Here are a few selected resources of interest from this week's Internet Scout Project:
The Pew Center on the States: Trends to Watch
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/trends.aspx
Change is afoot in the United States, and the Pew Center on the States has created their "Trends to Watch" site for policymakers, public officials, and members of the public at large. The backbone of the site is found in the overview they offer related to eight major economic, technological, social and environmental trends and issues likely "to be profound determinants of the prospects of states in the next 10 years." These issues include migration patterns ("The Big Sort"), political participation ("Demand for Democracy"), and climate change ("Green Wave"). Visitors can click on each of these eight major trends and issues to retrieve thematic and interactive maps, data tables, and press releases. Additionally, visitors can view state by state comparisons, and compare all of the 50 states via handy and easy-to-read charts and graphs. The site is well-designed and easy to navigate, and visitors can also sign up for electronic newsletters and their RSS feed.
Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800
http://wardepartmentpapers.org/
After a traumatic and devastating fire in 1800, many historians though that the early files of the United States War Department were essentially lost forever. Thankfully, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University recently completed a decade long project to locate all of these records and place them online here. The collection is a very important one, because during this time period the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, and naval affairs. The project was begun in earnest by Ted Crackel in the mid-1990s and it involved visits to over 200 repositories and consulting over 3,000 collections in the United States, Canada, England, France, and Scotland. Now, visitors can browse through 55,000 documents, and also perform detailed searches, complete with links to digitized images of each document. Interested parties can also browse the collection by year or person of interest. In short, this is an extremely valuable project that will be of interest to those with a penchant for American history, and early American military history in particular.
The Fathom Archive
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/
The University of Chicago's Fathom project consisted of a site whose goal was to bring accessible online learning resources to people around the world, whether student, professional, educator, or lifelong learner. And they succeeded, via a consortium of fourteen educational and cultural institutions committed to that very goal. This site contains the full archive of the Fathom project, which is part of the University of Chicago Library's Digital Collections. To see the list of the members of the consortium, click on "History of Fathom", in the middle of the homepage. After that, click on "Browse the Archive" at the top of the homepage to browse all of the works by title or author. The topics cover a broad array of material, from capital punishment to human cloning to studies of race and ethnicity.
One Life: The Mask of Lincoln
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/lincoln/
In time for both Lincoln's 200th birthday and Barack Obama's inauguration, this small exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery explores the still-mysterious nature of the 16th U.S. president, through portraits selected from the Gallery's collections. Examples include a small-size copy of an Alexander Hesler photograph; Lincoln with "tousled hair" which was produced in 1860 so it could be cut out and worn as a campaign pin; an engraving of the First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation; a drawing of Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln; and the famous cracked plate portrait, one of the last images made of Lincoln, taken in February 1865 by Alexander Gardner. The audio tour provides answers from David Ward, Historian, National Portrait Gallery, to some persistent Lincoln questions, such as "Why is this portrait cracked?" which refers to the Gardner portrait, or "In what way did Lincoln try to manage the explosiveness of the Emancipation Proclamation?" which refers to the engraving of the First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Copyright Internet Scout, 1994-2009. Internet Scout (http://scout.wisc.edu/), located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides information about the Internet to the U.S. research and education community under a grant from the National Science Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The government has certain rights in this material. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the entire Scout Report provided this paragraph, including the copyright notice, are preserved on all copies.
