American
Cultural History: The Twentieth Century
The purpose of these pages is to present a series of
web guides on the decades of the twentieth century. Period pictures used are
those of the family of the web author(s).
The American
Experience: Nixon's China Game [RealPlayer, QuickTime]
Richard Nixon continues to be a source of fascination as well as intense
debate for political scientists and historians. This companion Website
to the PBS broadcast this month of "Nixon's China Game" examines what is
generally regarded as the main triumph of the Nixon presidency, his opening
of relations with China. The site's best feature is an interview with Henry
Kissinger -- available in text, audio, and video -- in which he discusses
both the geopolitical strategizing and the behind-closed-doors maneuvers
at the White House that took place before and during the summit.
CIA and the
Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968 -- CSI
Published by the CIA's Center for the Study
of Intelligence (CSI) and written by former CIA officer and historian Dr.
Harold P. Ford, this book scrutinizes recently declassified CIA documents
and "reviews the Intelligence Community's analytic performance during the
chaotic Vietnam era." This forthright scholarly study focuses on how CIA
analysts provided information to US policymakers at crucial times duringthe
Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Civil Rights
in Mississippi Digital Archive
Maintained by the McCain Library and Archives at the University of
Southern Mississippi (USM), this Website features "an Internet-accessible,
fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library
and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi."
Cold
War Bibliography
Topics include: Recent Books on the Cold War; Concise annotated bibliography;
Institutions of the Cold War; Economic Impact of the Cold War; Comparative
and International Aspects of the Cold War; The Cold War and American Culture;
The Production of Knowledge During the Cold War; The Evolution of Science
Policy and Research Funding; Miscellaneous subjects; Annotated Filmography more info
Conversations
with History
"Lively and unedited interviews . . . produced at the Institute of International
Studies at the University of California at Berkeley." You will need
the RealPlayer plug-in to view and hear these interviews.
Death
Squad Dossier and Relevant Declassified US Documents from the National
Security Archive's Guatemala Collection
On May 20, the Washington Office on Latin
America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Human
Rights Watch, and National Security Archive (NSA) released a 54-page logbook
obtained from the Guatemalan military. The logbook, labeled the Death Squad
Dossier, documents, in coded detail, the executions of 183 people at the
hands of the Guatemalan security forces between August 1983 and March 1985.
The NSA has made the dossier available online along with declassified US
documents related to Guatemalan death squad activities.
Foreign
Relations of the United States
Selected volumes from the administrations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, and Johnson, are available online.
Free Speech Movement,
Student Protest U.C. Berkeley, 1964-65 -- University of California, Berkeley
Library
The Bancroft Library at UC, Berkeley has made available an array of
documents and media materials relating to the Free Speech Movement (FSM)
on the UC campus in the mid-60s. The site includes an online finding aid
to the protest collections of the library, online video and sound recordings,
a chronology, a bibliography, and a plethora of documents relating to the
movement. These last include oral histories, journals, legal proceedings,
contemporaneous journalism, FSM newsletters, books, pamphlets, minutes
of meetings, government documents, and more. An excellent site for researchers,
journalists, historians, and students.
Freeze Frame:
Eadweard Muybridge's Photography of Motion 
National Museum of American History
This site from the National Museum of American History examines the
famous sequences of photographs taken by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge
to explore the dynamics of human and animal locomotion. (It was Muybridge's
photographs, spaced only split seconds apart, that first proved that at
one point in a horse's gallop all four legs are off the ground at once.)
The site features a number of Muybridge's sequences of men and women as
well as animals engaged in physical activity, often scantily clad or in
the nude to capture the physical dynamics of the movements. more
History of Vietnam
and the Vietnam War
Created and maintained by Vets With A Mission, "a
non-political organization of Vietnam veterans which seeks to alleviate
the widespread suffering still victimizing the people of Vietnam," this
Website offers a plethora of articles, research, book excerpts, and other
learning materials about the Vietnam War and the history of Vietnam.
I Hear America Singing
[Quicktime, RealPlayer]
This companion website to the PBS Broadcast of "I Hear America Singing"
presents great American baritone Thomas Hampson's thoughts on American
song -- both its words and music. The site offers a timeline of American
song composition, and charts its development through the major composers
(such as Stephen Foster Collins, Samuel Barber, Charles Ives and others)
as well as the significant cultural influences (such as religious hymns,
work songs, American Transcendentalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and others).
more
Japanese
American Exhibit and Access Project
This site, created by the University of Washington, is an excellent,
well-crafted, content-rich online exhibit paired with a very useful guide
to archival holdings on the same subject. The subject is the forcible internment
of Japanese Americans on the American west coast. This exhibit chroniclesthe
experiences of Seattle's Japanese Americans in the Spring and Summer of
1942, when they were removed from their homes and taken to Puyallup assembly
center, nicknamed "Camp Harmony" by Army information officers.
The Kennedy Assassination
This site is devoted to the theory that Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone
.
The
Korean War - Project Whistlestop
Provided by Project Whistlestop, the Harry S. Truman online digital
archive (reviewed in the July
17, 1998 Scout Report), this site hosts an excellent collection
of primary resources for teaching or researching the Korean War. more
Make
the Dirt Fly!
Smithsonian Institution Libraries exhibition on the building of the
Panama Canal.
National
Security Action Memoranda of John F. Kennedy -- John F. Kennedy Library
and Museum
The John F. Kennedy Library has posted the National Security Action
Memoranda of the Kennedy administration, written either by the President
himself or his National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Topics of the
memorandums include policy for Cuba, forces in Vietnam, reconnaissance
flights over Russia, NATO, South Africa policy, CIA support of "certain
activities," and many others. The copies are presented in photographed
facsimile, and many of the more sensitive memorandums have been "sanitized,"
i.e., have portions deleted. A few of the memorandums are still classified
and therefore not yet available. In November of 1998, the library released
a huge quantity of taped recordings of Kennedy's consultations.
Native Americans and the Environment
This website promotes the research and
study of environmental issues facing Native American communities, particularly
the politics of land and treaty rights. The site also explores the "values
and historical experiences that Native Americans bring to bear on environmental
issues." Native Americans and the Environment provides a bibliographic
database, which covers topics such as environmental justice, natural resource
utilization, land and treaty rights, and demography and migration. The
database currently contains over 1,500 citations, and will be expanded
to approximately 3,000 by the end of 1999.
Picturing
the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives
Based on an exhibition of photographs at the National Archives that
runs through July of this year, Picturing the Century is an appealing online
exhibit of historically significant photographs from both well-known and
amateur photographers. The gallery features 70 photographs under the headings
A New Century, The Great War and the New Era, The Great Depression and
the New Deal, A World in Flames (World War II), Postwar America, and Century's
End. more
Rearview Mirror:
Automobile Images and American Identities
This Website, part of the larger joint Website of the University of
California, Riverside and the California Museum of Photography, features
dozens of photographs of automobiles and automobile culture -- including
showroom models (in both senses of the term), billboards, roadside gas
stations, suburban two-car garages, and much more.
Record of AmericanDemocracy,
1984-1990 (ROAD) [ASC II, SPSS, Stata, or SAS]
This Website from Harvard University serves as an indispensable data
source for researchers in social and political science. "The Record Of
American Democracy (ROAD) data include election returns, socioeconomic
summaries, and demographic measures of the American public at unusually
low levels of geographic aggregation." more
"Roadside
Architecture in 1950s America: Reflections of a Society"
This online essay by a Kenyon college student offers a well-written
and substantive discussion of how the advent of the Interstate Highway
system in the 1950s and the attendant proliferation of roadside architecture
and advertising reflected and shaped American ideology. The essay, replete
with numerous graphic representations, discusses the pre- and post-Interstate
Highway systems, billboards, gas stations, diners, motels and popular travel
destinations, Levittown, Dixie Highway, and Interstate 75.
Secrets
of History: The CIA in Iran [.pdf]
This special report from The New York Times on the Web offers
conclusive evidence of the United States's involvement in the Iranian military
coup
d'etat of 1953 that brought the Shah to power. The jewel in the crown
here is a mysteriously obtained copy of a still-classified CIA documentdetailing
the "inner workings" of a US plot to overthrow the elected prime minister
of Iran and install the Shah. more
info
The Tax History Project
Established in 1995 by Tax Analysts, the Tax
History Project helps scholars, policymakers, students, and citizens easily
access primary historical documents relating to American tax history. This
rich resource archives US Treasury, White House, and Congressional
documents from the early national, Depression, and World War II eras. Cartoon
and poster image galleries supplement the text archives. Other features
include statistical data on American taxation, Presidential Tax Returns,
books reviews, and links to tax policy discussion groups.
Three from the New York Public Library Digital Collections
Heading West:
Mapping the Territory
Touring West:
19th-century Performing Artists on the Overland Trails
Surveyors of the West:
William Henry Jackson and Robert Brewster Stanton
The New York Public Library has three major digital exhibitions currently
running to complement their in-house exhibits. Heading West examines the
exploration and development of the West using maps from the library's collections.
The accompanying text is well written and addresses itself to exploding
some of the myths about the Frontier, including the myth of the West as
settled by lone pioneers. The maps are fascinating and allow for viewing
in several sizes. The 1859 map of the US and Mexico is worth a visit by
itself; visitors can view both territories in their entirety or zoom in
to a level where geographic features and the names of individual towns
and territories can be made out. Touring West "celebrates the creators,
promoters, and performers of professional theater, music, and dance who
toured the American continent" from 1803 to 1893. more
US EPA History Office
The United States Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) was established to implement Federal laws protecting the nation
and its people from pollution. In 1992, the Agency established a history
program to preserve and organize documents related to its institutional
memory. more
U.S. National Park Service
The United States Department of the Interior
has recently opened its National Park Service (NPS) Web site, offering
listings of all U.S. national parks, monuments, historical sites, memorials,
and other designations by name, state, or region -- although state and
regional access is limited to clickable maps only at this time.more
World
War II Maps
Posted by the History department at the University of San Diego, this
site makes available over 100 strategic maps from World War II. All the
major theaters of conflict are represented here from Asia and the South
Pacific to Northern Africa, Europe, and the Battle for the Atlantic.
more info