergate events, for instance, are intertwined with Nixon's interest in relocating the San Diego Padres to Washington, D.C. In 16 photographs and six cartoons, Nixon is shown as spectator and participant at sporting events. He is quoted talking about sports on 13 different occasions. The site refers visitors to two articles by Sarnatakes on the topic of Nixon and sports. The site may be interesting to cultural historians in general and useful for research in sports history and the history of the presidency in particular.

FDR Cartoon Archive

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Portrait, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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A continuing project of high school history and science classes, this site presents thousands of political cartoons concerning the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Selected from the collection at the Hyde Park Presidential Library of Basil O'Conner—Roosevelt's New York City law partner—the materials are arranged into eight subject categories and often include brief background essays and questions designed to prompt further inquiries. Periods currently emphasized include 1932, "The Road to Pennsylvania Avenue"; 1937, "The Supreme Court"; and 1943, "The War Years."

Well-conceived and executed, the site also gives the texts of Roosevelt's inaugural addresses and a page of teacher resources and suggested projects.

Flashing Across the Country: Mr. Zip and the ZIP Code Promotional Campaign

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Promotional material, June 13, 1963, Postal Bulletin, National Postal Museum
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Anytime you write a letter, you use the ZIP code. What is that code, and when did people start using it? More importantly for the postal service, how do you get an entire country's population to memorize and add a seemingly random string of numbers to their addresses?

The answer, in the 1960s, was Mr. Zip, a jaunty cartoon postman, designed to make the new ZIP code cause memorable and approachable.

This website discusses the ways in which Mr. Zip was deployed as an educational and advertising device. The majority of the content consists of an essay divided into smaller, more manageable subpages. However, sprinkled throughout, you'll find Mr. Zip comics; merchandise, such as board games and lunchboxes; promotional materials; PSA videos; a memo; photographs; and postage stamps.

This video describes what each number of the ZIP code represents, which could be a hook if you decide to introduce Mr. ZIP in the classroom. Ultimately, the content is not likely to be of direct use in the classroom but may be of more interest as trivia or to flesh out background knowledge for related lessons.

Historical Thinking Matters

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Photo, Scopes Trial, Historical Thinking Matters
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Four guided investigations designed to teach students how to read primary sources and construct historical narratives lie at the heart of this website. Topics are: the Spanish-American War, the Scopes Trial, Social Security, and Rosa Parks. Each topic includes a short introductory video, a timeline of events, a central question, and extension activities. For example, the Rosa Parks investigation poses the question: "Why did the boycott of Montgomery's buses succeed?"

After completing a simple login, students read annotated documents—including letters written by the boycott organizers, a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and an interview with a woman working in Montgomery—and answer guiding questions, and draw on their responses to answer the question. The website also includes a useful introduction to the idea of historical thinking.

Digital Library of Georgia

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Postcard, 270 Peachtree Building, Historic Postcard Coll., Digital Library of Ga
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Bringing together a wealth of material from libraries, archives, and museums, this website examines the history and culture of the state of Georgia. Legal materials include more than 17,000 state government documents from 1994 to the present, updated daily, and a complete set of Acts and Resolutions from 1799 to 1995. "Southeastern Native American Documents" provides approximately 2,000 letters, legal documents, military orders, financial papers, and archaeological images from 1730–1842. Materials from the Civil War era include a soldier's diary and two collections of letters.

The site provides a collection of 80 full-text, word-searchable versions of books from the early 19th century to the 1920s and three historic newspapers. There are approximately 2,500 political cartoons from 1946-1982; Jimmy Carter's diaries; photographs of African Americans from Augusta during the late 19th century; and 1,500 architectural and landscape photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s.