Are you a nutmegger? Curious what life was like in the Nutmeg state before the Revolutionary War? Well, you’re in luck.
The University of Connecticut has created an online archive of pre-Revolutionary War records for Colonial Connecticut. The archive covers the period 1636 to 1776. The archive includes public records such as deeds, laws, city council proceedings and more.
Click here to visit the archive.
Florida, specifically Tampa, will be in the news a lot this week with the Republican National Convention in town. In Presidential politics, Florida has become an important swing state capable of deciding the outcome of presidential elections.
The Florida Heritage Collection, a project of the State University System (SUS) of Florida provides online access to a wealth of resources you can use to learn how Florida came to be the important state it is today. The collection provides online access to materials broadly representing Florida’s history, culture, arts, literature, sciences and social sciences. Thematic areas in this growing collection include Native American and minority populations, exploration and development, tourism, the natural environment, and regional interests.
Click here to visit the collection.
The Library of Congress has compiled a great site dedicated to documenting late 19th/early 20th century New York City. In addition to numerous articles about life, commerce, and other activity during this time period, the site contains forty-five films of New York City dating from 1898 to 1906. These videos are from the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress. The films consist of twenty-five made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and twenty made by Edison Company productions.
This is a great resource for teaching and learning about late industrial revolution era life in NYC. Click here to visit the NYC video site.
The Texas Historical Association publishes an online guide to everything Texas. The Handbook of Texas Online is a compendium of multiple topics including history, geography, and culture. It has more than 25,000 articles on people, places, events, history, institutions, and more. The breadth of information is wide and well ranging, designed to provide readers with concise, authoritative, and accessible articles that provide factual, nonpartisan accounts on virtually every aspect of Texas history and culture.
Click here to visit the Handbook of Texas Online.
Here’s a great link to historic and current aerial photographs of the State of Florida. The archive is maintained by the University of Florida. It includes aerial photographs of the state dating back to the 1930s.
A great resource to compare current conditions and land use with the past and discuss changes and impacts.
Click here to visit the archive.
California is, of course, one of the great states you can learn about with the American States and Capitals app. Among the many interesting places in California is the city of San Francisco. From its start in Spanish colonial times, through the Gold Rush of 1849, and on throughout the present, the city has a fascinating history.
Possibly one of the seminal moments in San Francisco history is the great earthquake and fire of 1906. So great was the destruction from that event, that historians often divide the city’s history into pre-fire and post-fire periods.
Here is a link to a video archive from the Library of Congress with motion-pictures of the city before the earthquake and fire, after the destruction, and finally after its rebuilding.
Click here to visit the early San Francisco video archive.