Tag: American history
A Night With Voice of Witness: August 16 @ 6pm in the MLK Student Union at UC Berkeley
This Tuesday—August 16, 2016—please join us along with Voice of Witness for an evening of oral history and human rights. OHC interviewer, Shanna Farrell, will moderate a lively discussion between Voice of Witness editors, Peter Orner (Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives) and Robin Levi (Inside this Place, Not of it: Narratives from Women’s Prisons) on the intersections of oral history methods, access, and social justice.
The event will begin at 6pm in the MLK Student Union’s Tilden Room (5th Floor). Light refreshments will be served and Voice of Witness books will be available for purchase.
This event is sponsored by OHC’s Advanced Oral History Summer Institute, which brings together students, faculty and scholars from across the United States for an intensive week of study and discussion. For more details, see the Oral History Center website.
Primary Sources: Colonial State Papers
The Library has acquired Colonial State Papers, a joint venture of ProQuest and the National Archives (UK) that resulted in the digitization of the Colonial Office Collection 1, Privy Council and related bodies: America and West Indies, Colonial Papers. It contains thousands of papers that were presented to the Privy Council and the Board of Trade between 1574-1757, and which relate to England’s governance of, and activities in, the American, Canadian and West Indian colonies.
Included in this database is the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739, a bibliographic tool providing over 40,000 descriptive records. The Calendar covers not only CO 1, but also documents from many other collections relating to the colonial past. Many of the bibliographic entries in The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739 are supplemented with full transcriptions, extracts or summary abstracts, all of which can be searched in Colonial State Papers.
The search box defaults to searching both Colonial State Papers and the Calendar, but it is possible to limit your search to just items that have been digitized, and those documents can be downloaded as images or PDFs. Each record also has a durable URL that can be linked to from bCourses or a website.
The quality of the scanned images is very high, which helps with the fact that the original documents and hand-written, and sometimes stained, damaged, or faded. Tools built into the database will allow you to zoom in to see detail.
Primary Sources: British Pamphlets Relating To the American Revolution, 1764-1783
A recent addition to the resources we acquire through British Online Archives is British Pamphlets Relating To the American Revolution, 1764-1783. According to the collection description, it “includes a copy of every available British and Irish pamphlet relating to the American Revolution that was printed in Great Britain between January 1st 1764 and December 31st 1783. Broadsides and controversial books which are relevant to the various aspects are also included. Two publications that lie outside the chronological limits of The American Controversy have also been included, one from 1763 and another from 1784, in order to complete a series of tracts on a common theme.
“In addition to British and Irish pamphlets, those American and European pamphlets that were reprinted in Britain between 1764 and 1783 feature alongside British parliamentary speeches that were published for outside readers, public reports and papers (though not government documents such as royal proclamations and parliamentary bills and acts). Pamphlets concerning Quebec have been included as the debate over its administration and government impinged on the pre-war disputes between Britain and the American colonies.”
Digital Humanities: Mapping Occupation
Quoted from the project website:
“Mapping Occupation, by Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit, captures the regions where the United States Army could effectively act as an occupying force in the Reconstruction South. For the first time, it presents the basic nuts-and-bolts facts about the Army’s presence, movements that are central to understanding the occupation of the South. That data in turn reorients our understanding of the Reconstruction that followed Confederate surrender. Viewers can use these maps as a guide through a complex period, a massive data source, and a first step in capturing the federal government’s new reach into the countryside.
“From the start of the Civil War and through the 1870s, the U.S. Army remained the key institution that newly freed people in the South could access as they tried to defend their rights. While slaves took the crucial steps to seize their chance at freedom, soldiers helped convince planters that slavery was dead, overturned local laws and court cases, and in other ways worked with freed people to construct a new form of federal power on the ground.
“The army was central to the story of Reconstruction, yet basic information about where the Army was, in what numbers, and with what types of troops, has been difficult to find. Downs gathered this information from manuscript sources in the National Archives and other repositories in preparation for his book, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015). Mapping Occupation presents an expanded version of this information in an online interface and as a downloadable data. Downs and Nesbit then used these locations to create rough estimates of the Army’s reach and, importantly, the places from which freedpeople and others could reach the Army in order to bring complaints about outrages and other forms of injustice. The methods by which we created these estimates are discussed here.
“Mapping Occupation presents this history and geography in two ways: as a spatial narrative, guiding the user through key stages in the spatial history of the army in Reconstruction; and as an exploratory map, in which users are free to build their own narratives out of the data that we have curated here. Both afford visitors to the site important tools for mapping the Army’s reach in the Reconstruction South.”
Primary Sources: ProQuest Regulatory Insight
The Library has recently acquired ProQuest Regulatory Insight, which contains administrative law histories organized by public law. Created as a companion product to Legislative Insight, Regulatory Insight reveals what happens after a law is passed — what rulemaking process is undertaken to implement the law. It provides regulatory histories compiled by editors that bring together the various rules and notices associated with a specific public law.
This resource is still being developed and additional content will be added throughout 2016. Currently it includes:
- ProQuest Regulatory Histories for Public Laws enacted from 2001-2015**
- Federal Register documents for 2001-present*
- Code of Federal Regulations from 2001-2015*
The database can be searched by keyword, but more precise results are retrieved if you search using a Federal Register or Code of Federal Regulations citation. You can also search by Public Law number, Statutes at Large citation, U.S. Code citation, Regulation Identifier Number, and agency docket number.
Primary Sources: The Papers of Andrew Jackson Digital Edition
In the early 1970s the History department at University of Tennessee-Knoxville began a project to make Jackson’s papers publicly available. According to their website, the team conducted a worldwide search and “obtained photocopies of every known and available Jackson document, including letters he wrote and received, official and military papers, drafts, memoranda, legal papers, and financial records.”
In 1987 the Project issued 39 microfilm reels that included all known documents that had not already appeared on the Library of Congress or National Archives microfilms. This resource is available at Stanford.
Now they are producing a series of seventeen volumes that will bring together what they consider to be Jackson’s most important papers. Volumes I through IX have been published, bringing the series through 1831, Jackson’s third presidential year. Volume X, covering 1832, is now in preparation.
The published volumes of The Papers of Andrew Jackson are available in a digital edition that has recently been acquired by the Library.
Additional sources of papers you might be interested in:
The Library of Congress has the largest collection of Andrew Jackson’s papers and our collection of 74 reels of their published microfilm is located in Newspapers and Microforms, call number MICROFILM 4007 E. (Two volumes of these have been digitized at the Center for Research Libraries.)
Jackson documents also are included in the federal government records located in the National Archives and are part of the M and T microfilm series.
For the years that the Jackson Project has not yet reached, there is an older seven-volume collection, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, available in the Main (Gardner) Stacks.
Primary Sources: The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition
The Library has acquired access to the digital edition of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, a landmark work in historical and legal scholarship that draws upon thousands of sources to trace the Constitution’s progress through each of the thirteen states’ conventions.
The work is the result of the NHPRC and NEH funded Ratification Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the goal of which is to collect, preserve, publish, and encourage the use of primary documentary sources dealing with the debate over the ratification of the United States Consitution and the Bill of Rights between 1787 and 1791. The project has collected copies of over 60,000 documents, including convention and legislative records, private papers, and newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets.
The digital edition currently includes these volumes of the Ratification series:
- Volume I: Constitutional Documents and Records, 1776-1787
- Volume II: Ratification by the States: Pennsylvania
- Volume III: Ratification by the States: Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut*
- Volume IV: Ratification by the States: Massachusetts, No. 1
- Volume V: Ratification by the States: Massachusetts, No. 2
- Volume VI: Ratification by the States: Massachusetts, No. 3
- Volume VII: Ratification by the States: Massachusetts, No. 4
- Volume VIII: Ratification by the States: Virginia, No. 1
- Volume IX: Ratification by the States: Virginia, No. 2
- Volume X: Ratification by the States: Virginia, No. 3
- Volume XIII: Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 1
- Volume XIV: Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 2
- Volume XV: Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 3
- Volume XVI: Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 4
- Volume XVII:Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 5
- Volume XVIII: Commentaries on the Constitution, No. 6
- Volume XIX, Ratification by the States: New York, No. 1
- Volume XX, Ratification by the States: New York, No. 2
- Volume XXI: Ratification by the States: New York, No. 3
- Volume XXII: Ratification by the States: New York, No. 4
- Volume XXIII: Ratification by the States: New York, No. 5
- Volume XXIV: Ratification by the States: Rhode Island, No. 1
- Volume XXV: Ratification by the States: Rhode Island, No. 2
- Volume XXVI: Ratification by the States: Rhode Island, No. 3
Event: Visualizing History: Mapping the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair
Join Bancroft Library in celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exhibition by digitally mapping rarely seen photographs of the world’s fair onto a historic map of the fairgrounds using the Historypin platform.
The event will kick off with a gallery tour by Curator Theresa Salazar of the Bancroft Library’s PPIE exhibit: The Grandeur of a Great Labor: The Building of the Panama Canal and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, followed by a reception and brief talk in the beautiful Morrison Library.
Participants will then work together to explore archival images of the world’s fair and try to pinpoint the exact locations where the photos were taken. Using maps and guides as you would have 100 years ago, you’ll virtually find your way through “The Zone” and its sometimes-fatal carnival rides, wander through the massive exhibit halls, and marvel at the architecture of the state and country pavilions. History “pinners” will see their results live on the Historypin PPIE site at the event. We guarantee you’ll never see SF’s Marina neighborhood the same way again!
Thursday, November 19, 2015
4:00-4:30 pm – Location: Bancroft Library Gallery
Bancroft Library Gallery Tour with Curator Theresa Salazar – meet in the Bancroft Library lobby (following the gallery tour, participants will be escorted to the Morrison Library for the remainder of the event)
4:30-7:00 pm – Location: Morrison Library
Welcome Reception and Talk by Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.
Demonstration and Pinathon
After a quick tour of the virtual fairgrounds, you’ll have a chance to get hands-on working in groups to help us pin historic images from Bancroft’s collections onto the 1915 fairground map, using clues, fair guides, maps, and more.
Live sharing on Historypin PPIE Site
We will have groups share some of the just-pinned materials Live on the Historypin PPIE site—Tell us what you discovered in your time travels!
Resource: OldNYC Mapping historical photos from the NYPL
OldNYC provides an alternative way of browsing the extensive collection of Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s held at the New York Public Library. The site was created (in collaboration with others) by software engineer Dan Vanderkamof, who also built OldSF. Each of the websites is an interactive city map that contains dots at the locations where each photo was captured. Click on a dot to see historic photos of that location.
Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “Before the PPIE: The Mechanics’ Institute and the Development of San Francisco’s ‘Fair Culture,’ 1857-1909.”
Please join us for the second Bancroft Library Roundtable of the fall semester!
It will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, October 15. Taryn Edwards, Librarian/Historian in the Mechanics’ Institute Library and Chess Room, San Francisco, will present “Before the PPIE: The Mechanics’ Institute and the Development of San Francisco’s ‘Fair Culture,’ 1857-1909.”
Between the years of 1857 and 1899, the Mechanics’ Institute hosted thirty-one industrial expositions that displayed and promoted the products of local entrepreneurs and inventors. These expositions bolstered California’s infant economy, encouraged the demand for local goods, and whetted the public’s appetite for elaborate, multi-attraction fairs. Given the Mechanics’ Institute’s vast experience with putting on such spectacles, its members were involved as consultants on larger state-wide fairs including the California Midwinter Fair of 1894, the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair of 1898, the Portola Festival of 1909, and the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. Ms. Edwards will explore this rich history through a lecture and slideshow.
We hope to see you there.
Crystal Miles and Kathi Neal Bancroft Library Staff