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Weclome to SpeechWars, a great way to see what the candidates are saying. Simply type in a word, click "Go", and SpeechWars shows you how often the candidates used the word in their speeches. You can also compare two words by using both text boxes.

The United States Library of Congress has selected SpeechWars for inclusion in its official historic collections of Internet materials related to Election 2008. The United States Library of Congress preserves the Nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship extend to digital materials, including Web sites. The Library will make this collection available to researchers. The Library's vision is to preserve these Web materials about Election 2008, and to permit researchers from across the world to access them.

Just as the candidates have learned to use novel technology tools to reach young people during this year's presidential campaign, teachers like Mr. Sherif are turning to electronic resources to capture students' interest in the election. At the same time, they want to help students decipher the barrage of related images and information and to engage them in lessons about the democratic process today and throughout American history. "The technology is fun and helpful, but it's also a tool you can use to get a better understanding of what the political and historical issues are," said Mr. Sherif, who teaches history and science at the Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia.

For months, the magic that once surrounded Barack Obama's presidential candidacy was lost in a fog of petty politics: the negative ads, the Clinton dramas, the degrading of Obama to the status of a mere "celebrity," the back-and-forth with John McCain over who is an elitist and who is a flip-flopper. The recent direction of the campaign reflects a basic political fact: If this contest turns out to be a big election, Obama will almost certainly win. But if it is converted into a small election, Obama could well lose. And the McCain campaign has done all it could to bring Obama back to earth and to dissipate the sense of possibility he once inspired. If it did nothing else, this week's Democratic National Convention served as a reminder of the historical import of Obama's nomination and the astonishing transformation of the country in just three generations.

An excellent article about ways technology is being used to learn about the election and participate in the conversation.

Both major parties' historic tickets-a black man for president, a woman for vice president-as well as compelling economic and foreign-policy issues are converging with the campaigns' use of text-messaging, online networking, and nontraditional media venues to draw young people into the contest. Teachers have also seized on the opportunity to use the favored devices of today's students in teaching traditional civics lessons along with the 21st-century skills experts say people will need to thrive in the information age. "The idea is to teach kids as young as possible to be able to navigate this increasingly complicated media world by giving them some basic tools for analysis

The GOP opens its convention here Monday as a party in peril. Hobbled by an unpopular president, a disillusioned and divided base, and low poll ratings on almost every domestic issue, the party of Nixon and Reagan and Bush may well be at the end of a historic 40-year grasp on power, say conservative thinkers and political historians. Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 2006, and are now at risk of losing the Senate. They were defeated in special elections this year in congressional districts that in some cases hadn't elected a Democrat since the days of Lyndon Johnson.

Lincoln history