Virginia Memory

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A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.

"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.

Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.

Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."

"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.

An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.

Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century

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The Presidential Timeline curates and presents primary sources drawn from twelve Presidential Libraries and Museums, institutions housing and presenting archival materials for the presidents from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. Under "Interactive Timeline," you can choose any of the 12 presidents—Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or William Jefferson Clinton—and explore his life.

Timelines consist of at least two sections: "Early Life and Career" and "Presidency." All timelines except Roosevelt's, Kennedy's, and Clinton's also include a "Post-Presidency" section. Marks on the timeline indicate events of interest in the president's life and career; click on a mark to read a brief summary of the event, and to view primary sources (a + sign in the mark indicates primary sources are available).

Browse "Exhibits," also under "Interactive Timeline," for more than 30 collections of short essays, accompanied by 2–6 primary sources per essay, covering major events and topics related to the presidents' lives and careers. Topics covered stretch from "The Stock Market Crash, October 1929" to "William J. Clinton and the Supreme Court, 1993-2001."

Try the "Gallery" to search more than 1,500 primary sources (including artifacts, maps and charts, video, photographs, sounds recordings, and documents) by keyword, library of origin, date, or source type.

The "Educators" section includes 14 ready-to-go activities, on topics ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Iran Hostage Crisis to Bill Clinton's visit to Little Rock Central High School. Students and teachers can view pre-selected primary sources online in each activity, with suggested rubrics, applicable standards, and links to related sources also included. "Resources" links out to 16 websites recommended for history and primary sources, education, and technology, while "Multimedia" rounds up more than 50 audio and video primary source clips for download.

If you can't access the interactive Flash version of the timeline, try the HTML "Text Version" that includes the same primary sources.

Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington 1898

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On November 10, 1898, Wilmington, NC, experienced what has come to be known as the only coup d'etat in United States history, when white supremacist members of the Democratic Party overthrew the municipal government and killed anywhere between six and 100 African Americans in the city, which at that time had a large, thriving African American population supported by the biracial Republican Party.

This website narrates the history of this event, from the rising racial tensions surrounding the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments and court disputes over miscegenation and interracial marriage, through the contentious election politics of 1898 that pitted the Democratic Party, supported by white supremacists, against the Republican and Populist Parties that represented African American interests at the local level, and the riot on November 10, through the legacy of the riot in the months and years to come, including the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws.

Each section is illustrated with links to primary sources, including political cartoons, newspaper clippings, laws, court cases, and photographs of prominent Wilmington African Americans.

The website also includes the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report published in 2006 by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources' Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which includes maps, photographs, and other primary source materials, and a link to an interactive map allowing visitors to visualize the events of November 10, 1898.

Ulysses S. Grant Digital Archive

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The largest public archive of Ulysses S. Grant correspondence to date, the collection includes letters, research notes, artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia. Topics cover Grant's childhood, military career, and experiences in the Civil War through his presidency and post-White House years.

The bulk of the collection is made up of 31 full-text searchable, digitized volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John Y. Simon, these volumes comprise thousands of letters spanning from 1837, just before Grant left for the Military Academy at West Point, to his death in 1885. The volumes also contain photographs, a chronology of the correspondence, and annotations.

In addition to the extensive Papers, the collection provides a sampling of digitized material from the U.S. Grant Association, including 14 multi-page compilations and 11 political cartoons from sources such as Harper's Weekly and Puck. Items include detailed, linked metadata to assist in tracking source provenance and connecting to related sources. Additionally, all items are keyword searchable and can be browsed by format, date, or title.

Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock

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Political cartoonist Herbert Block's career spanned more than 70 years, over the course of which he produced more than 14,000 cartoons and won three Pulitzer Prizes in 1942, 1954, and 1979. He spent the majority of his career at the Washington Post, where he critiqued Democrats and Republicans alike, and covered topics from McCarthyism (a term he coined in a cartoon published in 1950) and the Nixon Administration to Chernobyl, the Vietnam War, and the Yugoslav Wars in the mid-1990s. This website presents 32 of his cartoons, relating to seven prominent themes in his work: the environment, ethics, extremism, voting, the Middle East, privacy and security, and war. Each cartoon is enlargeable and downloadable, and accompanied by a brief description of the context surrounding its creation and publication, as well as several sketches drawn by Herblock made in preparation for drawing the cartoon. Useful for those interested in U.S. political history and foreign relations, as well as the history of editorial cartoons.

The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library eLibrary

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This website provides access to more than 5,700 documents surrounding Wilson and Wilson's family's personal life and work, including letters, speeches, notes, political cartoons, newspaper articles, and personal papers. All documents are keyword searchable and browseable by several topics, including debate, health, League of Nations, Paris Peace Conference, sport, and World War I. Much of Wilson's personal correspondence is included here, documenting his discussions with correspondents such as his wives Ellen Axson Wilson and Edith Bolling Wilson, and personal aide Cary Grayson. Featured documents include several of Wilson's most famous speeches: "Peace Without Victory" on the eve of World War I, "Fourteen Points for Peace," and "Women's Suffrage Amendment" in 1918. Useful both for those interested in Wilson's life and work, as well as those interested in early 20th-century U.S. political and social history, and foreign policy.

Land of (Unequal) Opportunity

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While many are familiar with the 1957 Little Rock High School integration crisis, far fewer students of U.S. civil rights history may be aware of the longer history of that struggle in Arkansas. This website includes more than 460 documents and images, including cartoons, court decisions, photographs, newspaper articles, letters, and essays related to that history. For example, an essay on the meaning of relocation written by a high school student at Arkansas's Jerome Relocation Center in 1943 brings a more personal perspective to the story of internment, as the student describes the ways in which members of her community have struggled between the "fighting spirit" and the "giving up spirit." Users new to civil rights history in Arkansas may want to begin with the extensive timeline that describes events from the arrival of slaves in Arkansas in the 1720s to a 2006 State Supreme Court ruling that struck down a ban on gays serving as foster parents. The website also includes 10 lesson plans geared for middle school students that make use of the website's resources—such as a speech given by Governor Oral Fabus in 1958. An extensive bibliography of secondary sources related to many aspects of civil rights, including African American, gay and lesbian, and women's issues, Japanese relocation, religious intolerance, political rights, and anti-civil liberties groups and issues, is also available.

Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson

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In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act (1867), which prohibited a president from unilaterally removing any officials for whom Senate approval was required for appointment. Part of Professor Douglas Linder's Famous American Trials website, this exhibit examines Johnson's impeachment trial and his narrow escape from conviction and removal from office. Linder provides a 1500-word account of the trial and includes a chronology of events in Johnson's presidency, from his election as Abraham Lincoln's vice president in 1864 to his death in 1875. The site includes background information on the process of impeachment, such as the relevant articles of the United States Constitution and James Madison's notes on the framers' Constitutional Convention debates over the impeachment process.

The site also includes full-text verions of the Articles of Impeachment against Johnson, the Senate's rules of procedure for the impeachment trial, and the Senate trial record, including all arguments, documentary evidence, testimony, and the final vote. There are also excerpts from the Congressional Globe of the opinions of six senators, both for and against impeachment, and a map that shows the regional splits in the votes for and against impeachment. The site also provides links to the Harper's Weekly account of the trial, including biographies of 28 key figures in the trial, 90 editorials, 47 news articles and briefs, 47 illustrations, 27 political cartoons, and one illustrated satire. A brief bibliography includes six scholarly books, one video, and two internet sites with information on the Johnson impeachment trial. The Harper's Weekly section also provides a link to a "Teaching Impeachment" exercise in which students can simulate an impeachment trial. This rather complicated role play exercise requires considerable research and strong analytical skills, but would be accessible for very advanced high school and survey classes. This is an ideal site for researching constitutional history, Reconstruction, and the presidency.

Red Scare (1918-1921)

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An archive of nearly 300 images and approximately 500 text files relating to the post-WWI Red Scare, created by Robert Leo Klein, the Web Coordinator and Digital Resources Developer at the William and Anita Newman Library, Baruch College, CUNY. The weekly compendium, The Literary Digest, constitutes "the primary source of material for this database." Klein notes, in describing his site, that "because the anti-red hysteria was so emblematic of the time" "we use it in the context of this database as a short-hand way of expressing the whole period." Whether or not this interpretation succeeds, this site is an impressive source for first-hand documents. Users will find them organized chronologically, as well as by more than 100 subject headings. No background text is offered, but students curious about the history of antiradicalism will discover here a rewarding presentation.

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.