Survival Tips for College Students:
•How to
read like a historian:
Having trouble keeping up with class readings? I've put together
some tips
on how to read more efficiently and effectively.
It downloads as a .pdf file. For further advice, take a look at
Professor Timothy Burke's helpful
essay.
•How to
write like a historian:
Troubled by the passive voice
or run-on sentences? Unsure when to use "I" in your prose? Want
to learn
more about how and why history professors often have different
expectations
for student papers than philosophy or English professors? Go here
for a great
collection
of writing "hand-outs" on these and other topics, prepared by an
institution dear to my heart, the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For more general writing
advice, download (.pdf) my own handout on how to
write an argumentative essay in college. It lays out some
overall essay-writing principles and offers a step-by-step process for
writing better papers.
•How to
talk like a historian:
Click here to download as a .pdf file my glossary
of terms used in History 388 (Historiography).
Sites Especially for History Teachers:
California
History-Social Science Standards (This page has useful info for
teachers)
National
Center for History in the Schools (info on national standards,
primary
sources, and lesson plans on U.S. and world history
The
History Teacher is a journal written by and for K-12 and college
teachers. Issues from 2000
to 2009 are here. J-Stor has older volumes.
History
Matters (a large site containing documents and designed for high
school
and university history teachers) signed
f
Classroom
Lesson Plans (links from the History News Network)
Best of History Websites
(links to well-chosen lesson plans on other websites)
Historic
Maps in K-12 Classrooms (with lesson plans)
Teaching
the JAH (Journal of American History (a great way to bring
cutting-edge
scholarship into the classroom)
H-Net
Discussion Lists (over a hundred discussion groups on specialized
topics
in history, from H-California to H-Africa to H-Women)
Finding Primary Sources and Documents
One of the best ways to find a primary document
is to visit a general search engine such as www.google.com
and
type "sources" or "documents" along with whatever
subject you are interested in you are interested in (Native Americans,
Reconstruction, etc.). As a general rule, documents presented on
academic
websites (.edu) are the most reliable sources. To limit your
Google
search to only .edu sites, enter your search words and then type
"site:.edu"
as well.
Primary Documents for General U.S. History
(a
very small sampling):
Ad
Access (a very rich collection of historical print advertisements,
in color and black and white)
American
Memory Collection Finder (a general home page for Library of
Congress
collections online)
The U.S. National
Archives
has some of its VAST collection on-line.
History
Matters (an extensive site with documents and exhibits)
The National
Humanities Center offers documents and teaching ideas on U.S.
history from 1492 through the 1960s
Modern
History Source Book (lots of links for U.S. and world history)
Duke
University Library sources (digitized collections on advertising,
medicine,
the Civil War, music, women's and African-American history, and more)
The
American Presidency Project
(contains primary documents, including
audio and video streams going back to Benjamin Harrison)
Miller
Center for Public Affairs (read and listen to speeches from U.S.
presidents;
also contains oral history collections on U.S. politics)
Women
and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
The
Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2008
Film
and U.S. History (documents and old movie trailers)
Professor Rebecca
Edwards has material on the Gilded Age (1865-1905), drawn from her
book New Spirits)
Sources on Immigration
History (1790-1930) from Harvard University Library
The
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (an exhibit on a deadly 1909 factory fire)
The
Anti-Saloon League, 1893-1933
Culture
Wars: 1920s America
America
in the 1930s
The
Literature and Culture of the American 1950s
America
from the Great Depression to World War II (a Library of Congress
site
with thousands of archival photographs)
Professor
Erika Lee has good links on Asian-American history
Resources
for Chicano Studies from UCLA library
Densho: The
Japanese
American Legacy Project (a source for information on
Japanese-American
internment during World War II)
UCSB
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
(listen to mp3 files
of popular music from the early 20th century. These songs were
originally recorded on wax or aluminum, but now you can download them
as mp3 files. It's convenient! It's even legal!)
Internet Movie
Database (looking for a movie set in a certain historical period or
place? Type in some keywords on this great site)
Internet Archives Movie
Archive (a great source for short old movies, especially
documentary shorts from the mid-twentieth century)
Primary Documents for the History of U.S.
International
Relations:
Professor
Vincent Ferraro
at Mt. Holyoke College has assembled a useful collection of documents
on his website, with a concentration from 1898 to the present.
The
National Security Archive (a large collection of declassified U.S.
government documents spanning the Cold War era through current events)
Cold
War International History Project (a good site for new scholarship
and newly released government documents from outside the United States,
especially from former Communist states)
Professor Nick
Sarantakes has a good set of general links on primary sources.
Avalon
Project at Yale Law School (an extensive collection of documents
from
the 18th century up to the 9-11-2001 attacks)
Project
Diana: Online Human Rights Archive
Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS) (This valuable series is the
U.S. State Department's collection of important policymaking
documents.
FRUS is currently online for most of the 1960s, and volumes from
earlier
and later years are slowly coming up. You can find bound volumes
for all
years in the third floor of JFK library in the JX233 section of the
stacks.
Please note that, due to declassification delays, this series currently
has nothing more recent than records from the Nixon administration.)
FRUS
online (offers partial but still substantial on-line versions of
FRUS
from 1863 to 1958. Almost all of these volumes are also in JFK
library.)
World
War I and World War II Posters
World
War II Poster Collection
Dr.
Seuss Went to War (Yes, the famous children's author also drew
war-related
cartoons!)
Documents
on the Decision to Use Atomic Bombs in 1945
Another
good documents site on the 1945 atomic bombings, from the National
Security Archive
The
Wars for Vietnam, 1945 to 1975
Listen
to the President Think Out Loud! Telephone Recording from Lyndon
Johnson's
White House
Listen
to the President: Transcripts of Two 1965 Conversations on Vietnam
PBS
Frontline "The War Behind Closed Doors" (on George W. Bush's
foreign
policy in the Middle East)
H-Diplo
Resources page (few links to primary sources but a good place to
learn
about different archives and organization in the field)
French History:
Archives
nationales
Bibliothèque
nationale de France
Stanford
French Studies Links for Research in France
French Cheese:
See pictures of handsome cheeses on the website of
what might be the world's
greatest
cheese shop (in Toulouse, France)
Two formidable cheeses have homepages here: Pont
L'Evêque and Livarot
California has some pretty good cheese too, as
with those from the
Cowgirl
Creamery in Point Reyes
Curdnerds.com
(the self-proclaimed Internet Home of Cheese Aficionados)
The
Cheese Guide from Nicole's Gourmet Imports in South Pasadena
Explore the all-American technology behind Easy
Cheese, one of the few cheeses that can be consumed through a straw!
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