Teaching American History: Fairfax County Public Schools June 2003 Workshop George Mason University Online Resources Online Primary Sources      Advertising      Film      Letters and Diaries      Maps      Music      Oral History      Photography      Quantitative History Colonial America and Early Republic Civil War and Reconstruction Inter-war Years
	ONLINE PRIMARY SOURCES
	ADVERTISING
	The Living Room Candidate: A History of Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2000, American Museum of the Moving Image. http://www.ammi.org/livingroomcandidate/ This site offers 183 television commercials used since 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the American public and an annotated guide to twenty-one websites created for the 1996 and 2000 elections. Ads from each election are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over the years, such as ‘Looking Presidential,’ ‘Attack Ads,’ ‘Family Man,’ and ‘Real People.’ Essays (200-400 words) analyze ad strategies of the major party candidates for each election; and a program guide (1,000-words)for high school students presents a history of the usage of TV commercials in campaigns. Valuable for students of American political history, consumer culture, and advertising history.
	Ad*Access, Duke University Digital Scriptorium http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/ This easily navigated site presents images and database information for more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in the United States from 1911 to 1955. It is an excellent archive of primary documents for students of consumer and popular culture.
	FILM
	Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/trfhtml/trfhome.html Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to have his life chronicled through extensive use of film. This site offers 104 films depicting events in Roosevelt’s life, from the Spanish-American War in 1898 to his death in 1919. This site is a good resource for learning about Theodore Roosevelt and early film.
	The American Variety Stage, 1870-1920, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vshome.html This collection documents the development of vaudeville and other popular entertainment from the 1870s to the 1920s. It includes 334 English- and Yiddish-language play scripts, 146 theater programs and playbills, sixty-one motion pictures, and ten sound recordings. This site also features 143 photos and twenty-nine memorabilia items documenting the life of Harry Houdini.
	LETTERS AND DIARIES
	George Washington Papers, 1741-1799, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/ This collection of approximately 65,000 documents written by or to George Washington includes correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, journals, account books, military records, reports, and notes written from 1741 through 1799. Because of the wide range of Washington’s interests and correspondents, including ordinary citizens, his papers are a rich source for studying almost every aspect of colonial and early American history.
	African-American Women, The Digital Scriptorium, Duke University http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html Writings of three African-American women of the 19th century are offered in this site. It features scanned images and transcriptions of an eighty-five-page memoir by Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867-1923), a Georgia women whose parents had been slaves; a 565-word letter written in 1857 by a North Carolinian slave named Vilet Lester; and four letters written between 1837 and 1838 by Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on a Virginia plantation. The documents are accompanied by three background essays, six photographs, a bibliography of seven titles on American slave women, and eight links to additional resources. Documents offer insight into the lives of women living under slavery and during its aftermath in the South.
	MAPS
	Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panhome.html This site presents more than 1,000 original panoramic maps, a popular cartographic form during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The maps cover the contiguous forty-eight states and four Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec from 1847 to 1929. Viewers can zoom in to find artists’ renderings of individual streets, buildings, and landscapes. An excellent resource for studying urbanization, cities, growth, and mapmaking.
	David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Cartography Associates http://www.davidrumsey.com/ This site consists of more than 4,400 historical maps of North and South America. Most of the maps were made in the 18th and 19th centuries; many are notable for their craftsmanship. Searchable by country, state, publication author, keyword, date, title, event, subject, and name of engraver or printer. This site vividly conveys how certain locations have changed over time.
	MUSIC
	Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/ftvhome.html This site is a collection of 104 sound recordings from annual folk festivals held at Fort Valley State College, an African-American teaching college in central Georgia. It also provides sixty-three items of written documentation about the festival and the recording project. The collection is an extraordinary record of non-commercial American music and musical styles.
	Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, Southwest Missouri State University http://www.smsu.edu/folksong/maxhunter/ This site is a collection of audio files and song transcriptions of more than 1,000 songs recorded in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas between 1956 and 1976. Lyrics for all songs are included; some also have musical notations, names of singers, and location and date of the recording. No information is offered for composer or lyricist. Users may browse singers and song titles or search titles using keywords.
	ORAL HISTORY
	Studs Terkel: Conversations With America, Chicago Historical Society http://www.studsterkel.org/index.html This site was created in honor of Studs Terkel, noted oral historian, radio host, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. An educational section helps students and teachers use oral history in the classroom. This site offers a rich history of many influential, as well as lesser-known, personalities living in the second half of the 20th century, and is beneficial to anyone interested in the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, and labor issues.
	Oral History Online! Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/ohonline/ Oral History Online has full-text transcripts of more than fifty-five searchable interviews. Current offerings include “The University History Series” focusing on the Free Speech Movement, “The Suffragists Oral History Project,” and interviews regarding the medical response to the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, 1981-1984. The site also contains “Oral History Tips” and guides to “Conducting an Oral History” and “Oral History Interviewing.”
	PHOTOGRAPHY
	Surveyors of the West: William Henry Jackson and Robert Brewster Stanton, New York Public Library Digital Collections http://digital.nypl.org/surveyors/ This site presents the journals and photographs of two men who surveyed the western states in the second half of the 19th century. William Henry Jackson was a photographer, artist, and writer who traveled along the route of the Union Pacific Railway in 1869. Robert Brewster Stanton was a civil engineer who surveyed canyons in Colorado for the Colorado Canyon and Pacific Railroad Company between 1889 and 1890. This site is easy to navigate and is useful for studying western states, the environment, and photography in the 19th century.
	When They Were Young: A Photographic Retrospective of Childhood, Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/young/ These sixty-six photographs capture the diverse experiences of children from many different parts of the world. The collection includes early 19th-century daguerreotypes, turn-of-the-century studio portraits, and 20th-century prints and stereographs.
	QUANTITATIVE HISTORY
	Centennial Celebration, Bureau of the Census http://www.census.gov/mso/www/centennial/index.html This site provides a wealth of statistical information on the U.S. population. While most materials offer recent data, more than thirty comprehensive reports and tables track decade-by-decade demographic shifts, including urban and rural population change, population of the largest one hundred cities, population density, and homeownership rates.
	Dynamics of Idealism: Volunteers for Civil Rights, 1965-1982, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/Idealism/index.html Provides documentation collected for a study of the attitudes, backgrounds, goals, and experiences of volunteers participating in a 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference voter registration effort. Includes questionnaires submitted prior to and following the project, as well as a follow-up survey conducted in 1982. Participants were queried as to reasons they volunteered, what they expected, their attitudes regarding race and politics, and subsequent attitudes regarding civil rights, violence, and social change. This information is valuable for those studying the civil rights movement and sociological aspects of American reformers.
	COLONIAL AMERICA AND EARLY REPUBLIC
	Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Gilder Lehrman Institute http://www.gliah.uh.edu/index.cfm This site provides multimedia resources and links for teaching American history, focusing on slavery, ethnic history, private life, technology, and film. The site offers a full U.S. history textbook and more than 1,500 searchable and briefly annotated links to American history-related sites, including 150 links to Supreme Court decisions and 330 links to historic speeches.
	Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820 , UNC, Chapel Hill
	http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/ This site provides detailed data on more than 100,000 slaves and free blacks in Louisiana from 1718 to 1820. Users can search by name of slave, master’s name, gender, epoch, racial designation, plantation location, and place of origin. Information was compiled from documents created when slaves arrived by ship, were bought and sold, reported as runaways, testified in court cases, manumitted, and at the death of masters.
	Hypertext on American History, University Groningen (Netherlands) http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/usa.htm This site provides more than 3,000 documents pertaining to United States history, primarily from the colonial period to the end of the 19th century. Though this site provides no contextualization, it is very useful for locating important documents.
	Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1873, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html This site offers records and acts of Congress from the Journals of the Continental Congress through The Congressional Globe, which ceased publication with the 42nd Congress in 1873. An excellent resource for antebellum and reconstruction politics.
	Do History—Martha Ballard’s Diary Online, Film Study Center, Harvard University http://dohistory.org/ This experimental, interactive case study explores the remarkable 18th-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard, including two versions of the 1400-page diary, facsimile and transcribed full-text; more than 300 documents, interactive exercises, and teaching resources.
	Drafting the Documents of Independence, Library of Congress http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/declara1.html Eight documents and prints relating to the Declaration of Independence are presented on this site, including a fragment of the earliest known draft and Thomas Jefferson’s “original rough draught” with changes by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others. This site is well-organized and successfully tracks the Declaration’s development and effect.
	The Hartford Black History Project, Hartford Black History Project http://www.hartford-hwp.com/HBHP/index.html Two exhibits on black history in Hartford, Connecticut. “A Struggle from the Start” charts stages in the life of the Hartford African-American community from 1638 to 1920, including slavery, black codes, free blacks, black governors, and black community institutions. A second exhibit presents approximately eighty photographs from Hartford’s African-American community covering the years 1870 to the 1970s.
	Campaign Atlases, United States Military Academy http://www.dean.usma.edu/history/dhistorymaps/MapsHome.htm Visitors will find more than 400 color maps of military campaigns from American colonial wars to U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992-1993. Most maps are of conflicts in which the U.S. played a role. Maps are indexed by war and may be enlarged. The site is easy to navigate although maps are large and can be slow to download.
	United States Historical Census Data Browser, University of Virginia Library http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/ This site provides data gathered from census records and other government sources for a study entitled “Historical Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-1970.” For each decade, users can browse extensive population- and economic-oriented statistical information at state and county levels, arranged according to a variety of categories, including place of birth, age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity and education.
	A Brush With History: Paintings from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/brush/index1.htm The National Portrait Gallery is closed for renovation, but visitors to this site can view seventy-six portraits of prominent Americans drawn from the Gallery’s collections. Paintings are arranged in chronological order, from the 1720s to the 1990s. Featured artists include famous 18th and 19th century portraitists Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent, as well as more abstract 20th century artists like Marguerite Zorath. A brief biography accompanies each portrait, along with the artist’s name (if known), the year painted, the medium, and acquisition information.
	Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive, University of Virginia http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/ Provides more than 1,700 texts—correspondence, books, addresses, and a variety of public papers—written by or to Thomas Jefferson. The site also includes a biography of Jefferson written in 1834, eight years after his death. The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, published in 1900, organizes more than 9,000 quotes according to theme and other categories. A collection of 2,700 excerpts from Jefferson’s writings present his political philosophy.
	Virginia Runaways Project, University of Virginia http://www.wise.virginia.edu/history/runaways/ Provides full transcriptions and images of more than 2,200 newspaper advertisements regarding runaway slaves, mostly from the Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, between 1736 and 1776. Includes ads placed by owners and overseers for runaways as well as ads for captured runaway or suspected runaway slaves placed by sheriffs and other governmental officials. In addition, the site’s creators have included ads for runaway servants and sailors as well as military deserters. Searchable by any words appearing in ads. Additional material includes three K-12 teaching guides using the ads.
	CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
	The African American Odyssey, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html More than 240 items dealing with African-American history, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings. The site is organized into nine chronological periods, including slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction; the black exodus, the “Booker T. Washington era” of progress, World War I, the Depression and World War II; and Civil Rights. It is a well-written guide for exploring African-American history.
	Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/sthome.html Provides published materials on legal aspects of slavery. Most of the pamphlets and books pertain to American cases in the 19th century. Includes documents on the slave trade, slave codes, the Fugitive Slave Law, and slave insurrections, and courtroom proceedings from famous trials such as the Amistad case, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy trial, and trials of noted abolitionists John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison.
	Images of African Americans from the 19th Century, New York Public Library http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/images_aa19/ This site contains roughly 500 images depicting the social, political, and cultural worlds of African Americans. The site can be searched through 17 subject categories, such as family, labor, Civil War, slavery, social life and customs, and portraits. This site offers a keyword search and is ideal for researching African American and 19th century history.
	Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1938, American Memory, Library of Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html A gold mine of information on the history of slavery from those who lived as slaves. This site has more than 2,300 first person accounts of slavery and 500 black and white photographs of former slaves. These narratives and photographs were collected as part of the 1930s Federal Writers Project of the Works Project Administration, and they were assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
	The Time of the Lincolns, PBS Online, WGBH, American Experience http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/ This companion site to the six-hour documentary, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided includes essays and videos addressing the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, defenses for slavery, “wage slavery” in the North, African-Americans in the North, developments in technology, women’s rights, and literary women. This site is comprehensive and exceptionally well-designed. A teacher’s guide is included.
	The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Johns Hopkins University http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/index.html Provides scanned images of more than 18,000 pieces of sheet music, especially 19th-century popular music, including songs related to military conflicts, presidents, romance, transportation, and the minstrel stage. Users may search for songs on hundreds of topics such as drinking, smoking, the circus, and death, or look for composers, song titles, or other catalog record data.
	Making of America, University of Michigan http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ This site is a “digital library” of thousands of primary documents in American social history from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction. It offers more than three million pages of text from 10,000 volumes and 50,000 journal articles.
	Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, University of Virginia http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow/ A massive, searchable archive of thousands of pages of maps, images, letters, diaries, newspapers, and church, agricultural, military, and public records—all relating to two communities, Staunton, Virginia, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, before, during, and after the Civil War.
	Selected Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress, American Memory http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html This collection offers 1,118 photographs depicting Civil War military personnel, preparations for battle, and the aftermath of battles in the main eastern theater and in the west, in addition to Federal Navy and Atlantic seaborne expeditions against the Confederacy. The presentation “Does the Camera Ever Lie” demonstrates the constructed nature of images.
	HarpWeek: Explore History, John Adler http://www.harpweek.com/ This collection of exhibits presents free access to a wealth of texts and images taken from Harper’s on a variety of subjects dealing with 19th-century American political and social history. “Presidential Elections” offers 320 annotated political cartoons. “Toward Racial Equality” presents approximately seventy cartoons, illustrations, and advertisements dealing with slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and African-American culture and society.
	Civil War Women, Digital Scriptorium, Duke University http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/civil-war-women.html These Civil War-era documents relate to three American women of diverse backgrounds and political persuasions. These women are Rose OÕNeal Greenhow, a Confederate spy and Washington socialite; Sarah E. Thompson, who organized Union sympathizers near her home in Greenville, Tennessee; and sixteen-year-old Alice Williamson, a Gallatin, Tennessee, schoolgirl who kept a diary about the Union occupation of her town.
	Eye of the Storm, Michael Johnson, Adam Stoltman, and Alan Dorow, Journal E http://www.musarium.com/eyeofthestorm/index.html Presents more than 500 watercolor drawings and maps by Union Army Private Knox Sneden, depicting battle scenes, camp life, and maps. Four presentations depict particular incidents Sneden witnessed.
	INTER-WAR YEARS
	Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons, UC San Diego http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/ From 1941 to 1943, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) drew more than 400 editorial cartoons as the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. The cartoons are primarily related to issues surrounding World War II, and include caricature images of political figures like Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
	The Emma Goldman Papers, Berkeley Digital Library http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/ This site provides primary resources on Emma Goldman (1869-1940), a major figure in the history of radicalism and feminism in the United States prior to her deportation in 1919. Includes writings, speeches, newspaper accounts, and photographs, as well as a 1934 Hearst Metrotone Newsreel entitled Famous Anarchist Back from Exile.
	The New Deal Network, Teachers College, Columbia University http://newdeal.feri.org/ A database of more than 20,000 items relating to the New Deal, including newspaper and journal articles, speeches, letters, reports, advertisements, and other textual materials, more than 4,000 images, and featured exhibits, many with lesson plan suggestions.
	American Radicalism Collection, Michigan State University Libraries http://www.lib.msu.edu/coll/main/spec_col/radicalism/index.htm This site contains 129 images of pamphlets and newsletters produced by radical movements. Groups and issues represented by one to 30 digital images are: Birth Control; the Black Panthers; the Hollywood Ten; the IWW; the Ku Klux Klan; the Rosenbergs; Sacco and Vanzetti; the Scottsboro Boys; Students for a Democratic Society; and Wounded Knee.
	Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html This site features more than 100,000 images taken by government photographers with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) during the New Deal and World War II eras. These images document the ravages of the Great Depression on farmers, scenes of everyday life in small towns and cities, and mobilization campaigns for World War II.
	Internet Moving Images Archive, Prelinger Archives and Internet Archive http://webdev.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php This site offers films selected from the Prelinger Archives, a privately held collection of 20th-century American ephemeral films (films produced for specific purposes at specific times, not intended for long-term preservation). The site includes films produced between 1927 and 1987 by and for U.S. corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Note that viewing these movies requires a DSL or faster connection and movies take several minutes to load.
	By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943, NARA http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/wpahome.html This colorful exhibit showcases more than 900 original Works Project Administration posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program to support the arts. The silkscreen, lithograph, and woodcut posters were designed to publicize health and safety programs, art exhibits, theatrical and musical performances, travel and tourism, educational programs, and community activities in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.
	Anti-Saloon League, 1893Ð1933, Ohio Public Library http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/wpahome.html This selection of printed material is representative of the public campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League from 1893 to 1933. Highlights include fourteen wet and dry maps of the U.S., three temperance anthems, transcriptions of nine anti-alcohol stories, and twelve pro-temperance cartoons. In addition, six entries from the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem offer the Temperance perspective on communion wine, whiskey production, and alcohol use in China. Teachers will find eleven classroom activities relating to social reform.
	Famous Trials, Douglas Linder, University of Missouri, Kansas City http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm This exceptional legal history site includes fascinating treatments of twenty of the most prominent court trials in American history, including: the Scopes “Monkey” Trial (1925); Scottsboro Trials (1931-1937); Nuremburg Trials (1945-49);the Hauptmann (Lindbergh) Trial (1935); and the Sweet Trials (1925-1926). There are also links to biographies of five “trial heroes,” including famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, and a “Constitutional Conflicts” site that offers twenty-nine important constitutional topics for class discussion.
	California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties, American Memory, Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html This site features thirty-five hours of folk and popular music sound recordings from several European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-speaking communities. The Work Projects Administration California Folk Music Project collected these 817 songs, in twelve languages and representing 185 musicians, in Northern California between 1938 and 1940. The collection also includes 168 photographs of musicians, forty-five scale drawings and sketches of instruments, and numerous written documents.
	Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935, Jim Zwick, American Studies Scholar http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html This innovative site of important texts on American imperialism and its opponents presents approximately 800 essays, speeches, pamphlets, political platforms, editorial cartoons, petitions, and pieces of literature, such as Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist writings and the text of Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden accompanied by fifty contemporary reactions. Arranged by document type and searchable by keyword, the materials also include information concerning bulletin boards and electronic discussion networks.
	FDR Cartoons, Niskayuna High School, New York http://www.nisk.k12.ny.us/fdr/FDRcartoons.html A continuing project of high school history and science classes, this site presents thousands of political cartoons concerning the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Of particular interest is the “Cartoons” link, which leads to a comprehensive database showing depictions of FDR’s Presidency in the popular medium. Periods currently emphasized include, “1932, The Road to Pennsylvania Avenue,” “1937, The Supreme Court,” and “1943, The War Years.” Well-conceived and executed, the site also gives the texts of Roosevelt’s inaugural addresses and a page of teacher resources and suggested projects.
	Jukin’ it Out: Contested Visions of Florida in New Deal Narratives, Oberlin College http://www.oberlin.edu/library/papers/honorshistory/2001-Gorman/default.html Created as a senior honors project at Oberlin College, this conceptually sophisticated site explores issues of narrative and representation in two New Deal cultural projects. The site uses the 1939 WPA guide to Florida and FSA-sponsored documentary photography from the period, in particular photographs of “jook joints” to investigate such themes as local color writing, documentary photography, and tour guides as modes of communication, all within the context of key intellectual and cultural concepts that marked the 1930s. The site includes a thoughtful analysis of why and how to write history in hypertext.
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