The Voices of the People: A Focus Workshop
December 4 , 2010
Web Resources
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| Website: | Description: | |||
| http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whatkind.html
What kind of historical sources are diaries and letters? | This collection of essays explores the benefits and pitfalls of using diaries and letters in a history curriculum. | |||
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/diary/
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The Wisconsin Historical Society has digitized a selection some of the diaries in their collections with brief explanatory notes, images of the original pages, and links leading to more information. The project started with the journal of the only member of the Lewis and Clark expedition to die en route, Sgt. Charles Floyd, the journal and other documents from Marquette and Joliet's 1673 voyage across Wisconsin and down the Mississippi and now contains excerpts from the 1834 Diary of Presbyterian missionary Cutting Marsh (1800-1873 and the1863 diary of Emily Quiner, young Madison woman who decided in June 1863 to go work in a Civil War hospital. | |||
| http://dohistory.org/diary/
| Martha Ballard was an 18th century midwife, who wrote in her diary nearly every day from January 1, 1785 to May 12, 1812 for a total of almost 10,000 entries. At this site, you can explore the contents of the diary, try your hand at transcribing or learn more about Martha and her time. | |||
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The Duke University Library system has digitized some of their extensive collection and gather links that reflect women’s experience in the Civil War. This site contains multiple digitized diaries and letters of Southern women written during the conflict. |
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The Duke University Library system has digitized letters and a memoir of African-American women which reflect their experiences under slavery and Reconstruction. | |||
| http://solomon.imld.alexanderstreet.com/
| This site compiles the voices of 2,162 authors providing personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. It includes contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, and can be browsed by date, place, author or cultural heritage. | |||
| http://www.over-land.com/diaries.html
| One of the few non-academic sites on the list, this website has collected links to numerous digitized diaries, memoirs and letters from emigrants to the American West. It represents many voices from Westward Expansion. |
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| http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/
Documenting the American South | "First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.”Although occasionally difficult to search, this collection has some incredibly valuable sources. Check out the highlights page (http://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/archive.html) and the classroom page (http://docsouth.unc.edu/classroom/) for ideas to get you started | |||
| http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/etext/collections/diaries/
| Six digitized diaries of northeastern women covering time periods from 1850 to1941. |
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| http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/nbhihtml/pshome.html
Prairie Stories: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters | This digital collection integrates two collections from the holdings of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Solomon D. Butcher photographs and the letters of the Uriah W. Oblinger family. Approximately 3,000 glass plate negatives crafted by Butcher record the process of settlement in Nebraska between 1886 and 1912.. The approximately 3,000 pages of Oblinger family letters discuss land, work, neighbors, crops, religious meetings, problems with grasshoppers, financial problems, and the Easter Blizzard of 1873. In the eloquent letters exchanged between Uriah and his wife Mattie, and in letters to other family members, Oblinger expresses very personal insight into the joy, despair, and determination in their struggle to establish a home on the prairie |
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| ORAL HISTORY SITES | ||||
http://www.tellmeyourstories.org/ Tell Me Your Stories |
This website contains a curriculum designed around collecting and using oral histories to teach history. |
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Alive in Truth recorded life histories of people from New Orleans,
Louisiana and nearby areas who were affected by Hurricane Katrina from 2005
to 2006. Our goal was to document individual lives, restore community bonds,
and to uphold the voices, culture, rights, and history of New Orleanians.
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http://www.tellingstories.org/index.html
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High school students at the Urban School of San Francisco conduct and film interviews with elders who have witnessed key historic events of the 20th century | |||
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html
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“From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former
slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists
under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves,
most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War,
provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities,
and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for
understanding the lives of America's four million slaves.”
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http://media.library.ohiou.edu/cantigny/
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This project captures twenty-two videotaped oral histories of soldiers and guardsmen who served with the First Division of the U.S. Army from 1944 to 2009. | |||
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/voces/
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This project seeks to document and
create a better awareness of the contributions of Latinos and Latinas of the
WWII, Korean War and Vietnam War generations. On this site you will find
hundreds of stories, thousands of photos, oral history training videos.
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http://wpcf.org/oralhistory/ohhome.html
Women in Journalism
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This award-winning,
nationwide oral history project includes comprehensive, full-life interviews
with women journalists who have made significant contributions to society
through careers in journalism since the 1920s. The nearly sixty interviews
provide an important documentary record of the experiences of women in
seeking acceptance in journalism and the impact that this development has had
on the reporting and editing of the nation's news. The interviews also
document changes in the roles, expectations, opportunities, and obstacles for
women in American society during this century.
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| Illinois
Oral Histories:
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http://memory.loc.gov/wpaintro/ilcat.html
Library of
Congress: WPA Illinois Life Stories
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These titles are mostly first-person
accounts of life in Chicago collected during the Great Depression
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http://www.alplm.org/oral_history/projects.html
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library |
The ALPL has collected videos and
oral histories from oral histories around a few specific topics such as
agriculture, statecraft, veterans’ experiences and African-American
experiences. If you enter any of those sections, the interviews are listed
alphabetically with attached blurbs.
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http://will.illinois.edu/tv/vietnam-soldiers-stories
WILL- Vietnam Soldiers’ Stories
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In these videos, the reminiscences of
local veterans are intercut with combat footage.
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http://will.illinois.edu/WWII/
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WILL’s Central Illinois World
War II Stories project focuses on recording untold World War II
stories and making them available through broadcast and the Web.
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http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/
Illinois
State Museum
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This collection of interviews about
Illinois agriculture ranges from the 1950s to the 2000s, in either audio or
visual format. Searchable by
person or by geography (look at the interview map: http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/people/map.)
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http://www.loc.gov/vets/vets-portal.html
Library
of Congress
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A collection of links to oral history
projects dedicated to the experiences of veterans and civilians during
wartime.
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| Websites for Using Sources in the Classroom | Description | |||
http://www.indiana.edu/~cshm/k-12ed.html University of Indiana Center for History and Memory
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The Center for History and Memory explores different ways of using oral histories and personal narratives in the classroom. | |||
| http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/history/resources/pubs/usingprimarysources/index.cfm
ALA: Using Primary Sources | A site for beginners. This site explores what a primary source is, how to find it and how to use it. | |||
| Websites Exploring the Historiography around Historical Memory: | ||||
| http://www.learner.org/courses/worldhistory/unit_overview_2.html
Bridging World History
| The first few paragraphs from this syllabus offer a clear look at the challenges of historical memory. | |||
| http://cwmemory.com/2006/06/03/history-vs-memory/
Civil War Memory: Reflections of a High School History Teacher & Civil War Historian | This blog post offers a thoughtful discussion of the issues we are addressing today. | |||
| http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.3/ah0302000821.html
| Medieval historian Barbara Rosenwein examines the scholarship around historical emotion and how it has evolved as modern psychology has evolved. | |||
| Websites to hear more Voices of the People: | ||||
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The Zinn Education Project |
“The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. . . . Its goal is to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of United States history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. Zinn’s[books] emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history. Students learn that history is made not by a few heroic individuals, but instead by people’s choices and actions, thereby also learning that their own choices and actions matter." | |||
| http://www.inthefirstperson.com/firp/index.shtml
| In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. | |||
| http://www.pbs.org/pov/regardingwar/
| This is a collection of modern voices, writing about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war zones. Although not historical, this compendium explores the realities of these situations. [Warning, some of these stories are graphic] | |||
| http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/991224.smith.html
| From NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” collection, this site features the taped reminiscences of Meryln Snyder of Ohio in 1945 and David Terry Smith recording his experiences in Vietnam. | |||
| http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html
| Not limited to American History, this collection of digital primary sources utilizes all forms of media to tell historical stories. | |||
| http://www.hpol.org/
| “History and Politics Out Loud is a searchable archive of politically significant audio materials for teachers, scholars and students." | |||