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<title>Picturing US History: Web Resources</title>
<description>
The following is an annotated guide to some of the most useful visual resources available online. Gathered by scholars of American history and visual culture, each annotation describes the range and content of the website\'s visual resources and assesses its utility for teaching U.S. history.
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<link>http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/wwwvisualhistory.php</link>
<copyright>Picturing U.S. History by  American Social History Project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/about.php Permission to use images have been obtained from their respective right's holders. Creative Commons license pretains to textual content, layout, and original textual works. </copyright>

	 
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      <title><![CDATA[&quot;I Always Had Pads with Me&quot;: A G.I. Artist&acirc;™s Sketchpad, 1943-1944]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[This small but fascinating site focuses on one soldier&amp;rsquo;s experience of World War II, but speaks to the universal experience of war from the perspective on the ground. Ben Hurwitz was just twenty years old when he enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces in the wake of Japan&amp;rsquo;s attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Like many of the men and women who entered military service, Hurwitz (who changed his name to Brown after the war) kept a record of his experiences. But his &amp;ldquo;journal&amp;rdquo; was a sketchpad, and, during his two years in North Africa and Italy, Corporal Hurwitz drew and painted at every opportunity. Hurwitz&amp;rsquo;s pictures are accompanied by the artist&amp;rsquo;s commentary transcribed by historian Joshua Brown in November 1996. This site will be of interest to anyone looking for a firsthand visual account of life in the U.S. military during the Second World War]]></description>
		<link>http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/75</link>        
        <pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:59:39 EST</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Plains Indian Ledger Art]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project (PILA), housed at the University of California, San Diego, seeks to digitally preserve and exhibit an artistic phenomenon unique to American history. Between 1860 and 1900, a period of &amp;ldquo;forced reduction&amp;rdquo; of Plains Indians tribes to reservations as decreed by the U.S. government, a new form of Native American art emerged as a response to these rapidly changing social, cultural, and environmental conditions. There currently exists over 200 complete &amp;ldquo;ledgers&amp;rdquo; (books of drawings from this period) throughout the world, rapidly being sold in auctions, and this website seeks to use digital technology to preserve this history. By scanning each image, the site allows viewers to explore these pieces in high detail without damaging the originals. The website&amp;rsquo;s viewing interface is among the most advanced and user-friendly of any visual history site, allowing users to open multiple windows showing different pages across the PILA project and zoom in to view the details of any portion of any open ledger book page. The site also includes a virtual research station for registered visitors (free), which allows users to login and save searches, create Web-based slide shows that can be displayed on any computer that has access to the Internet, record their own research notes linked directly to the images, post public comments, as well as download research notes and plate lists to a local computer. This ongoing project helps keep a rare and dying art form publicly alive by combining rigorous scholarship with cutting edge visual technology.  ]]></description>
		<link>http://plainsledgerart.org/</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[American Revolution Digital Learning Project [Currently Offline]]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[The American Revolution Digital Learning Project showcases the immense and diverse collection of the New-York Historical Society. Focusing on the many elements of the American Revolution, the site covers events roughly from 1760-1810. There are thousands of documents and objects to browse through on your own, in addition to more organized games and activities that help contextualize the sometimes-overwhelming amount of material. Much of this visual material is presented with innovative viewing software that allows users to explore items in rich detail, including a 3-D object viewer that can, for example, let users examine a tiny crack on the inside of a teacup. The main strength of the American Revolution Digital Learning Project lies in its flexibility as an educational resource, as users are free to engage the copious historical ephemera in a variety of ways (from games for elementary school students to essay-writing activities for high school students). Through unique visual presentations and an attention to historical context, this site brings the American Revolution to life in impressive and often surprising ways. ]]></description>
		<link></link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Early American Paintings in the Worcester Art Museum]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[Early American Paintings in the Worcester Art Museum collects, contextualizes, and displays works produced by American artists prior to 1830. The vast majority of the museum&amp;rsquo;s collection consists of portraiture, although there are also religious images, historical paintings, and landscapes to be found as well. Within this catalogue exist dozens of paintings by 20 different artists, all of whom were either born or active in the United States, including works by important early American artists Gilbert Stuart and Chester Harding. Users can browse this collection in a variety of ways (by artist, genre, place of origin, etc.), all of which employ useful thumbnails and descriptions that help guide the tour visually. In addition to these search functions, the site also arranges its entire collection on a digital time line that situates each piece within its historical context. While the scope of this exhibition is inherently limited to the Worcester Art Museum&amp;rsquo;s narrowly focused collection, the works are presented and elaborated upon in an innovative manner that constitutes an entertaining and useful site for students of U.S. history. The time line feature is particularly engaging as an educational tool, since it combines visual elements within a linear narrative, aiding comprehension of historical and artistic development over time.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[George Washington:  A National Treasure]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[George Washington:  A National Treasure is a unique website that uses a single historical portrait as a gateway to explorations of the larger issues that surround the biography of America&amp;rsquo;s first president.  The painting itself, known as the Landsowne portrait and painted by renowned American portraitist Gilbert Stuart, is presented as an interactive piece that allows for detailed investigation as organized by specific themes (symbolic, biographic, and artistic).  As the user scrolls the mouse around the portrait, various links appear that lead to even more text and visual resources.  Clicking on Washington&amp;rsquo;s sleeve, for example, conjures a brief description of clothing in the era&amp;rsquo;s art and other visual examples (portraits) as demonstration.  Since this website is narrowly focused on a single historical figure, and particularly interested in the portrait as a means of historical evidence, its resources are somewhat limited to these central themes.  However, the interactive nature of the portrait, which links to over 100 smaller descriptive sites with additional visual and audio presentations, makes for an effective and informative digital exhibition.  Perhaps the best use of this site would be to demonstrate the interconnectedness of art and historical reality, since students can investigate the larger contextual motivations for specific aesthetic choices.  This educational template may only depict a single, albeit iconic, portrait, but the techniques of critical thinking that it encourages are an effective means of artistic interpretation that can be transferred to a host of other works and disciplines.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.georgewashington.si.edu/portrait/index.html</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Secrets of the Dark Chamber:  Art of the American Daguerreotype]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[Daguerreotypes were an early form of photography prominent in the mid-nineteenth century. In Secrets of the Dark Chamber: Art of the American Daguerreotype, the Smithsonian American Art Museum presents a series of representative daguerreotypes along with primary source texts that reinforce the significance of this technology and its impact on American history. As the companion site to a book of the same name, the visual component of the exhibition is limited to a few examples placed in three broad categories: landscapes, portraits, and occupationals. While the site then only includes ten examples of actual daguerreotypes, this seeming lack is made up for by the site&amp;rsquo;s careful attention to primary sources as historical context. For example, one page includes dozens of nineteenth century texts on the rise of photographic technology, while another contains audio files of contemporary scholarly lectures that effectively situate the significance of this artistic development. The sum total of this effort is a site that communicates the importance of a subject rarely covered in much detail, and that presents this hidden history in a clear and understandable, if not often visual, fashion.  ]]></description>
		<link>http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/collections/exhibits/helios/darkchamber.html</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[American Political Prints, 1766-1876]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[ A joint venture of the Library of Congress and Harper&amp;rsquo;s Weekly, one of the nation&amp;rsquo;s preeminent political publications, the website American Political Prints, 1766-1876 collects, and exhibits, an impressive selection of historically significant primary source documents. Specifically, the site seeks to expose the public to an extremely important yet often overlooked form of American political expression; that is, the political print. For a long period of America&amp;rsquo;s history, from the tumultuous birth of the nation to the violent upheaval of the Civil War, political prints were a vital form of national expression and today provide a vibrant portrait of the nation&amp;rsquo;s past. This website charts the evolution of the political print from both a technological as well as ideological perspective. A helpful glossary keeps readers informed about the various stages in this development, from the woodcuts of the eighteenth century to the lithography of the Civil War era. Hundreds of political prints can be browsed within a contextual timeline, or searched using key terms. The site is much more than simply a collection of beautifully scanned and cataloged prints; each image is accompanied by copious annotation that helps situate its historical meaning. Since these posters, broadsides, handbills, cartoons, and other images contain often obscure political and cultural references, the explanations immensely aid the reader&amp;rsquo;s comprehension of the important role these prints played in the nation&amp;rsquo;s early history.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.loc.harpweek.com</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Stripper's Guide]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[Allan Holtz is a historian of American culture who specializes in newspaper comic strips of the past 150 years. In the course of this research, Holtz discovers and catalogs a vast amount of newspaper comic strips from every era of American history. His popular blog The Stripper&amp;rsquo;s Guide discusses the history of this important art form and showcases selections from Holtz&amp;rsquo;s own collection of rare comic strips. The result is a deeply informative website about another often-overlooked form of visual expression that has played a significant role in America&amp;rsquo;s cultural history. An obvious fanatic and veritable expert on the subject, Holtz posts a new image each day, accompanied by detailed explanations that provide historical context, aesthetic notes, and bits of artistic trivia. The main purpose of the site is to demonstrate the comic strip&amp;rsquo;s ever-changing role in American history, and Holtz accomplishes this with a dynamic combination of scholarly insight and digital technology, embedding his images within a blog framework that allows for user comments, posted links, and primary sources all on the same page, making The Stripper&amp;rsquo;s Guide emerge as a valuable online discussion of the intersection of art and history. ]]></description>
		<link>http://strippersguide.blogspot.com</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Beyond Face Value:  Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Produced by the United States Civil War Center, Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency, provides a detailed look at a unique subject matter; namely, American money. In particular, the site aims to uncover how deeply embedded slavery was in all aspects of Southern life. As evidence, the site offers hundreds of scans of Confederate currency, examining the documents for references to Southern economics, agriculture, and slavery itself. A series of scholarly essays by Civil War historians helps contextualize the phenomenon of Confederate currency and the unique set of political, social, and cultural conditions that created it. Beyond these introductory essays, however, there is little on the site to help the reader understand each individual image and the unique historical reality that it depicts. The site thus maintains an impressive collection of rarely seen primary sources, but lacks a corresponding detailed analysis to aid understanding. Nevertheless, Beyond Face Value catalogs an important set of sources, as Southerners consecrated their culture on the official documents of their seceded government. As site historian Harold Holzer aptly observes, &amp;quot;Much more than remnants of a shattered economy, these artifacts open a rare window onto the Confederacy's view of itself, and they deserve our attention as artistic and political, not just financial, currency.&amp;quot;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/BeyondFaceValue</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas:  A Visual Record]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[In some ways, the University of Virginia&amp;rsquo;s website The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record provides an example of visual history in its purest form. Devoid of any interpretive analysis or annotation, the documents presented on this website are meant to serve as a silent record of a specific historical phenomenon; in this case, the forced movement of African peoples to the Americas and their experience of slavery. As site historians Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr. explain, &amp;ldquo;little effort is made to interpret the images and establish the historical authenticity or accuracy of what they display. Individual users of this collection must decide such issues for themselves.&amp;rdquo; While this strategy may sound like a recipe for inaccurate conclusions, the site&amp;rsquo;s explicit goal is to simply serve as a guide for readers to make their own interpretations about a diverse set of images that depict a difficult research topic. The well over one thousand images on the site can be searched by keyword, or browsed through by categories that include maps, plantation scenes, ships, recreational activities, and a host of others. The result is a user-guided experience that allows for easy exploration of an extremely diverse and compelling collection of images whose interpretive possibilities are left open, but whose power resonates with historical significance.    ]]></description>
		<link>http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[African American Sheet Music 1820-1920]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[Brown University&amp;rsquo;s collection of African Sheet Music, part of a larger collection from the John Hay Library, digitally preserves and exhibits an impressive range of images unique to American cultural history. Sheet music for songs produced (and sometimes performed) by African Americans during the years 1820-1920 demonstrates the powerful intersection of race and entertainment that defined this era. The images on the site are typically of a single kind: full color scans of sheet music covers, followed by scans of the music itself. The covers are of particular interest for historians of visual culture, as they depict a whole range of racial attitudes (caricature, stereotypes, minstrelsy) as developed over an entire century. The site&amp;rsquo;s main strength lies in the impressive digital scans of these images, which can be zoomed into without losing clarity or detail. With attention to the collection&amp;rsquo;s ripe potential for scholarly research, this website offers nearly two thousand examples of African American sheet music, organized by themes and keywords, or completely searchable. While the historical context provided is limited to a few essays by experts in the field, the high-quality images and ease of navigation make this site an important repository for a compelling set of images.]]></description>
		<link>http://dl.lib.brown.edu/sheetmusic/afam/</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[National Gallery of Art Teaching Resource:  Exploring Themes in American Art]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[The National Gallery of Art&amp;rsquo;s website has produced a series of teaching resources that seek to illuminate the museum&amp;rsquo;s impressive collection by elaborating on the underlying historical context of each exhibited piece. This site divides its collection into a series of ten major themes that speak to the unique contributions of American art, with each image accompanied by contextual essays, detailed artist biographies, exhibition histories, and hyperlinked glossaries of important terms. The sheer volume of information available on this site makes for a rich educational experience, as users can find, either on the site itself or through helpfully placed links, virtually any information on these representative works of art. For example, clicking on the section titled &amp;ldquo;Historical Subjects&amp;rdquo; brings the user to an introductory essay about the use of historical events in painting, with a particular focus on American history. This essay contains links to representative examples found on other websites as well as brief biographies of relevant artists. The user can then continue to a thumbnail page on which several more examples exist as detailed scans with additional information embedded in the links. The overall experience, then, is much like taking a tour of a renowned museum, with a guide that has detailed knowledge of each piece&amp;rsquo;s historical importance and a digital connection to infinite additional resources.    ]]></description>
		<link>http://www.nga.gov/education/american/aasplash.shtm</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[NYPL Digital Gallery]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[The New York Public Library&amp;rsquo;s impressive collection of photographs is digitized and available for browsing on the library&amp;rsquo;s dynamic website.  The tremendous scope of visual materials on the site makes this an invaluable resource for historians, and the library has spent a great deal of time organizing this data so as to maximize its discovery and use.  Users can search independently using an advanced search function that keeps logs of the users search terms and results.  Simply browsing through the collection is made much easier by the broad categories that separate the photos; a linked menu of these categories appears in the navigation bar at the top of every page, and an illustrated version for Flash-enabled computers opens on this website's home page. The categories are Arts &amp;amp; Literature, Cities &amp;amp; Buildings, Culture &amp;amp; Society, History &amp;amp; Geography, Industry &amp;amp; Technology, Nature &amp;amp; Science, and Printing &amp;amp; Graphics.  Perhaps the site&amp;rsquo;s most helpful function for researchers is its presentation of detailed collection guides.  Each of these presentations includes a structured narrative about the digital contents and provides tools for further browsing: &amp;quot;Collection Contents&amp;quot; is a list of titles or a hierarchy of folders and sub-folders enabling researchers to move through a collection's content and follow its internal organization; &amp;quot;Related Subjects&amp;quot; provides a scoped index, derived from the subject terms in the collections' descriptive records.  Managing a collection this large (and historically significant) is no easy task, but the New York Public Library has created a website that is enormously helpful in making sense of it all.  ]]></description>
		<link>http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[American Centuries... View from New England]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[For users interested in a detailed visual exploration of early life in New England, from paintings of historic figures down to board games and bed linens, this site provides infinite entries into the specific ephemera of this historically rich environment. This digital collection exhibits approximately 2000 objects and transcribed document pages on New England life&amp;mdash;with a focus on Deerfield, Massachusetts&amp;mdash;from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. Appropriate for users from elementary school age to professional historians, the site offers a variety of ways to access material. Sets of interpretative texts (100&amp;ndash;600 words), intended for different age groups, are provided for each image. Users can browse according to major themes, including children, entertainment, military, rituals, and work. These categories in turn are subdivided into even more specific themes, such as marriage, toys, and travel, making for an intuitive browsing experience that is thematically consistent. The site also highlights 64 people, places, and events, allows text and category searching, and includes interactive exhibits over three transitional time periods (turns of the century). There are also lesson plans and study guides for elementary, middle, and secondary levels. ]]></description>
		<link>http://www.americancenturies.mass.edu</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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      <title><![CDATA[Portraits by Carl Van Vechten]]></title>
		<description><![CDATA[This online exhibit from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress collects and displays the work of photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), known for his striking black and white portraits of prominent cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century.  Van Vechten had a particular interest in photographing black artists and activists, and as a result this collection includes many rarely seen images of important leaders of the 1930s to 1950s. Visitors can browse the occupational index listing, which organizes the portraits into categories such as artists, authors, poets, singers, and sports figures. ]]></description>
		<link>http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/vanvechten</link>        
        <pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT</pubDate>  
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