Welcome to the Scarsdale High School Library Phyllis DiBianco and Leonard Kerson, Librarians Library Catalog At Home Database Access

Resources for American Studies:

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress
The story of America is reflected in these images, sounds, written accounts, and a myriad more items of cultural documentation of ordinary people who live everyday lives, from cooking and eating meals, to the activities of work and play, to religious observances and seasonal celebration. Folk life includes the songs we sing, the stories we tell, the crafts we make.  Soon to include StoryCorps from NPR.

Smithsonian Source
Resources for Teaching American History
Includes teaching strategies, key topics with related resources, plus a searchable database. Suggestion: Sign up for the email newsletter. Also, from the Smithsonian Institute:

Smithsonian's History Explorer (Advanced Search page)
In addition to primary resources you can search for artifacts, interactive activities, media, lesson/unit plans, reviewed web sites, lesson/unit plans and more. You can search by keyword, grade level, historical era, and format,

Web Guides: Primary Documents in American History (Library of Congress)
Students can select a key document and receive a one page explanation followed by links to top web resources on this period.

New York Public Library Digital Collections
The Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
Here you can search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

The Authentic History Center
The AHC is comprised of artifacts and sounds from American popular culture. "It was created to teach that the everyday objects in society have authentic historical value and reflect the social consciousness of the era that produced them."

Free Teaching Resources from the Federal Government
Includes primary sources, animations, photos, videos from the U.S. government archives arranged by subject area.

American Journeys
American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later." The teacher section includes possible topics, lesson plans and more.

AwesomeStories
"AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites." Primary resources include documents, images, and video, It's resources are freely available for two types of memberships" individual and academic.

The National Archives
In addition to the historical documents of the U.S. the Archives also hold in trust for the public the records of ordinary citizens. They capture the past: America’s Historical Documents, many online exhibits with associated teachers’ lesson plans and various web pages describing records by research topic.

One Hundred Milestone Documents from 1776 to 1965
Includes transcripts and large images, the official text of Federal laws, Presidential documents, administrative regulations and notices, and descriptions of Federal organizations, programs and activities. These documents reflect our diversity and our unity, our past and our future, and mostly our commitment as a nation to continue to strive to "form a more perfect union."

Footnote
A partner of the National Archives, Footnote.com is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past. Its mission is to build an online community around history, using an amalgamation of the United States National Archives and social networking to foster contact between users who can download documents from the site and upload their own scanned content.

Documenting the American South
Courtesy of the University of North Carolina, this site provides historical documents including texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Includes twelve thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases
This site was provides a full range of resources and activities to support the teaching of landmark Supreme Court cases, helping students explore the key issues of each case.

Africans in America
This companion to Africans in America, a public television series, chronicles the history of racial slavery in the United States from the start of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century to the end of the American Civil War in 1865. For each part, there is a Narrative, which relates the history of the period and provides links to specific entries in the Resource Bank, people and events entries, historical documents (annotated visual materials and texts), and modern voices (commentaries). 

Chronology of US Historical Documents (University of Oklahoma)

Dr. Seuss Went to War
Political cartoons created by Theodor Seuss Geisel about WWII.

Eugenics Archive
Image Resources from Amercian Eugenics Movement

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
The Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum have partnered to create an online collection of some of the most influential and important American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. Digital images of the pages of each cookbook are available as well as full-text transcriptions and the ability to search within the books, across the collection.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
March 1925 Issues of Survey Graphic, which was the monthly illustrated number of Survey magazine, the premier journal of social work in America in the 1920s. This special issue was devoted to the African American "Renaissance" underway in Harlem. The magazine that resulted was the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community

Historical Text Archive: United States History
Articles, e-books, and links. The article section contains the articles, documents, essays, and photographs.

Japanese-American Internment
After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans encountered strong hostility, prejudice, and discrimination. Fearing that Japan might next strike the West Coast of the United States and that Japanese Americans would "spy" for the enemy, Thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West coast were rounded up and confined to internment camps located inland. These photos offer a view of what life was like for the Japanese Americans.

Letters Home from an Iowa Solider in the American Civil War
These letters are part of a collection written by Newton Robert Scott, Private, Company A, of the 36th Infantry, Iowa Volunteers. Most of the letters were written to Scott's neighborhood friend Hannah Cone, in their home town of Albia, Monroe County, Iowa, over the three year period that he served as Company A's clerk. The final letter, describing the long-awaited mustering out in August of 1865, was written to his parents.

Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its throrough documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music. The collection is especially strong in music spawned by m

Making of America
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

New Deal Network
A database of primary source materials—photographs, political cartoons, and texts (speeches, letters, and other historic documents)— gathered from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and other sources.

New York State Archives -- Rediscovering New York: History and Culture
Photographs, documents and online exhibits from New York's archives, historical societies, libraries and museums. The images reveal a tiny fraction of the documents, photographs, maps, and other archival records held by historical record respositories throughout New York and hint at the richness and variety of the collections that tell the stories of New York's communities and people.

New York State Archives -- The Legacies Project
The Legacies Project website is an educational resource from the New York State Archives and the Verizon Foundation that focuses on the history of the Chinese and Latino populations in the Capital District, Buffalo, Syracuse, Yonkers and New York City. It contains concise histories of the Chinese and Latino communities in each city and document-based activities. The histories and activities include definitions of important vocabulary terms and are illustrated with both historical and contemporary documents and photographs.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1841-1902
The digitization of the historic Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper from reels of microfilm covers the period from October 26, 1841 to December 31, 1902, representing half of the Eagle's years of publication. The actual images of the pages are searchable by date, keyword, type of article.

Propaganda Posters - World War II
The 338 items, primarily World War II-era posters, featured in this site's database were collected and preserved by the Northwestern University Government and Geographic Information and Data Services Department. Issued by various U.S. government agencies, these posters represent the government's effort, through art, illustration, and photographs, to pull the American people together in a time of adversity for the country and its population.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
From Duke University, includes special collections such as: Medicine and Madison Avenue

The Valley of the Shadow 
Examines images and artifacts of two communities, one northern and one southern throughout the Civil War.

The Wars for Vietnam, 1945-75
This site, developed around the course materials for Robert Brigham's senior seminar on the Viet Nam War at Vassar College, offers students an opportunity to examine some of those sources, including numerous official documents. Brigham was the first American scholar given access to the Vietnamese archives on the war in Hanoi. Included here are his translations of some of the Hanoi documents, offered for examination and study.

Women Working, 1880-1930
From the Harvard University collection, focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets, 1,200 photographs

World War II Resources
Original documents regarding all aspects of the war.

World-Wide Primary Sources

Subscription:

Associated Press Images - 150 years of international news images with captions.

Web:

Avalon Project (Yale Law School)
International documents in law, history and diplomacy from 4000 BCE to 2003 CE translated into English. Additional collections include Project DIANA - An Online Human Rights Archive and The International Military Tribunal for Germany - A Document Collection

World Digital Library
Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings; interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing; browse by place, time, topic, type of item or global institution; developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress with contributions by partner institutions in many countries.

East Asia, including South and Southeast Asia

Holocaust Chronicle

Costume History

EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe

European Visual Archive
Historical photographs dating from 1840 to today

Europeana
Explore the image, text, sound and video resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.

German Propaganda Archive - A collection of English translations of propaganda material from Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic

Graphic Design from the 1920s and 1930s
in Travel Ephemera (International)

International Archival Resources on the Internet

International Institute of Social History Collections

Internet History Sourcebook Project
Ancient, medieval and modern history sources

Nuremberg trial transcripts
Materials (Incomplete) from the Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion Donovan collection

Soviet Posters
Soviet posters first appeared during the ProletarianRevolution in Russia - they delivered Communist Party's slogans to themasses and called on workers and peasants to fight for freedom and justice. Posters from 1917 through the 1990s.

The Visual Front
Posters from the Spanish Civil War

They Still Draw Pictures
Spanish Children's Drawing During the Spanish Civil War, circa 1938

Voices from the Archive (BBC)
Original audio of interviews through 20th century in all fields

Multimedia Content:

THIRTEEN: Teachers' Domain
Free downloadable videos from PBS / Thirteen and National Science Foundation covering all subject areas, many from NOVA, Frontline, American Experience. Advanced Search by grade levels and media type. Create account; save to personal folder.

Internet Archive
Scarsdale alum Brewster Kahle is compiling "FREE ACCESS to all human knowledge". A digital library of all previous Internet sites (Wayback Machine) and cultural artifacts. Free access to film, photo, books, audio, journals, and more.

Talking History
University at Albany, State University of New York  has a production, distribution, and instructional center for all forms of "aural" history, including a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, commentaries, archival audio sources. Some of the most talented radio producers and engineers currently working in public and non-commercial radio now contribute to Talking History.

Teaching with Primary Sources:

Learning Page of the American Memory Collection
From the Library of Congress, this collection of sets the standard for teaching resources. Begin with The Learning Page for teachers or go directly to the collection where you can browse by collection and/or search.

** DocsTeach from National Archive Experience
Create your own new dynamic classroom activity with interactive engaging tools. Select themes, time periods, exchange primary source documents and modify activity instructions. Log in to borrow from an even larger selection from fellow educators.

Picturing Modern America: Historical Thinking Exercises for Middle & High School Students
This site introduces students to historical documents! Created by the National Endowment for the Humanaities using resources from the American Memory collection, this site motivates students to deepen their understanding of common topics in the study of modern America 1880-192, and develop skills in analyzing primary sources, especially visual source.

Poster Analysis Worksheet

Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans (NARA)
From the National Archives, this site includes "reproducible copies of primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives of the United States, teaching activities correlated to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government, and cross-curricular connections. Includes analysis worksheets for eight types of resources.