This is a comprehensive textbook covering life functions that are ultimately interpretable in chemical terms, as chemistry is the logic of biological phenomena.

This archive traces the history of the American circus since 1793, when British equestrian John Rickets presented the first circus in America. Learn about the acts, animals, people, music, and marketing of circuses -- and the impact of the circus on popular culture in America. Get an in depth look at six major circuses, including P.T. Barnum and the Ringling Brothers. A timeline and video clips are provided. The site contains artifacts from private collections, museums, archives, brought together for the first time for the use of scholars and students of history, popular culture, technology, business, drama, sports, art, and advertising. There are huge gaps and inaccuracies in our knowledge of circus history, in part because the documents and circus artifacts (route books, posters, newspaper stories, journals, and oral histories) have been scattered among many different repositories and part because there have been few systematic efforts to archive, analyze, and correlate these materials. The Circus in America makes it possible for the first time to study this singularly important influence on and reflection of American culture.

In this section of our site, we have endeavored to provide teachers and students with useful primary and secondary materials to help foster understanding of early America through the life of George Washington. These resources can work on several levels. First, the twelve slides themselves provide a general chronology of the life of George Washington as well as secondary information on the larger historical context. Ideally, this background material reiterates your own class text readings and discussion. From here we hope you'll link to the accompanying primary document and questions. Manuscripts like Washington's school book exercises, an address to the Senate, his will and others give students the chance to examine the life and times of a leading figure in American history firsthand and in greater depth. Finally, throughout the lessons, we've tried to communicate just what it is that "historians" do by referring to the editing process along the way and giving students a chance to try their own hand at a transcription.

Race and Place is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia. The Jim Crow laws segregated African-Americans from white Americans in public places such as schools, and school buses. The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville. The Jim Crow laws were not overturned until the important Brown versus Board of Education court ruling in 1954 (but not totally eliminated until the Civil Rights Act of the 1964). The project intends to connect race with place by understanding what it was like to live, work, pray, learn, and play in the segregated South.

Salem Witchcraft Papers: Transcription and Archival Project introduces the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and presents information on other aspects of the history of Danvers (formerly Salem Village), Massachusetts. The website features rare documents including the complete 1692 Salem Witchcraft Papers, narratives of witchcraft cases, historical maps, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Centered on a database of slave and slaveholder populations in Texas during the Republic era (1837-45), the Texas Slavery Project offers a window into the role slavery played in the development of Texas in the years before the region became part of the United States.

Dynamic interactive maps show the changing flows of enslaved and slaveholder populations in Texas over time. The population database search engine allows users to discover the growth of slave and slaveholder populations in the region.

Digitized original documents from the era provide an opportunity to hear the voices of those who lived with slavery in early Texas

Tocqueville's America is another project of the American Studies Programs at The University of Virginia. In this project we take up the task of re-contextualizing Alexis de Tocqueville's famous political and cultural analysis of American democracy. Our objective is, over time, to return that book -- arguably still one of the most influential works in political thought -- to its origins, to the America of 1831-32 . For it was on that very specific ground and at that very specific historical moment that Tocqueville stood.

What he saw there, who he talked with, what he read and overheard, became the stuff of his analysis of our nation's essential nature and probable destiny. And almost everything he saw and heard has, of course, simply vanished. Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams have been translated into icons of Jacksonian Democracy and The New England Conscience; Justice Story and Senator Poinsett are remembered only by a handful of professional historians; Cincinnati is no longer a frontier boom town and the trackless wilderness of Tennessee has been comfortably suburbanized and malled along with the rest of the country. If Tocqueville's America persists in our institutions and our common habits of mind and feeling, in many more objvious ways Tocqueville's America has simply vanished.

And so we're attempting to construct a virtual American ca. 1831-32. The site now contains a virtual tour of America based on Tocqueville's itinerary, on his and his friend Beaumont's letters and journals, on contemporaneous accounts of other foreign visitors, and on a variety of examples of material culture of the period , mostly paintings and engravings. It also holds explorations of Womens' Place at the time, of attitudes toward race and color, towards religion, and towards everyday life. In addition, we've included a section on Tocqueville's America: 1997 that focuses on the recent debate over the status and future of American Associationalism, a distinguishing and necessary feature of American Democracy for Tocqueville -- and something we seem to be in danger of losing