New Jersery History Partnership Project

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Portrait, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Huntington, NJ History Partnership Project
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This project was designed to teach U.S. history through New Jersey history. Currently, materials are organized under two themes. "American Revolution" contains 10 lectures and nine lesson plans, seven images of New Jersey historic sites such as Liberty Hall and Morven, 47 primary source documents on topics such as women, African Americans, the state constitution, the Quakers, and the Lenape, seven video clips on topics such as republican motherhood, the Great Awakening, and the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and an interactive exercise on the 1776-1777 campaign in New Jersey. Lesson plan topics include revolutionary heroes, African American quest for freedom, and the Battle of Trenton. A timeline integrating U.S. and state history events from 1734 to 1807 is also included.

A less extensive thematic section "Market Revolution" offers a lecture, a lesson plan, and a video clip on New Jersey's transportation revolution, seven primary source documents that include an 1839 map of New Jersey and a map of the Morris Canal, and a timeline. Links are provided to three partner institutions, eight history centers or organizations, and 30 New Jersey history centers, organizations, or historic sites. This website provides useful resources for those teaching the 18th- or early 19th-century history of New Jersey.

Library of Congress: Webcasts

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Photo, introductory image, Library of Congress Webcasts
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This video archive assembles Library of Congress webcasts in one easily accessible location. The biography and history section offers 159 webcasts of talks by historians, writers, commentators, and political figures, including historians Joseph J. Ellis, John Hope Franklin, Jill Lepore, Lawrence W. Levine, David McCullough, and Robin Shields and writers and commentators David Brooks and Andrea Mitchell. The wide variety of subjects discussed include Vietnam, Iraq, Abraham Lincoln, early American printers and the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor, the national character, early African American life, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The section on government has 67 webcasts by current and former government officials, such as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, George Shultz, and David Weinberger. Subjects include intellectual freedom, global democratic governance, and guardianship and the First Amendment. Moreover, the site offers 56 webcasts on culture and the performing arts and 305 webcasts on poetry and literature. There are also sections on religion, science and technology, and education. This website is a useful resource for information on historical subjects from the historians and authors who have written about them.

Folkstreams

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Introductory graphic, The Angel that Stands by Me. . ., Folkstreams
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The declared mission of this film archive "is to build a national preserve of documentary films about American folk or roots culture." The archive contains more than 50 independent films and videos "depicting American folk, traditional, regional, and vernacular culture." Films include Dry Wood, a "glimpse into the life, food, and Mardi Gras celebrations of black Creoles in French Louisiana, featuring the stories and music of 'Bois Sec' Ardoin and Canray Fontenot" and New England Fiddles, presenting seven "traditional musicians as they play in their homes and at dances and contests, passing their styles to younger fiddlers, and commenting on their music."

All films are available in streaming video and can viewed with Quicktime or Realplayer. The site also provides background material on each film, explaining the subject and aesthetic importance. Transcripts are available for some films. Visitors can browse the collection by title, filmmaker, subject, region, or people. They can also search for films or search the available transcripts of films as well as essays about the films. This site should be of interest to those studying the history of American folk culture or the history of documentary film.

Florida Folklife Collection

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Photo, Tampa tobacco industry, 1920s, Florida Folklife Collection
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This extensive archive offers more than 10,300 photographs of Florida folklife from the 1930s through 2001. The archive can be browsed or searched by keyword. The site also makes available 17 interviews with folklorists and folk artists and 24 recordings of performances by Florida blues, gospel, shape-note, and folk singers. Additionally there are also 10 "voices of Florida" collections that include recordings of performances by or interviews with folk musicians, crafters, storytellers, and folklife interpreters on subjects such as children's lore, religious traditions, Seminole culture, maritime traditions, ethnic folk culture, material culture, and occupational lore. There are also 29 brief profiles of prominent Florida folklorists.

For teachers, the site offers five educational units that offer a history section with an interview, documents and audio, photographs, and lesson plans. Unit subjects include Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 recording expedition to the turpentine camps in Cross City, the history and practices of the net-making trade, the tradition of white oak basket making, and Seminole doll making. The visitor can also search the full catalog of photos and audio recordings (46,000 photographs and 5,000 audio recordings). Also available are five film clips from early Florida Folk Festivals and the Florida Folk Arts Conference. And the website provides 30 links to related websites on folklife programs and collections.

Medicine in the Americas, 1619-1914

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Logo, Medicine in the Americas 1610-1914: a Digital Library
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This small "digital library" offers a collection of eight historical medical books related to the development of medicine in the U.S. PDF files of the original documents are accompanied by a transcription and a brief description. Additionally, most of the documents have a link to a "historical note" with a more detailed description of the document. The text of the documents is searchable. The eight medical works are Clara Barton's 1878 pamphlet on the Red Cross; Thomas N. Chase's 1903 Atlanta University conference report on the mortality of African Americans in cities; Benjamin Coleman's observations on smallpox inoculation, written during the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic; an 1825 description by Robert Waln, Jr., of the Friends Asylum near Philadelphia, the first private hospital in the United States entirely dedicated to the treatment of mental illness; William T. G. Morton's 1847 work on producing anesthesia by the inhalation of sulphuric ether; L. Emmett Holt's 1894 book on the care and feeding of children; Benjamin Rush's 1808 pamphlet on medical care for U.S. Army soldiers; and the text of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at UNC

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Letter, John and Ebenezer Pettigrew. . . , May 4, 1795, page 1, True and. . .
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This site offers 121 edited documents written by students at the University of North Carolina between 1795 and 1868. Documents include letters, speeches, diary excerpts, compositions, and poems. Annotated transcriptions and images of handwritten pages are provided. The collection can be explored through 15 essays divided into six chapters, each covering a different period with links to the associated primary documents. Essay titles include "Early Student Rebellions," "Slaves and Servants," "Writing in the Academy," and "The Debating Societies."

The collection can also be browsed in its entirety or by name, topic, events, organizations, places, publications, genres, or authors. The collection can be searched by keyword or advanced search. Four introductory essays offer an overview of the collection as well as short essays on the value of documentary histories and possibilities for future research. Links to 20 published sources are provided as well as a bibliography of source materials. See also Documenting the American South.

Silicon Valley History Online

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Photo, Thin film, Intel Corporation, 2003, Silicon Valley History Online
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This small archive provides more than 850 images from the mid-18th century to the present of the Santa Clara Valley in California. Browse the archive or view images through six thematic groupings: agriculture (91 images); education (147 images); people (467 images); technology (182 items); transportation (125 items); and urban life (78 items). There is some overlap between the collections. Keyword and advanced searches are also available. There are seven lesson plans on the history of the Santa Clara Valley, primarily for high school. Topics include the 1906 earthquake, the history of technology, urban development, the Ohlone Indians, women in Santa Clara County, and transportation.

Tennessee Documentary History Collection, 1796-1850

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Map, Introductory graphic, 1796-1850, Tennessee Documentary History. . . site
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This archive assembles more than 1,600 primary sources, including letters, family papers, reports, and images, relating to the history of antebellum Tennessee. Visitors can browse the archive by collection or author, or they can use the simple keyword search or a variety of advanced searches to locate specific documents. Included in the collections are 142 letters, reports, and other documents, including the correspondence of Cherokee chiefs and officials such as John Ross. The archive also includes letters of such antebellum Tennessee figures as Sam Houston, James K. Polk, John Sevier, and Andrew Jackson, as well as letters to and from 12 antebellum Tennessee governors. The archive offers 79 images, many of various aspects of Cherokee village life in the mid-18th century. Though primarily focused on an audience of K-12 teachers of Tennessee history, academic historians and researchers in antebellum political and social history will also find this material useful.

Automobile in American Life and Society

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Hartford Auto-Jack advertisement, 1911, Automobile in American. . . site
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This website was designed as an academic resource for courses focused on the automobile and the automobile industry. Each section—design, environment, gender, labor, and race—has a short introduction and two illustrated scholarly essays (often including annotated bibliographies). The complete text of each essay can be viewed in a separate window and each essay is accompanied by a student and teacher resources section with one or more questions for reading, discussion, writing, and research, as well as questions making connections between the essays. "Design" also offers a list of 110 "automotive oral histories" available in the Benson Ford research center, but only 17 are available on the site. Visitors can search the site by keyword but no advanced search is available. This site is a useful resource for students and educators studying the role of the automobile in American culture and society.

New York Public Library Picture Collection Online

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Engraving, "Capture of the Galleon," Howard Pyle, 1887
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This image resource site contains 30,000 digitized images from books and periodicals, as well as original photographs, prints, and postcards, mostly dated before 1923. There are cartoons and illustrations from the well known Harper's Weekly and Century Magazine, as well as images from the Library of Congress Prints and Photograph division. In addition many of the vibrant images of Native Americans were collected from the Department of War Indian Gallery. Covering more than 12,000 subjects, the site features images of Jamestown settlers, Pocahontas and John Smith, American presidents, 19th-century New York architecture, slave life, American and European women's costumes, streetcars and trains, and even insects and snakes.

Bibliographical information accompanies each image, and users may also save images of interest in their own "gallery" for viewing or purchase. Thumbnail sketches enlarge for full-page viewing. Searchable by keyword or by browsing a variety of indexes, the collection is a useful visual resource for teachers and researchers.