Modern (18th-20th Century)

Historic Pittsburgh is a digital collection that provides an opportunity to explore and research the history of Pittsburgh and the surrounding Western Pennsylvania area on the Internet. This website enables access to historic material held by the University of Pittsburgh's University Library System, the Library & Archives of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The project represents a model of cooperation between libraries and museums in providing online access to their respective materials.

The Social Welfare History Archives has acquired over 200 collections of organizational records or personal papers. The collections chronicle the development of a broad range of activities. Included are the classic social services offered to particularly vulnerable classes of persons, e. g., the economically dependent, recent immigrants, migrants and refugees, unwed mothers, abused and abandoned children, the aged, and the developmentally and physically challenged. Beyond these are causes and services aimed at the broader community, many of them not traditionally included in a narrow definition of social welfare: child-rearing advice for parents, recreation programs, community planning, arts programs, preventive health, and family planning. Because of the problem-solving mindset of the service field, the collection as a whole tends to stress times of crises. Coverage is richest in--but not limited to--times of war, depression, or other types of social and economic dislocation.

The Visual Index to the Virtual Archive is an innovative visually-based interface that uses a 3-D computer model of Manhattan as a click-on map, allowing Web visitors to view the city, present and past, and to access the Museum's collections through an on-line, searchable database. The idea of a visual index to the collection recognizes the importance of graphic representation in both the medium of the website and in the way that visitors, virtual or actual, come to understand and comprehend a city through its geography and landmarks.

Neither financier nor broker Charles Dow was a journalist. The stock averages he devised provided a window for outsiders to view the market; Wall Street types were welcome to use it, but they were not his chief concern.

When Dow came to Wall Street, the investment market of choice was bonds. Investors liked securities that were backed by real machinery, factories and other hard assets. They felt reassured by the predictability of income that bonds offered, as well as the specific dates of maturity when their principle would be returned. The stock market, by contrast, dealt in "shares of ownership" which had no specific claim on anything a company owned.

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation is ambitious in its scope but simple in its aims: to make the complete records of Howard Carter's excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun available on these web pages. It is astonishing, but no longer acceptable, that some eighty years and thousands of articles, hundreds of books, and dozens of exhibitions after the discovery of the tomb, this most famous event in the history of Egyptian archaeology has not yet been fully published.

Airline history in the continental United States of America was shaped early in its life by the US Postal Service's airmail contract system. This was extended to allow passenger carriers to win routes. The first routes were long-haul, trans-continental trunk routes connecting major hubs and these routes were what made the 'big-four' US airlines successful.

Secondary local routes feeding the trans-continental hubs were then awarded. So carriers in the US were divided into major and local companies. In more recent times most of these smaller carriers were taken over by the larger ones and so we see American, for instance, flying both trunk and feeder services.

Airshipsonline houses the online archive of the Airship Heritage Trust. Inside you will find an extensive history relating to all of the British Airships from 1900 to the present day. The OnLine-Forum is open to to offer comment and share in news and knowledge between members and the public who share in the interest of lighter than air travel. The Trust is a charitable voluntary run organisation based in the U.K. We own and are responsible for the national heritage airship archive and large collection of airship artifact's and photographs relating to the British Airship Programme, from it’s early days at the turn of the century to the Skyships of the 1980’s.

Gentlemen:
It gives me great pleasure to be enabled to report the Niagara Suspension Rail Way Bridge complete in all its parts. The success of this work may now be considered an established fact. The trains of the New York Central, and of the Great Western Rail Road in Canada, have been crossing regularly since the 18th of March, averaging over 30 trips per day.
One single observation of the passage of a train over the Niagara Bridge, will convince the most skeptical, that the practicability of Suspended Railway Bridges, so much doubted heretofore, has been successfully demonstrated.

Conde B. McCullough was the head of the Bridge Division of the Oregon Department of Transportation from 1920-1935. In that position, he was personally responsible for the design and construction of 162 of the most beautiful and functional bridges in the United States. Virtually all of the bridges that make up the Oregon Coast Highway 101 (formally known as the Roosevelt Military Highway) are McCullough designs. The highway was just beginning to be paved in 1927 and had no permanent crossings of the numerous rivers that line the Oregon coast. By 1932, the highway was paved, but it wasn't until 1936 when the three final bridges were completed over Coos Bay, Alsea Bay and Yaquina Bay that the highway was complete.