A Sociology Guy's Historical Resources

LESSONS FROM THE PAST?

`The Persistence of Memory' by Salvador Dali (1931) Ray Bradbury's "The Chicago Abyss" is a tale of an old man who remembers too much. In the rubble of some bombed out urban center, the people physically abuse the old man when he shares his memories of such things as Baby Ruth candy bars, music, restaurants, and television. A small group protects and cares for the old guy, hiding him from the ever-searching police. Of course, the reason for the loathing and fear of this gentleman was that he held a frame of reference that degraded the present.

This brings us to the matter of controlling such memories and the proverbial "lessons of history." Although the past is for all intents and purposes gone (the present is shaped by its own past and future), it is routinely resurrected to serve various functions. For instance, in the post-911 era of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and White House framings of policy criticism being unpatriotic, NPR observed in March 2004 the 50th anniversary of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's appearance of Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now." Each generation selects its own history--and the ancestors it chooses to remember. As George Orwell observed, "Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past."

Click here for more thoughts on the implications of historical ignorance

GENERAL HISTORICAL RESOURCES

From Peter N. Stearns and his colleagues, The Encyclopedia of World History: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (6^th ed.)
The HistoryNet "where history lives on the web"
Thomas Daccord's The Best of History Websites
Refdesk's Historical Information Resources an alphabetical listing of some of the best web resources
HistoryWorld.net "Make history Make sense"
David W. Koeller's Web Chronology Project (North Park University)
Frank E. Smitha's WorldHistory.com
History Gateway at Kansas
World History Chart with HyperHistory Online
Roland Marchand's (UC-Davis) History Project, a collection of primary documents and lesson plans for all educational levels
Steven Kreis's Resources for Historians
Western European Specialists Section--history, literature, culture, and politics from the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries
Library of Congress Exhibits
International Institute of Social History
Spartacus Educational's (UK) comprehensive Teaching History Online
Don Mabry's THE HISTORICAL TEXT ARCHIVE
Carnegie Mellon's English Servers humanities texts online: History and Historigraphy
Hanover Historical Texts Project
EuroDocs: Western European Primary Historical Documents
British History Online from the University of London
Canada's Digital Collections
Mapping History: The Darkwing Atlas Project from the University of Oregon
Romanov Timeline
The History Channel

JOURNALS

History Today
History Now

VOICES FROM THE PAST: RECORDINGS OF FAMOUS SPEECHES AND PERSONALITIES

PBS's Great American Speeches: 80 Years of Political Oratory
A wealth of resources from Michigan state:
U.S. Labor and Industrial History Audio Project
19th-century recordings taken from wax cylinders from tinfoil.com
Historical Sounds in MP3 Format from The Free Information Society, includes Theodore Roosevelt, Che Guevara, JFK, and Einstein

MOVING IMAGES FROM THE PAST

Internet Moving Image Archive a project of the Internet Archive in association with Prelinger Archives. Currently under construction, the site will eventually include 1,001 archival films, digitized as MPEG-2 files, that are free for everyone to use for any purpose except resale.
Original format motion pictures from American Memory

WORLD HISTORY: FOCUSING ON THE EPOCHS

CLASSICAL/ANCIENT

Perseus Art & Archaeology
The Ancient World Web: Main Index
Exploring Ancient World Cultures
Eternal Egypt
History B94: History of Ancient Egypt - Piccione
The Ancient World Web: Main Index
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

The Age of King Charles V
University of Reading's Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies
Fordham's Medieval Web Links
History of the Crusades a University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Project
Paul Gans's Medieval Technology Pages
WORLD CULTURES--TO 1500
The Online Medieval and Classical Library (DL SunSITE)
UCLA Medieval Studies
The World of the Vikings

RENAISSANCE

Medieval and Renaissance Sites
The Art of Renaissance Science

16TH CENTURY

Spanish Armada

18TH CENTURY

Digital History LTD. goal is the chronicle all of 18th century American history
Carnegie Mellon's English Servers humanities texts online: 18th Century
Penn State's C18-L: Resources for 18th-century studies across the disciplines

19TH CENTURY

The Napoleonic Guide
19th-century articles from Harper's Weekly
The Victorian Web "literature, history, and culture in the age of Victoria"
The Victorian Dictionary "a guide to the social history of Victorian London"
Phillip Mallett's (University of St. Andrews) The Nineteenth-Century City
The Southern Experience in 19th-Century America (from UNC Chapel Hill)
Furman's Nineteenth Century Documents Project
Romanticism on the Net--an international refereed electronic journal
The Web of American Transcendentalism, a product of Professor Ann Woodlief's Virginia Commonwealth U. class

20TH CENTURY

China 1900-1976
Spanish Civil War: The Posters of the Spanish Revolution
Joseph Stalin Reference Library
Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution
Anarchism and the Russian Revolution
Paul Halsall's (Fordham) Internet History Sourcebook: Russian Revolution

AMERICAN HISTORY

David Schwalbe's guide to American history sites
From the Library of Congress:

American Memory--one of my favorites sites on the WWW

America's Story from America's Library

American Treasures
"Making of America"--digital library from University of Michigan and Cornell containing thousands of 19th century books and journal articles For primary source material from 18th century America check out Archiving Early America
National Museum of American History--and get real interactive with its HistoryWired
National Archives and Record Administration's Archival Information Locator of digitized images of documents, maps and photographs
History Matters: a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
Dr. John McClymer and Dr. Lucia Knoles's E Pluribus Unum--America in the 1770s, 1850s, and 1920s
The History Place--a site to watch from Pearson Education (owners of Addison-Wesley Longman, Allyn & Bacon, and Prentice-Hall)
Historical Maps of the United States
AnimatedAtlas.com's "Growth of a Nation" watch the USA's growth from 1790 to 1950
Organization of American Historians
TIMEly Pick of the Week
American Historical Review
American studies cultural maps from University of Virginia
US Historical Documents--U Oklahoma, Magna Carta on
USA PAGE--Mississippi State Archives
U Texas Center for American History
U.S. DIPLOMATIC HISTORY RESOURCES INDEX
History Buff.com American newspaper printing and publishing history
The Early America Review--journal of fact and opinion on people, issues and events of 18th century America At Home in the Heartland Online--history of the Midwest from 1700 to the present
The Declaration of Independence from ushistory.com
Benjamin Franklin
Yahoo! 19th Century American History listings
From the Library of Congress/American Memory: The First American West: The Ohio River Valley 1750-1820 (contributed by the University of Chicago Library and Filson Historical Society of Louisville [KY])
Lewis and Clark--The National Bicentennial Exhibition
Westward by Sea: A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion, 1820-1890
Meeting of Frontiers--on the explorations of the American West and Russian Far East
Mike Trinklein and Steve Boettcher"s The Oregon Trail
Territorial Kansas Online 1854-1861
Washington State Pioneer Life Database from the University of Washington libraries
Lincoln's Assassination
Stanley Schultz and William Tishler's American History 102: Civil War to the Present
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871
The Great Seattle Fire of 1889
Early Motion Pictures Home Page
Klondike Gold Rush
Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935
Ellis Island Immigration Museum, with over 1300 oral histories
Turner Adventure Learning--Ellis Island
Smithsonian's "Make the Dirt Fly!"--exhibit on the construction of the Panama Canal
Alf the Poet - U.S. Government Collection
Keven Rayburn's Roaring Twenties site
WPA Life Histories Project
New Deal Network sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute & the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College/Columbia University
Roosevelt and the New Deal a comprehensive, hypertexted encyclopedia from Spartacus
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum (with over 10,000 digitized documents online)
America in the 1930s from the University of Virginia's America Studies Program
Museum Online Resource Review
Museum of the City of San Francisco
Al Filreis's "The Literature and Culture of the American 1950s"
From the U.S. Senate and GPO Transcripts of the McCarthy Hearings 1953-54
Ralph Schuster's The John F. Kennedy Assassination Homepage
John McAdams's Kennedy Assassination Home Page
Spartacus Educational's The Assassination of JFK: Index
KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS COLLECTION from the National Archives and Records Collection
The Secret History of the United States 1962-1996

THE OLD WEST--AND LET'S BE HIGHLY VISUAL PLEASE!

The American West: A Celebration of the Human Spirit
New Perspectives on THE WEST
TreasureNet Historical Image Collection
The American West 19th century images from Harper's Weekly
Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album
New Perspectives on The West PBS companion site to Ken Burns documentary
Photographs of the American West 1861-1912 from the National Archives and Records Administration
Donald J. Mabry's American West Historical Text Archive
The American West: A Celebration of the Human Spirit
Western History from the Denver Public Library with more than 100,000 historical photographs of Native Americans, pioneers, gold miners, railroads, and small town life
The California Heritage Digital Image Access Project
The Eastman Project: Images of California Life

POPULAR CULTURE

Primary Sources from American Popular Culture from the Authentic History Center
Professor T.V. Reed's Popular Culture: Resources for Critical Analysis