New Perspectives on the West

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Photo, A Hopi Girl, John K. Hillers, 1879
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This educational resource complements an eight-part PBS documentary series by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, The West. The site is organized into several sections: a guided tour of the West, an interactive timeline to 1917, a hypertext map which includes migration and commerce routes, games and puzzles, and, most importantly, archival materials collected during the making of the series.

Primary sources, organized in chronological order, include memoirs, letters, government reports, and photographs. Visitors should not expect to encounter new perspectives on the American West offered by such historians as Patricia Limerick or William Cronon, or in-depth discussion of such important historiographical issues as gender or the environment. Political and military history, and to a lesser extent social and ethnic history of the West, however, are well represented in this account.

Rosa Parks Museum [AL]

Description

The Rosa Parks Museum presents the history of the events of and the people involved in the 1955 and 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The museum is located at the site of Rosa Parks' refusal to give her seat on a Montgomery public bus to a Caucasian man. Following Parks' arrest, many African American residents boycotted the bus system as a protest against segregation. In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregation of buses unconstitutional. Collections include a replica of the aforementioned bus. The children's wing offers a sensory "time travel experience," which presents life under early Jim Crow laws.

The museum offers exhibits and a research center.

AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History

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Logo, AMDOCS
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Provides links to approximately 390 documents, most of which are related to the nation's political, diplomatic, military, and legal history. Arranged chronologically, the site begins with excerpts of Christopher Columbus' journal of 1492 and ends, at present, with President George W. Bush's May 1, 2003 address announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq [update: documents reach from around 800 to 2007]. Includes speeches, statutes, treaties, court decisions, memoirs, diaries, letters, published books, and even a few songs. The site, created by Lynn Nelson, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Kansas, is valuable especially for high school and college students who need easy access to many of the canonical documents in American history.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

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Image for Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
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The complete facsimile and transcript versions of the March 1925 Survey Graphic special "Harlem Number," edited by Alain Locke, is presented here. Locke later republished and expanded the contents as the famous New Negro anthology. The effort constituted "the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community" of the 1920s.

The journal is divided into three sections: "The Greatest Negro Community in the World," "The Negro Expresses Himself," and "Black and White—Studies in Race Contacts." The site also includes essays by Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson; poems by Countee Cullen, Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes; and quotations from reviews of the issue.

The Old Stone House Museum [VT]

Description

The Old Stone House Museum contains 25 rooms of exhibits on 19th-century life in Vermont. The museum consists of six buildings spread over 55 acres, with the largest being Athenian Hall, a stone dormitory. The dormitory was built between 1834 and 1836 by the nation's first African American college graduate and state legislator, Reverend Alexander Twilight. Other structures on-site include Twilight's own home and an English-style barn.

The museum offers self-guided tours, hands-on activities, educational programs, and living history outreach presentations. The website offers several scavenger hunts.

American Literature on the Web

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Image, "Ralph Waldo Emerson"
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Provides thousands of links to information on and texts by more than 300 American writers from 1620 to the present. Users can search in five chronological periods for links to timelines, author's sites, related resources, music and visual arts, and "social contexts." Also contains specific categories for electronic text collections, U.S. History, American Studies, poetry, movements and genres, Southern literature, women writers, literary theory, reference works, and "minority literature/multi-cultural resources," including categories for African-American, Asian-American, Jewish-American, and Latino/Latina writers. Authors represented include famous literary figures such as Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), Anna Bradstreet (ca. 1612-72), Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Emily Dickinson (1830-86), and Ralph Ellison (1914-94); important public figures, such as William Byrd (1674-1744) and Frederick Douglass (1818-95); and lesser-known figures, such as John Woolman (1720-72) and Amelia Edith Barr (1831-1919).

Offers images of many writers, links in Japanese, a section devoted to Canadian authors, a master list of authors in alphabetical order, and "two site-specific search engines" for word searches of this site and others. Last updated in December 2001, many links are no longer operable; however, as a gateway, it offers an abundance of usable links in a well-designed format for those needing resources on American writers and their times.

Mark Twain and the American Character, Part Two

Description

Professor David Foster analyzes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, looking at what the novel, its characters, and the life of its author reveal about the "American character" and views of American ideals and life at the time of its writing.

This lecture continues from the lecture Mark Twain and the American Character, Part One.

For the lecture, follow the link below and scroll down to the second seminar under Wednesday, August 4.

An older version of this lecture can be found here.

Mark Twain and the American Character, Part One

Description

Professor David Foster analyzes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, looking at what the novel, its characters, and the life of its author reveal about the "American character" and views of American ideals and life at the time of its writing.

For the lecture, follow the Website Title link and scroll down to the first seminar under Wednesday, August 4.

This lecture continues in Mark Twain and the American Character, Part Two.

An older version of this lecture can be found here.