American History Websites:
19th Century
- Abraham
Lincoln Papers -- LOC
The Complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of
Congress, which totals approximately 20,000 documents is
organized into three "General Correspondence" series. This
includes 2,200 annotated documents (about 6,500 images),
comprises series one and contains correspondence dated from March
1829 through June 1864 that was originally gathered by Robert
Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son. Users can browse the
collection chronologically or search by keyword. The site also
includes two special presentations featuring original documents
and images on the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's
assassination.
- American
Cultural History: The 19th Century
The purpose of these pages is to present a series of web guides on the
decades of the nineteenth century. From the Kingwood College Library.
- Between a
Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops 1820 -
Present
The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History
provides this online exhibit, a look at one of the more unsavory
aspects of American history. The exhibit can be viewed via a
floor plan or a series of navigational toolbars at the bottom of
the screen. The content and the design of the exhibit are
fascinating. Each section is introduced by large images from the
actual exhibit.
- Documenting
the American South: The Southern Homefront -- 1861-1865,
Education
Posted as part of the Documenting the American South project (see
the April 18, 1997 Scout Report), this
Website offers primary documents relating to efforts by the
Confederacy to shape its own educational system. The site
includes .html versions of period textbooks such as The First
Dixie Reader; Designed to Follow the Dixie Primer and
First Book in Composition, Applying the Principles of Grammar
to the Art of Composing: Also, Giving Full Directions for
Punctuation; Especially Designed for the Use of Southern
Schools. These texts include online illustrations,
frontispieces, and cover pages
- Dred Scott
Digital Project
This site, the first major digital project of the Washington
University in St. Louis Library, takes advantage of a remarkable
collection of documents that involve both local history and one
of the most significant episodes in Antebellum US history, the
Dred Scott Case. In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet filed
suit for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court, initiating
an eleven-year legal fight that ended in the US Supreme Court,
which issued a decision that contributed in no small part to
rising tensions between the free and slave states. The site
offers digital images and transcriptions (HTML or Word) of 85
original documents from the Dred and Harriet Scott cases tried in
St. Louis courts between 1846 and 1852. In addition to the
documents, the site also provides a brief chronology and links
for further information.
- Eye of
the Storm [Flash]
This Website showcases materials from the recently published
Simon & Schuster book, Eye of the Storm, which details
in vivid watercolors, maps, and journal entries, events from the
Civil War as witnessed by Union soldier Private Knox Sneden. The
site offers 20 selections from Knox's diaries covering from 1861
to December of 1864, each accompanied by a watercolor or map
viewable in two sizes, as well as four Flash presentations of
these watercolors based around particular incidents Knox
witnessed. The watercolors, while not masterpieces, are fine
renderings of characteristic events of the war -- a surprise
artillery attack by Rebels against an overconfident and
underobservant Union fortification, a surrendering of 10,000
troops, views of battles, sabotage operations, and the like. More
than anything, they give a sense of the harsh imprint of war upon
an otherwise typically bucolic countryside. Knox's dark lines of
soldiers, scarred earth, and flames reflected in slow running
rivers show that America's bloodiest war touched not only its
people, but its landscape as well.
- From
Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection,
1824-1909
This collection of pamphlets written by African-American
authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries boasts
"complete page images of 397 titles . . . as well as searchable
electronic texts and bibliographic records." Part of the Library
of Congress's American Memory project, the pamphlets constitute a
wonderful collection of online primary resources in
African-American history. Users can examine works here by pivotal
black writers, such as Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles
Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.
- History
of American Education Web Project
This site offers an online history of American education from the
Puritans to the present. Separate sections focus on European
Influences on American Educational History, the Colonial Period
of American Education, the Early National Period of American
Education (ca.1776-1840), the Common School Period of American
Education (ca. 1840-1880), the Progressive Period of American
Education, and the Modern Period of American Education (ca.
1920-present).
- The
Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
This site explains the key political issues behind Johnson's
impeachment, details the legal and political arguments for
impeachment, provides biographies and portraits for 28 key
figures related to the trial, and chronicles Johnson's term as
President.
- Jewish-American
History on the Web
"Dedicated to 19th Century Jewish-American history, poetry and
fiction, polemics and philosophy," this site provides an omnibus
of historical materials relating to Jewish contributions to
nineteenth-century American history with an emphasis upon the
settlement of the West and the Civil War. Primary documents here
include letters, memoirs, and slavery polemics of both Union and
Confederate Jewish-Americans; the full-length chronicles of a
Jewish-American artist's journey with Col. Fremont's Last
Expedition "across the Rocky Mountains; including three months'
residence in Utah, and a perilous trip across the Great American
Desert to the Pacific;" and more.
- Oneida Indian
Nation
The Oneida Indian Nation has released a new and improved Home
Page, including 1) "The Treaties Project"-an ongoing project to
make significant treaties between Native American Nations and the
U.S. available via the Internet to both Native Americans and
Non-Native people. This project was released to coincide with the
200th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Konondaigua and
the 50th anniversary of the National Congress of American
Indians.
- Religion
and the Founding of the American Republic
- This companion site to a new US Library of Congress exhibit
draws upon the holdings of the Library and other archives to
illustrate the importance of religion in the founding and making
of America during the 17th through 19th centuries.
- Secession Era Editorials Project
Produced by the History department at Furman University in South
Carolina, this site features full texts of primary documents in
nineteenth-century American history "with special emphasis on
those sources that shed light on sectional conflict and
transformations in regional identity." The site has thus far
posted documents ranging from newspaper editorials and
abolitionist tracts to political speeches and legislative
resolutions. These materials will aid researchers examining
issues of Slavery and Sectionalism, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of
1854, the Dred Scott Case, the election of 1860, the secession of
the Southern states, and the immediate aftermath of the Civil War
in the South. The site also features a statistical almanac of the
1850s, which includes but is not limited to data on slave
mortality and survival; the ratio of slaveholders to families in
1860 (by state); presidential elections, 1844-1860; and Growth in
Railroad Mileage, 1850-1860. Some documents may have some minor
errors, but fully proofed documents are clearly marked.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
and American Culture
This site from the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the
Humanities at the University of Virginia contains a plethora of
materials concerning Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin and the nation's response to it. The site features a
complete electronic edition of the first published version of the
novel along with the various prefaces Stowe wrote for different
editions as well as audio versions of most of the Christian hymns
presented in the text. Users can also examine and compare
different published editions of the text using 3-D applications
as well as view selected manuscript pages and sheets from the
novel's original newspaper serialization side-by-side. The site's
unique value, though, lies in the documents it presents that
elucidate the novel's historical and cultural context.
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