AS205: Inbetween Peoples

Thanks to Erin for the shout out to Madison on Tuesday.  If you haven’t read Federalist #10 (or some of the rest of the Federalist Papers), you should.

Those of you interested in immigration and exclusion might want to check out Anna Pegler-Gordon’s article, “Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and U.S. Immigration Policy,” from the March 2006 American Quarterly.

Those of you working on working class women might want to check out Harvard’s Open Collection Program.  The immigration collection isn’t open yet, but it’s slated for Fall 2006, so we can hope.

As we begin our work on our projects for the semester, you might want to consider downloading and using Zotero as your research management tool.  It works sort of like a traditional bibliographic manager (Endnote), but it’s specifically designed to import and deal with online searches–whether through Google or George or any of the many databases you have available to you.

Zotero is only out in beta right now, which means that there may be some small bugs (and that you get to help the development team at CHNM track and repair them).  Also, the software only runs with Firefox 2.0, which is also in beta release.  It would be nice and safer for you all if you moved to Firefox, and open source browser that is much more solid than IE.

For those of you who frequent wikipedia, I suggest that you review Roy Rosenzweig’s article from the Journal of American History, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” (June 2006).

In conjunction with our reading for this week, I thought that you might be interested to know that the Stanford University Libraries have digitized the entire 41 volumes of the Dillingham Commission Reports. The Commission provided a wealth of statistical evaluation on immigration for the 61st Congress (1910-1911). Perhaps the most interesting part of this collection, is the “Dictionary of races or peoples.” You’ll need a browser plug-in to read the documents, but it’s worth a look.

As it turns out… also available from Google Book.

This is the course site for AS205: Inbetween Peoples (American Civilization III). Here you will find all of the information that you will need to successfully participate in the semester.

In addition to containing all of the course details, the site will also be the home of our course blog, where members of the class will post their reflections on our materials. Our discussions will begin here and spill over into the classroom. Your familiarity with this site and its contents is particularly important because of the limited time that we have together on Tuesday afternoons.