Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

This just-released book by the University of Pennsylvania Press is also available on-line in its entirety, courtesy of the Center for History and the New Media.

A guide for historians who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve projects they have already started.

Selected collections from The Library of Congress's American Memory


A reminder that the following sources in early American history are available on-line…

Early Virginia religious petitions

Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention

Jefferson papers

Madison papers

Slavery and Law

Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown

A recent addition to the September 11th Digital Archive, Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown features 30 searchable interviews with a cross-section of neighborhood residents. Also links with the Museum of Chinese in the Americas.

History of the American West, 1860-1920

Over 30,000 photographs, drawn from the holdings of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library, illuminate many aspects of the history of the American West. Most of the photographs were taken between 1860 and 1920.

The Speech Accent Archive

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers. Includes a bibliography of sources on the subject.

George Grantham Bain Collection

This collection represents the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters and political activities. Bain's photographs were worldwide in their coverage, but there was a special emphasis on life in New York City. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1900s to the mid-1920s, but scattered images can be found as early as the 1860s and as late as the 1930s.

Women Working, 1870-1930

Women Working, 1870 - 1930 provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard's library and museum collections. This collection explores women's roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented. The collection currently contains 2,396 books and pamphlets, 1,075 photos, and 5,000 pages from manuscript collections.

The Lost Museum

For almost a quarter-century the American Museum epitomized popular entertainment and education in the U.S. It also articulated, sometimes in unusual ways, the major issues confronting antebellum American culture, society, and politics. The site allows you to experience what it may have been like to enter Barnum's American Museum in 1865 as well to explore historical documents that place it in a broad historical context.

Thomas Jefferson Papers

The Library of Congress's Jefferson collection is organized into ten series or groupings, ranging in date from 1606 to 1827. The broad range of Jefferson's intellectual and political interests is represented by his legal and literary commonplace books, miscellaneous bound volumes of notes and extracts, and manuscript volumes relating to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia history, some of which were part of the personal library he sold to Congress in 1815. In its online presentation, the Thomas Jefferson Papers comprises approximately 83,000 images.

Newspaper Pictorials: WW I Rotogravures (1913-1919)

This collection tracks American sentiment about the war in Europe, week by week, before and after the United States became involved. Events of the war are detailed alongside society news and advertisements touting products of the day, creating a pictorial record of both the war effort and life at home. The collection includes an illustrated history of World War I selected from newspaper rotogravure sections that graphically documents the people, places, and events important to the war.

American Landscape
and Architectural
Design, 1850-1920

This collection of approximately 2,800 lantern slides represents an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. The collection offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens, including a complete history of Boston's Park System. In addition to photographs, views of locations around the country include plans, maps and models. Hundreds of private estates from all over the United States are represented in the collection through contemporary views of their houses and gardens.

Historic American
Buildings Survey

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. They record America's built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.

Alexander Parris
Digital Project

Alexander Parris (1780–1852) was one of the most prominent architect-engineers of Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth-century, responsible for designing and or superintending the construction of many significant buildings in the Commonwealth. Led by the State Library of Massachusetts, the Alexander Parris Digital Project digitized Parris material held in the State Library and the collections of six Boston repositories. The project contains a searchable digital archive containing images and transcriptions of more than four hundred items. Materials reproduced include architectural and mechanical drawings, specifications, correspondence, and accounts, and span Parris's career, from 1803 to 1851.

Emporis

formerly skyscrapers.com

Emporis is the world's premier reference source on high-rise buildings, currently containing reference information for over 90,000 structures over 11 floors high. Formerly known as skyscrapers.com, the scope of the project was recently expanded to include tens of thousands of low-rise buildings, and sections are under development for stadiums, bridges, churches, industrial buildings, and about 20 other types. The main focus continues to be commercial properties.

Map
of the lower Mississippi area

Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz
The History of Louisiana

Site created by Gordon Sayre, Associate Professor of English, University of Oregon

"An ethnographer, historian, and naturalist, Le Page du Pratz is in my opinion the most interesting writer of French colonial Louisiana, and one who deserves to be better known among anthropologists, literary scholars, and anyone interested in the history of the French colony on the Lower Mississippi. His Histoire de la Louisiane, published in three volumes in Paris in 1758, is now very rare, and has never been fully translated into English. This site features basic information about Le Page du Pratz, and translations of selected chapters of his book."

American Council of Learned Societies

History E-Book Project

"The printed monograph long stood the test of time, but recent developments in scholarly communication, the economics of university press publishing, and the re-emerging role of the scholarly societies as publishers has drastically altered its once central role. On the other hand, the development of technology is now and will continue to be a dominant influence on scholarly communication; and we are now in transition from a print-based world to an era in which scholarly discourse will be conducted largely within a globally networked electronic environment. Scholars are becoming increasingly dependent on technology for research, teaching, the exchange of ideas, and the dissemination of information. At this critical juncture, the ACLS recognizes that the fulfillment of its mission and the advancement of humanistic studies require broader understanding of technology's impact on the scholarly community. Even more important is the need for its constituent societies—as creators and consumers of scholarly information—to join together in order to ensure that they exercise appropriate influence on the development of scholarly communication in the electronic environment and in today's highly commercialized publishing environment in general."

A Thin Blue Line

The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit

Advertisement for e.p.t, Ladies' Home Journal, January 1979.

Am I pregnant? The answer to this age-old question once demanded a combination of guesswork, intuition, and time. In 1978, however, the long wait to know for sure became a thing of the past. Trumpeted by advertisements as “a private little revolution,” the first home pregnancy tests started appearing on drug store shelves that year. A quarter of a century later, innovations promise to make even the telltale thin blue line obsolete. This web site looks at the history of the home pregnancy test—one of the most ubiquitous home healthcare products in America—and examines its place in our culture.

Investigating Disruptive Technology:

The Emergence Of Ring Spinning In The American Textile Industry

Trademark incorporating elements of ring spinning technology, from a Brown Brothers & Co. trade catalog, ca. 1881.

The concept of disruptive technologies, first developed by Harvard Business School professors Richard S. Rosenbloom, Joseph L. Bower, and Clayton M. Christensen, cuts across many industry types and time periods. A disruptive technology is a new product or innovation that sneaks into an established market because industry leaders fail to recognize the threat it poses. Since not all new technologies will be disruptive technologies, they are not always easy to recognize.

Although introduced between 1828 and 1835, ring spinning was not embraced by the leading textile producers of New England and the machine builders who supplied them until the 1850s. This may be an early illustration of the thesis that leading companies often fail to catch the wave of new, disruptive technologies. Using the rich primary and secondary resources of the Baker Library, this exhibition will investigate the emergence of ring spinning and how to gather the evidence needed to decide whether it qualifies as an early example of disruptive technology.

Documenting the American South

$100 note depicting John C. Calhoun and slave laborers, 1862.
Civil War Currency Specimens

Documenting the American South (DAS) is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century.

Documenting the American South (DAS), an electronic collection sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.

Currently, DAS includes seven digitization projects: slave narratives, first-person narratives, Southern literature, Confederate imprints, materials related to the church in the black community, and North Caroliniana.

Historical Census Browser of the
University of Virginia Library

The data presented here describe the population and economy of U.S. states and counties from 1790 to 1960.

The original source of the each decade's data is the decennial census conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The electronic data collection presented here was compiled by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) under a grant from the National Science Foundation. The data selection was carried out under guidelines developed by the American Historical Association and reflect an interest in political and economic analyses.

This site allows you to browse the data files for each decade and choose from the lists of variables. You can produce lists of data by state or county that can be sorted, calculate proportions, or graph any of the variables.

The Ethnography of Lewis and Clark
Native American Objects and the American Quest for Commerce and Science

Upper Missouri corn varieties.
"We purchased from the Mandans a quantity of corn of mixed color which they dug up in ears from holes made near the front of their lodges..."

This online exhibit explores some of the objects in the current exhibit at the museum. These pieces are both rare and extremely important, as few other ethnographic materials from the expedition have survived. They provide valuable evidence of the material culture of many Native American tribal groups.

As the caretaker of the only remaining Native American artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition the PEABODY MUSEUM developed an exhibit showcasing some of the original Native American objects acquired by Lewis and Clark during their exploration of the American west and its peoples. From Nation to Nation: Examining Lewis and Clark's Indian Collection examines Lewis and Clark's diplomatic mission, their relationship with the tribes they encountered, and discusses the results of Museum's research on the collection.

The Exhibit is on view at the Peabody Museum through December 2005.

Discovering Lewis and Clark

Black Moccasin
George Catlin
Engraving from Catlin's Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians (1841).

This is a progressive Web site, currently containing more than 1,400 pages, which is increased by one or more new episodes each month.

The centerpiece of Discovering Lewis and Clark® is a nineteen-part synopsis of the expedition's story by historian Harry W. Fritz, illustrated with selections from the journals of the expedition, photographs, maps, animated graphics, moving pictures, and sound files.

The History of Jim Crow

Explore the complex African-American experience from the 1870s through the 1950s

Protesting seating segregation at the Melba Theater, Dallas 1955. R. C. Hickman Photograph Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

This award winning site that presents teachers with new historical resources and teaching ideas on one of the most shameful periods in American history, an era of segregation, violence, and disfranchisement of African Americans that tore at the very fabric of the nation.

The site includes in-depth historical essays, an image gallery, lesson plans, a gateway to related sites and other resources in social studies, literature and the humanities, all developed by teachers.

Early Americas Digital Archive

Tlaloc, the War God
The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project in progress committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invites scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site.

Colonial Currency, Massachusetts, 12 Pence, 1776

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

American Currency Exhibit

Paul Revere engraved this note from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. An image of a codfish, which symbolized prosperity for the Massachusetts fisheries, is depicted on the front side of the note.

Money hasn't always looked like it does today. Explore the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's American Currency Exhibit online and watch history come alive as you step back in time to our nation's beginning. Learn how our country's rich history is closely tied with our currency. Discover the role the Federal Reserve has played--and continues to play--in that history.

MEMORIES OF SLAVERY

Trauma and representation in European and African art and visual culture 16th –21th century

Portuguese merchant with handcuffs; Bronze from Bénin

The database puts together images and objects, sites and gestures related to the cultural memories of slavery in Europe and West-Africa. As the transatlantic slavesystem was a traumatizing experience for enslaved Africans as well as for the European slaveholder-societies only few images show the social practices, which both groups were unable to integrate in a positive self-concept. The material does not illustrate the history of slavery itself, but documents the complex visual strategies of its cultural legitimation, interpretation and integration in national and ethnical identities, which are formed not only by a cultural heritage shared, but also by oblivion and suppression, denial and disavowel of unbidden memories. The project makes the assumption, that art and visual culture give access to a collective colonial unconsciousnous, which is shaped by the historical trauma of slavery, encoded by artistic and cultural response.

The National Security Archive - George Washington University

Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of Rights or even the Constitution of the United States, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley's visit to the White House.

The National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions in one non governmental, non-profit institution. The Archive is simultaneously a research institute on international affairs, a library and archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, a public interest law firm defending and
expanding public access to government information through the FOIA, and an indexer and publisher of the documents in books, microfiche, and electronic formats.

The Tax History Project
Exploring the History of American Taxation

The Tax History Project was established by Tax Analysts in 1995 to provide scholars, policymakers, students, the media, and citizens with information about the history of American taxation. The project pursues its mission through a program of web-based documentary publication and original historical research.

North by South
A three year, NEH sponsored, study of African American migrations from South to North

During the first Great Migration, from1916 to 1919, nearly 70,000 African Americans migrated from the rural south to northern cities, in search of freedom, better lifestyles and working conditions. Created by students in the NEH North by South seminar at Kenyon College, this web site is devoted to tracing the flight of African Americans from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago during two main periods of migration, from approximately 1916 to 1950.

FLY AWAY: The Great Migration
The Movement of African Americans from the
Mississippi Delta to Chicago

No single cause proves solely responsible for migration. However, in the Delta, such a large scale migration would
not have been imaginable without the active participation of the church. Although southern ministers often discouraged congregation members from abandoning their roots, the appeal of a better life strongly affected many church leaders. Church deacons would help spread information of the migration, and Chicago's myriad possibilities, throughout the South...The church served as the matrix connecting potential migrants with labor agents....

The New York Public Library
Center for the Humanities Print Gallery


Hand-colored engraving from: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues.

DRY DRUNK: The Culture of Tobacco in 17th- and 18th-century Europe

Tobacco has long been a subject of fascination and concern, for a variety of reasons. The New York Public Library possesses significant collections relating to the history of tobacco, containing materials that cross many different cultures and areas of research; these collections serve scholars from many fields, including literature, history, art history, the history of the book, and the sciences. Drawing upon these rich resources, Dry Drunk provides historical context for the uses and abuses of tobacco, showing, among other things, that it has been the focus of endless, if ever-shifting controversy since the moment of its introduction into Europe from the New World.

The cure effected by tobacco, shown in the center
background, was described as follows:

They also have a plant which the Brazilians call petum and the Spaniards tapaco. After carefully drying its leaves, they put them in the bowl of a pipe. They light the pipe, and, holding its other end in their mouths, they inhale the smoke so deeply that it comes out through their mouths and noses; by this means they often cure infections.

Univeristy of Virginia's Electronic Text Center

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

A Hypermedia Edition of the March 1925 Survey
Graphic Harlem Number.

Survey Graphic was the monthly illustrated number of Survey magazine, the premier journal of social work in America in the
1920s. In November of 1924, the Survey's chief editor, Paul Kellogg, asked Alain Locke (then a professor of philosophy at Howard University) to design and edit a special issue devoted to the African American "Renaissance" underway in Harlem. Locke agreed, and the magazine that resulted was the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community

Where, then, is the "peculiar" community of which I had heard so much ? Is the cultural genius of the Negro, which is supposed to have produced jazz and the spiritual, the West African wood-carving and Bantu legalism, non-existent in this country, after all? To what extent, if any, has this genius developed a culture peculiar to it in America? I did not find it in the great teeming center of Negro life in Harlem, where, if anywhere, it should be found. May it not then be true that the Negro has become acculturated to the prevailing white culture and has developed the patterns of culture typical of American life?
The Dilemma of Social Patterns, Melville J. Herkovitz

University of Pennsylvania Library

Cultural Readings
Colonization and Print in the Americas

Any account of the colonization of the Americas must acknowledge the prodigious number of texts which colonization
generated. "Cultural Readings" presents a sample of those texts. The web site is grouped into six broad categories; it also includes scholarly essays on topics related to the exhibition and a brief bibliography and list of web links.

Printed images disseminated preconceptions and misconceptions about the New World to eager European audiences. While often the accompaniment of textual accounts, images also came to circulate independently of texts, recurring frequently across Europe.

Fabrications though they often were, early impressions shaped European understanding of Native American peoples, their histories, and their lands. They are dramatic representations which reveal less about indigenous peoples than they do about European preoccupations.

This engraving shows a deer-trap used by Algonquin and Montagnais tribes near Quebec. Champlain, unlike most European observers, describes some native hunting and agricultural practices in detail, although the landscape here resembles that of a European hunting scene rather than that of Eastern Canada.

The Center for
Educational Telecommunications (CET) is a not-for-profit organization devoted to producing, publishing and consulting in the area of multiculturalism, with a special interest in Asian and Asian American concerns.

One of CET's major thrusts is the research, development and production of educational television and multimedia programs. CET is also involved in outreach partnerships with community and educational organizations, and in developing and publishing curriculum and viewer's guides.

CET's latest production in progress is ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS is the first in-depth television series to present the untold history and contemporary legacy of early Asian immigrants to the Americas, from the 1700s to the 1900s. Creating first-person voices through an innovative "documemoir" approach, ANCESTORS brings to life a largely unexplored past, not found in standard textbooks, and invites a new understanding of American history.

Conscience and the Constitution

Heart Mountain
Relocation Center,
Wyoming

In World War II, a handful of young Americans refused to be drafted from an American concentration camp. They were ready to fight for their country, but not before the government restored their rights as U.S. citizens and released their families from camp. It was a classic example of civil disobedience -- but the government prosecuted them as criminals and Japanese American leaders and veterans ostracized them as traitors.

This website explores the story with photographs, original documents, and audio and video clips from the PBS film.

Documenting the American South
An electronic collection sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture.

The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army.

My Mustache in Danger.

Before the supper was over I had a terrible fright, and for a few moments fancied that I was on the brink of a discovery that would upset all my plans, and nip my enterprise in the bud. While drinking a glass of buttermilk...my mustache got full of the fluid, and when I attempted to wipe this ornament, which my Memphis friend had so carefully glued upon my upper lip, and which added so much to the manliness of my countenance, I fancied that it was loose and was about to fall off.

Mary Edwards Walker
Civil War Doctor

Even in uniform Dr Mary Walker was controversial - she added trousers under her skirt, wore a man's uniform jacket and carried two pistols at all times. Her military career was not actually military in that she was never commissioned. She was refused a commission as an army surgeon, but served on a volunteer basis at a Washington D.C. hospital. She worked as a field surgeon near the Union front lines for almost two years.

The Dramas of Haymarket

"Attention Workingmen" flier, 1886 May 4
This broadside was introduced into evidence during the trial Illinois vs. August Spies et al.

This online project, produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, commemorates one of the most notorious incidents in late-nineteenth-century labor history, examining selected materials from the CHS Haymarket Affair Digital Collection.

On May 4, 1886, two workers were killed in a struggle between police and locked-out union members at the McCormick Reaper factory. Central among labor's demands was the eight-hour workday. The next day there was a rally to protest the killings. Someone threw a dynamite bomb into a group of Chicago policemen sent to control the protest, killing seven.

The unknown bomber's act resounded nationwide. Public opinion was instantly galvanized against the radical left, resulting in the first "Red Scare" in America. In a climate of political paranoia fueled by the popular press, the police arrested eight prominent Chicago anarchists and charged them with conspiracy to murder.

Organized in the form of a drama, the site contains the Haymarket meeting and bombing, the subsequent riot,
arrests, trial, and executions, and related events of the period . Each part consists of an interpretive essay and topical sections including visual materials, such as images of artifacts, photographs, and engravings of the people involved in the Haymarket Affair,facsimiles of selected manuscripts and printed materials, transcriptions of documents, virtual tours and audio recordings of contemporary labor songs, as well as video segments of personal recollections.

The WTO History Project

Poster publicizing an international summit of
farmers and advocacy groups discussing the WTO and agriculture

This site is a joint effort of several programs at the University of Washington - the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, the Manuscripts, Special Collections and University Archives - seeking to make a wide array of resources available to researchers and the interested public.

The WTO History Project is largely and primarily a response to the momentous protests that took place on November 29-December 3, 1999 in Seattle during the WTO Ministerial meetings.

A unique collection of interviews with protest organizers and participants sheds light on the behind-the-scenes cooperative (and sometimes contentious) relationships among social movement organizations involved in the protests. Selected for electronic access from the collection, are materials which are most illustrative of the diversity of the protests and which most represent the intense mobilization that made the events so dramatic.

These materials include archives of photographs, posters, written documents as well as audio and video documentation of the events.

VoxPop
Kristina Bross
Cabin Fever in Frontier House
Authenticity and living history on PBS

Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. Common-place is a common place for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life--from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. And it's a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic films; and in popular culture.

Museum of Our National Heritage
November 8 2002-May 18, 2003
Winners and Losers: Handkerchiefs and Bandannas from Presidential Campaigns

Such a scene of wild enthusiasm had rarely been witnessed …handkerchiefs were brought forth and swung to and fro like snowflakes in a hurricane. --An observer describing an 1876 Republican meeting.

During the 1800s, handkerchiefs and bandannas printed with political messages held a special role in presidential campaigns. Men displayed brightly colored, printed bandannas spilling out of coat pockets, while women--not allowed to vote until the early 1900s, but nonetheless aware of politics--waved handkerchiefs to applaud speakers at campaign events and public debates.

American Museum of the Moving Image
The Living Room Candidate
The first televised presidential campaign commercials
appeared in 1952; in the years since, they have played an
increasingly powerful role in the business of electing a
president. This online exhibition contains 183 television
commercials, from every presidential election from 1952 to 1996.

The Authentic History Center
Primary Sources from American Popular Culture

This web site features audio files, images and other documents of American popular culture from the Antebellum period to the present day.

Daguerreotypes at Harvard
Exhibit by Library Preservation

Since the invention of photography, libraries, museums, research institutes, and academic departments at Harvard have collected photographs for research
and teaching. Among these millions of images are more than 3,500 daguerreotypes.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvin Ellis Stowe
Schlesinger Library

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was one of eleven
children of the Reverend Lyman Beecher. In 1836 she
married Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802-1886),.... Harriet carved out a career as a writer while raising seven children...After the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she sat for a number of daguerreotype portraits.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition
Yale Center for International and Area Studies
Dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of information concerning all aspects of the Atlantic slave system and its destruction. [The Center's] online document collection contains over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles.

Enterprising Women
250 Years of American Business

The Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute and the
National Heritage Museum have joined in organizing this exhibit which premieres October 5 - February 23.

In addition to the exhibit, there will be a Web site and an illustrated book, written by Virginia Drachman.

Memorial Hall Museum Online
American Centuries...view from New England

Harvard Forest - Fisher Museum

The museum was originally
designed to display twenty-three dioramas (example shown) portraying the history of central New England forests, their management and ecology. Constructed in the 1930's, the world-reknowned Harvard Forest models portray central New England forests, beginning before the first European settlement in Petersham. Access to the Fisher Museum and its outdoor self-teaching trails is free to both groups and individuals.

Digital National Security Archive

Farsi Survival Guide from the 1980 Iran Hostage Rescue Mission -Document of the Month

The National Security Archive has developed a reputation as the most prolific and successful user of the Freedom of Information Act. The Digital National Security Archive contains the most comprehensive collection of primary documents available: The database contains more than 35,000 of the most important, declassified documents that have led to policy decisions. The Archive contains fifteen complete collections: Afghanistan, Berlin Crisis 1958-1962, Cuban Missile Crisis, El Salvador, Iran-Contra Affair, Intelligence Community, Iran Revolution, Iraqgate, Military Uses of Space, Nicaragua, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Philippines, Presidential Directives from Truman to Clinton, South Africa, and Soviet Estimate.

Historical Nuclear Weapons Test Films

Throughout the nuclear era, the various agencies of the Federal Government documented their activities on celluloid film. The films were used for various purposes including providing information to the public, training, and for analysis of the effects of the weapons tests. The Department of Energy, in cooperation with the Department of Defense, declassified a series of historical films on the nuclear weapons program. These films document the history of the development of nuclear weapons, starting with the first bomb tested at Trinity Site in southeastern New Mexico in July 1945.

Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies

South Spring Street, Los Angeles, California

Prolific inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) has had a profound impact on modern life. In his lifetime, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" patented 1,093 inventions, including the phonograph, the kinetograph (a motion picture camera), and the kinetoscope (a motion picture viewer). The collections in the Library of Congress's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division contain an extraordinary range of the surviving products of Edison's entertainment inventions and industries. This site features 341 motion pictures, 81 disc sound recordings, and other related materials.

The Library Company of Philadelphia

"Every Man His Own Doctor" Popular Medicine in Early America

[Image] frontpiece symbolizes the health reformer's linked concern with the physical body and with spiritual improvement. - Mary S. Gove, Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology, 1842.

During the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, most Americans healed themselves, as their ancestors had for centuries. This care was usually administered with the aid of books and pamphlets such as those discussed and displayed in the [online] exhibition. Charles Rosenberg's essay, The Book in the Sickroom, provides an historical context for the approximately ninety books and pamphlets in the exhibition, which range in date from the early eighteenth century to about 1870.-LCP

Women and Social Movements in the United States 1775-1940

This website is a project of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New
York at Binghamton. Currently it contains 33 document projects, including this month's:

"How Did Women Become Politically
Active during the American Revolution?"
analyzes the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, which emerged during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, 1780-81. The strongest organization of women during the Revolution, the Association exemplified the elite-dominated politics of the era, but it also anticipated the more democratic politics of the early Republic, which associated "virtue" with the everyday life of average people.

Massachusetts Historical Society

"The Decisive Day is Come" The Battle of Bunker Hill

"The Day; perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends. my bursting Heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his Country-saying better to die honourably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the Gallows. great is our Loss."-Letter written by Abigail Adams, June 18, 1775

To mark the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the
Massachusetts Historical Society presents its first "web exhibition" -- personal accounts and eyewitness descriptions of the battle, along with contemporary maps, drawings, engravings, broadsides, and artifacts, either preserved by the participants or found on the battlefield. An essay by Bernard Bailyn giving an overview account of the battle.-MHS

Harvard Law School Library

Sundry Good and Needfull Ordinances

Food is of abiding interest to almost everyone, and concern with food and drink has left its traces in the law in the form of codes and regulations regarding everything from bread and coffee to oysters and beer. Displayed here is a sampling of books, manuscripts and photographs from the Law Library's Special Collections, covering the period from the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries. -HLL

Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency


"Slaves weeding cotton"
Confederate States of America $100 (1862)


"From the universe of paper money that has survived, and using my own collection as a base, I have selected notes and proofs that portray the institution of slavery. I have included notes that paint in broad brush and minute detail images of plantation life and slavery. These images are truly miniature works of art, recapitulating powerful events, personalities, and loyalties. The currency featured here captures in a unique, visual way the ethos of this historically significant time period." Jules d'Hemecourt (principal scholar) Beyond Face Value

The Glovers of Fulton County


"... women did the cutting and sewing while men tanned the leather."

"The Glovers of Fulton County is a research and documentation project that examines the glove industry of Fulton County, New York. Fulton County was long a center of world glove production. During the late 1800s and early decades of this century the county produced more than 90% of all fine leather
gloves manufactured in the United States. [This web site]will ultimately be a comprehensive multimedia exploration of this important Mohawk Valley industry, examining its evolution from the 1700s through the late 20th century." The Glovers of Fulton County

National Park Service Museum Collections
American Revolutionary War

"This multi-park exhibit showcases museum and archival collections at selected National Park Service sites. Featured sites and collections commemorate significant events and individuals of the American Revolutionary War." National Park Service Museum Collections

Moving Uptown:
19th Century Views of Manhattan


"Corner of Greenwich 1810"
(Approximate site of World Trade Center)

"Moving Uptown traces Manhattan's urban evolution as it has been recorded in 19th-century prints,... they celebrate the ever-changing face of a thriving, bustling, confident city." Moving Uptown

Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints

New Amsterdam Fort
(ca. 1626-28) Possibly the first view of Manhattan.

The I.N. Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, donated to the Library by Stokes in 1930, visually documents a 400-year sweep of American history, beginning with the European discovery of the Americas and tracing the transformation of the landscape into an urbanized United States at the end of the nineteenth
century. Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints

Frontier Photographer Edward S. Curtis

"The Blanket Weaver"
from Vol. I of The North American Indian, 1907.
Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

"I regard the work you do as one of the most valuable works which any American could now do."~ President Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to Edward S. Curtis, December 16, 1905.

"Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) left an indelible mark on the history of photography in his 20-volume life's work, The North American Indian. Part photographic essay, part ethnographic survey, and part work of art, Curtis' North American Indian Project represented an attempt to capture images of American Indians as they lived before contact with Anglo cultures. The photogravure prints in The North American Indian reveal peoples whose traditional ways of life were coming to an end as the U.S. frontier began to fade." Frontier Photographer: Edward S. Curtis-A Smithsonian Institution Libraries Exhibition