This webpage describes a National DIgital Newspaper Program that is a partnership between the NEH and Library of Congress. It aims to provide access to internet users. THis could be a great resource for teachers to use in classrooms... often other subscriptions to databases can be licensed and quite expensive to use.
The Valley of the Shadow (also called the Valley Project) website is a part of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. The material in the site documents the lives of two communities during the Civil War period; one community from the South and one community from the North. The site is an online library or an archive filled with primary resources such as letter, diaries, census records, government records, newspapers, speeches, maps, images and other materials. The site contains thousands of documents.
The archive is divided into three sections: The Eve of War (Fall 1859-Spring 1861), The War Years (Spring 1861-Spring 1865), and The Aftermath (Spring 1865-Fall 1870).
An example of one such document is a letter written in August, 1864 by a young militiaman to his parents telling them that he is well and that he will be sending home his pay. I have added a few lines because I find it so interesting and compelling. The letter comes from a camp near Petersburg.
Dear Parents
it is with the Greatest of Pleashure that I seat My self to inform you and My Brothers and Sisters that I like it well and am well feal Hartey like ite beter now than Ever I did I hope that youens Ar all well and all the Rest about [unclear: tomstorm] ile now state to you that I Received your Letter last Knight And was Glad to here from youens And was glad to here that Youenes wasened yet dissturbed By The Johneys Rebes you Stated in your letter that tha Wes moveing every thing out Of Town now if tha wold be men tha wold take
In the same document but another page, the young man writes about his pay.
Read this letter we ar getting Paid off to day I draw 1.20.10 that is one hundrad 20 dollars 10 cts Ile ex press 1 hundrade 10 dollars and mebbey fifteen dollars I dont want to ceep so mutch money here I cend it to you and if you want to make youse of it whi you may get the Chirldren wat ever tha want that is in the eating line And Close but you must be A littl
I ran out of room in the box above.....anyway, I am not certain what the citation rules are regarding this but I found the letter on the website that I have bookmarked, The Valley of the Shadow.
Anyway, it is a great site….there is soooo much more.
This website was created and maintained by the Virginia Center for Digital History, the Carter Woodson Center for African and Afro-American Studies, and the University of Virginia. You can contact these folks about the project via email.
The site emphasizes a great holistic approach to studying an African American community in Virginia after the fall of the Confederate States of America and up through the first half of the twentieth century. They include oral histories, maps of Charlottesville, census reports, city records, political materials, personal papers of residents, newspapers (including two African American papers), as well as images.
For educators, I think this might be a great way to teach Jim Crow and/or Reconstruction in the South through exploratory web quests. If the students have access to computers in a school, they could investigate the website at their own pace and answer essential questions or pose questions themselves for others to answer. Also, teachers could use the primary sources as classroom aides for their students to examine.
Densho is an organization that is dedicated to "preserving the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during WWII before their memories are extinguished." The website does offer a great deal of information and document to support this mission; however, there is much more! There is a huge archive with photographs, newspaper articles from around the country, immigration documents, proof of citizenship documents, photographs of artifacts, and videotapings of interviews with the grandchildren of the first generation of immigrants. Many of these archived documents date back to the late 1800s.
There is also a filter with a timeline and a glossary that is useful in understanding the events during the period of immigration through WWII and the period of incarceration.
The site is a great resources for teachers and students alike!
Has timelines arranged around the following:
"a) Jamestown in the Global Context
b) Journey to Jamestown - the Voyage of the Susan Constant and the first 90 days at the fort
c) Jamestown, 1606-1608
d) Virginia, 1608-1612
e) New England, 1602-1620"
Includes contemporary interviews with Native American descendants of Jamestown as well as maps of the Native American towns that predated Jamestown in this area. Also contains a Google Earth map based on the original drawings of John Smith.
"Dr. Julie Solometo researched and organized the entry on the Paspahegh Indians. What the English called Jamestown, the Indians called Paspahegh territory.. Interviews and videotaping of contemporary Indians was done by Phyannon Berkowitz, Jeffery Dalton, and Crandall Shifflett."
From the Site:
"Letters and first-hand accounts allow us to see seventeenth-century society as no other record can.
. . .
They are best approached with the questions: what are the authors trying to tell us and what are their agendas? These materials do give us a sense of the contingencies, uncertainties,and dilemmas that surrounded choices and when read critically should lead to a better understanding of what factors shaped individual decisions.
newspapers A full-text searchable database (XML) gives us a powerful tool for tracing and comparing topics, ideas, concepts, motivations, and much more from vantage points of time, space, power, authority, race, class, gender, and ethnicity"
LESSON PLANS!!!!
Some of these are even in our exact format!!!
All are on Jamestown. Lots about runaway slaves and indentured servants, some on Native American relationships.
Most make use of primary documents.
Check em out! :-)
From the website: "The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment." As a work in progress, Virtual Jamestown aims to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony."