An examination of "classic" documents in American history from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, including writings by authors such as John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln; Horatio Alger, Jacob Riis and Thorstein Veblen; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Music, taped speeches, television programs, motion pictures, and/or other visual materials may also be included. Class meetings consist primarily of discussions and there is one required museum trip.

This is a multimedia anthology illustrating the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini.

This site consists of tens of thousands of pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the post-Civil War era. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred music and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. This first release of the online collection consists of over 22,000 musical compositions registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1879.

This site presents 2,100 early baseball cards. The cards show such legendary figures as Ty Cobb stealing third base, Tris Speaker batting, and pitcher Cy Young formally posing. Other notable players include Connie Mack, Walter Johnson, King Kelly, and Christy Mathematics and Statisticsewson.

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.

This site presents TV commercials, never-broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage that together reflect the historical development of TV advertising for a major product. Ads include the 1971 Hilltop commercial with an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke; the first Polar Bear commercial from 1993; the Snowflake commercial from 1999; and First Experience, an international commercial filmed in Morocco in 1999.

The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964. The bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities, including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance. A much smaller portion of the collection is an assortment of American landscapes.

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience--specifically, prose grounded in, but not confined to, personal narrative. That is, you will write essays that engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of articles that address current issues in popular culture along with essays, pieces of carefully-crafted nonfiction, by writers, scientists, philosophers, poets, historians, literary scholars, and many others. These essays will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world, using personal narrative and memoir to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal in the variety of forms that the essay genre embraces, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write.

This site presents over 9,000 images relating to the early history of advertising in the U.S. Materials include cookbooks, photographs of billboards, print advertisements, trade cards, calendars, almanacs, and leaflets for various products. Together, these images illuminate the early evolution of this ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.

This site provides a selection of more than 500 letters, lectures, photos, articles, and sound recordings related to the birth of the recording industry. Hear auctioneers, animal calls, musical instruments, and Native American songs, Italian songs, Swedish songs, and more. Berliner (1851-1929), an immigrant and largely self-educated man, was responsible for the development of the microphone and the flat recording disc and gramophone player.

This site presents 3,000 pieces of sheet music drawn from a collection at Duke University. The selection covers a variety of music types including bel canto, minstrel, protest, plantation, and sentimental songs, as well as songs from vaudeville and tin pan alley. The collection is particularly strong in antebellum Southern music, confederate imprints, and Civil War songs and music.

This site features 341 motion pictures, 81 disc sound recordings, and other related materials, such as photographs and original magazine articles. Cylinder sound recordings will be added to this site in the near future. In addition, histories are given of Edison's involvement with motion pictures and sound recordings, as well as a special page focusing on the life of the great inventor.

This is the companion website to the Ken Burns PBS series that aired in January 2001. Explore cities and clubs where jazz developed; listen to excerpts of bebop, cool jazz and other styles; discover what makes jazz jazz and the theory behind the art form often called the purest expression of American democracy. The site provides biographies of nearly 100 musicians, transcripts of interviews that went into the making of the show, a virtual piano, a study guide and more than a dozen lessons.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine , anchored in Havana harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine . Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their many newspapers to stir public opinion over the sinking of the Maine into a frenzy, hastenening U.S. entry into the conflict. This February 17, 1898, front page story from Pulitzer's New York World suggested, on the basis of little evidence, the hand of the enemy in the destruction of the Maine.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks and the occasional supervision of WPA administrators--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. Others lent their talents to community art centers that made art training and appreciation accessible to wider audiences. FAP also sponsored hundreds of murals and sculptures designed for municipal buildings and public spaces. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, artist Louis Guglielmi found the social consciousness of the 1930s and the support of the New Deal a spur to his artistic development. Artist Julius Bloch praised the FAP for bringing art to new audiences, including his African-American subjects.

This is a lesson in which students (Grades 7-12) analyze lyrics and images of popular sheet music as part of their studies of the political, social, and economic conditions existing during industrialization and reform in the U.S.

This site features photographs and discussions, poems, proclamations, and other material related to the holiday.

This digital collection presents 7,949 publicity brochures, promotional advertisements and talent circulars for some 4,546 performers who were part of the Chautauqua circuit. These talent brochures are drawn from the Records of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, held by the University of Iowa Libraries. One of the largest booking agencies for the Chautauqua performers, the Redpath bureau managed a vast talent pool. Performers and lecturers were familiar names as popular entertainers or well known in the political, religious, and cultural worlds.

Alfred Whital Stern (1881-1960) of Chicago presented his outstanding collection of Lincolniana to the Library of Congress in 1953. Begun by Mr. Stern in the 1920s, the collection documents the life of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) both through writings by and about Lincoln as well as a large body of publications concerning the issues of the times including slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and related topics.

The collection contains more than 11,100 items. This online release presents more than 1,300 items with more than 4,000 images and a date range of 1824-1931. It includes the complete collection of Stern’s contemporary newspapers, Lincoln’s law papers, sheet music, broadsides, prints, cartoons, maps, drawings, letters, campaign tickets, and other ephemeral items. The books and pamphlets in this collection are scheduled for digitization at a later date.