Primary Source

Words & Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/mcchtml/corhome.html

Author:

Janice E. Ruth, Manuscript Division Project Director, Library of Congress

Excerpt:

In honor of the Manuscript Division's centennial, its staff has selected for online display approximately ninety representative documents spanning from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Included are the papers of presidents, cabinet ministers, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, military officers and diplomats, reformers and political activists, artists and writers, scientists and inventors, and other prominent Americans whose lives reflect our country's evolution. Most of the selected items fall within one of eight major themes or categories which reflect the division's strengths. Each of these themes is the focus of a separate essay containing links to digital reproductions of selected documents. A detailed description accompanies each document, and additional information about the parent collections may be obtained by following links to catalog records and finding aids.

Annotation:

A Library of Congress Manuscript Division online exhibit to celebrate the Manuscript Division's centenary, this site contains approximately 90 representative documents from the 15th to the mid-20th century. The selected documents include the papers of presidents, cabinet ministers, congressmen, Supereme Court justices, military officers, diplomats, reformers, artists, writers, scientists, and other Americans who made a mark in history. Most items fall with eight categories that reflect the division's strengths: "The Presidency"; "Congress, Law, and Politics"; "Military Affairs"; "Diplomacy and Foreign Policy"; "Arts and Literature"; "Science, Medicine, Exploration, and Invention"; "African-American History and Culture"; "Women's History"; and "Miscellany." Each theme contains a roughly 250-word essay with links to digital reproductions of selected documents. A detailed description (200 words) accompanies each document, and additional information about the collections from which a document came is available through links to the collection records and finding aids. The exhibit also includes roughly 25 images, primarily in the "Science, Medicine, Exploration and Invention" category. There is a special presentation entitled "Collecting, Preserving, and Researching History: A Peek into the Library of Congress Manuscript Division." This site provides a description of the division, its holdings, definitions of terms like "personal papers" and why they are important, how the Library of Congress acquires manuscripts, how the staff prepares, conserves, and stores them, and who uses the documents. The site also has links to the Library of Congress's ordering and reproduction policies, the American Memory site, and to the Library of Congress collection catalogs. This easily navigable site is keyword and subject searchable. This site is ideal for conducting research in many areas of American History, as well as answering the question: "What do archives do?"

RaceSci: History of Race in Science

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/r/racescience/

Author:

Evelynn Hammonds, ed., History of Science Program in Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Excerpt:

The RaceSci Website is a resource for scholars and students interested in the history of "race" in science, medicine, and technology. RaceSci is dedicated to encouraging critical, anti-racist and interdisciplinary approaches to our understanding of the production and uses of "race" as a concept within the history of science. Instead of assuming race as a natural category that science then uncovers, this site assembles scholarly works that look at how cultural processes of racialization have profoundly shaped knowledge about humanness, health, and even our understanding of "nature" itself.

Annotation:

RaceSci is a site dedicated to supporting and expanding the discussion of race and science. The site provides five bibliographies of books and articles about race and science. The section on current scholarship has 1,000 entries, organized into 38 subjects. A bibliography of primary source material includes 91 books published between the 1850s and the 1990s. Visitors can currently view 14 syllabi for high school and college courses in social studies, history of science, rhetoric, and medicine. The site links to 13 recently published articles about race and science and to 49 sites about race, gender, health, science, and ethnicity. This site will be useful for teachers designing curricula about race and for researchers looking for secondary source material.

History of the First Locomotives in America

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/brown/index.html

Author:

William H. Brown

Excerpt:

THERE is, perhaps, at the present day, no subject upon which the community at large is so poorly in formed as the history of the first locomotives in America-in what year they were built, where they were constructed, and upon what railroad they were first introduced and employed in actual service.

Annotation:

Reproduction of 1871 book The History of the First Locomotives In America: From Original Documents And The Testimony Of Living Witnesses.

Story of a Great Monopoly - The Atlantic Monthly, March 1881

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1881mar/monopoly.htm

Author:

H. D. Lloyd

Excerpt:

WHEN Commodore Vanderbilt began the world he had nothing, and there were no steamboats or railroads. He was thirty-five years old when the first locomotive was put into use in America. When he died, railroads had become the greatest force in modern industry, and Vanderbilt was the richest man in Europe or America, and the largest owner of railroads in the world

New Media Encyclopedia

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.newmedia-art.org

Author:

Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum Ludwig and Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine

Excerpt:

CITY OF ANGELS, TERRA DELLA DEA MADRE, TERMINAL GARDEN
The three parts of this video work entitled "CONTINENTAL VIDEOSERIES" incorporate elements of earlier works by Ulay/Abramovic: Firstly, they are shot in different locations in the eastern and western world: Bangkok, Sicily and Cambridge, whose ritual and traditional peculiarities are picked out as a central theme. The artists are working with the stylistic device of the "tableau vivant", combining it with speech in a way that creates the impression of ritual acts. The strings of speech cannot be deciphered, only in "Terra della dea madre" snatches of words seem to be Italian or Greek. The language is reminiscent of an ancient epos. With the exception of the "Cambridge" sequence, the singsong of the speaker’s voice and the undecipherable text in the remaining parts make the aspect of contents and narrative virtually disappear in favour of a pictorial whole that encompasses the peculiarities of the language system.

Annotation:

This site serves as a scholarly research tool for the study of new media's relationship with artistic expression. The site contains brief biographies of new media artists and critical descriptions of their works, which users may view with a RealPlayer or QuickTime plug-in. The site also includes a chronology by decade (1950 to the present), and a glossary and bibliography, each arranged alphabetically. The site can serve as an important online resource for understanding the development of new media arts and the progression of specific artists, their work, and their use of technology. Historians of technology and culture will find this site extremely useful.

Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/

Author:

Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and Forum on the History of Physics, American Physical Society

Excerpt:

AN ARCHIVE PRESENTING AND DOCUMENTING SOME IMPORTANT AND ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS MADE BEFORE 1976 BY 20th CENTURY WOMEN

Annotation:

Includes information on eighty-three physicists in resume-like form relating important contributions, honors, positions held, trivia, and a reference listing of books and articles of related interest. The reference listing may also be accessed as a whole, in list form. There are also reproductions of scientific papers written by the women themselves, historical accounts from eyewitnesses, and essays written for the site on a variety of topics. Documents are browsable by author, title, and subject and may also be searched. An annotated photo gallery and several essays of a historical nature are also provided.

MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/

Author:

John O'Connor and Edmund Robertson, School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of St. Andrews

Excerpt:

One of the commonest questions which the readers of this archive ask is: Who discovered zero? Why then have we not written an article on zero as one of the first in the archive? The reason is basically because of the difficulty of answering the question in a satisfactory form. If someone had come up with the concept of zero which everyone then saw as a brilliant innovation to enter mathematics from that time on, the question would have a satisfactory answer even if we did not know which genius invented it. The historical record, however, shows quite a different path towards the concept. Zero makes shadowy appearances only to vanish again almost as if mathematicians were searching for it yet did not recognise its fundamental significance even when they saw it.

Annotation:

The MacTutor Archive hosts thousands of biographical sketches of important mathematicians. Many of the biographies include links to documents and other materials related to mathematicans. Searches can be performed alphabetically or chronologically. In addition to the biographies, the site also includes a number of essays that are grouped by culture and topic. Thus the chronology of Pi or the history of zero can be found under "Arab Mathematics" and "Number Theory" among other categories. This is one of the most-linked to history of science sites on the web because it contains so much information.

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/

Author:

Eric M. Jones

Excerpt:

Sending humans to the Moon was arguably the most difficult technological undertaking in all of history. For sure, the best of America's scientists and engineers were taxed to the limit in order to accomplish nine manned flights to the Moon, six of which involved landing on the crater-filled lunar surface. The scientific results of the Apollo program were staggering. Much that was learned during Apollo required scientists to revise their basic understanding and theories about the Moon's formation and history. And the samples and data collected during Apollo will keep those scientists busy for decades to come.

Annotation:

This site documents the NASA Apollo missions to the moon from 1969-1972. The site includes mission summaries, crew bios, flight plans, communication transcripts, and more. Special features of the site are video and audio files, and supplemental commentary by most of the Apollo astronauts. Technical descriptions of the tools and equipment help readers understand the astronauts' work. This site offers a large collection of materials concerning the nuts and bolts of the Apollo flights with some supplemental historical background added for context. The site navigation is a little cluttered but the available information gives an important window into the workings of NASA and the Apollo missions.

Built in America: Historic Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record: 1933-Present

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/hhhtml/hhhome.html

Author:

Library of Congress

Excerpt:

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Annotation:

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collection includes digital images of measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for 10,000 historic structures and sites dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. These collections display building types and engineering technologies from a farmhouse to a pickle factory, from churches to the Golden Gate Bridge. New material is added monthly. A gallery of images includes 36 photographs and 18 drawings of 50 structures, one from each state in the U.S. The site is searchable by geographic location, keyword, and a subject index that is organized by structure type. For each structure, the site provides from one to ten drawings, from one to 30 photographs, and from one to 50 pages of HABS text in facsimile detailing the structure’s history, significance, and current physical condition. Useful for a specialized audience, for architectural historians, or for those looking for illustrations and examples.

Lone Star Flight Museum

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.lsfm.org/

Author:

Lone Star Flight Museum

Excerpt:

The mission of the Lone Star Flight Museum is to inform and educate the public of their aviation heritage and history by: acquiring, restoring to flying condition and preserving a collection of aircraft representing the evolution of aircraft design and operational capabilities; acquiring, preserving and displaying artifacts and memorabilia depicting the development of aviation; providing a facility for the proper display and preservation of the collection and a suitable setting for aviation memorials; establishing a membership to support the aviation heritage collection in the highest museum standards-

Annotation:

The Lone Star Flight Museum site is a basically a publicity page for the museum that gives directions, contact information and upcoming events. The most useful and interesting section for those who do not plan to visit the museum in person is the museum's Living History Group. This section contains a few records of World War II concerning veteran Henry Erwin and a link to email for other vets and family to offer their experiences. As other primary accounts are entered on the site, the usefulness of the site will improve.