By noted historian and teacher Richard Jensen (January, 2008) provides an annotated guide to web-based materials including both primary and secondary sources.
Online Resources
This site at the National Humanities Center offers essays on a wide range of topics by leading scholars.
"Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska explores the development of towns and cities on the Great Plains through the lens of a murder case in the 1890s that evolved into a fascinating story that drew the attention of nearly everyone in town and people from across the region and country." The project is directed by Prof. Timothy R. Mahoney
The online forum of the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
A Northern Illinois University Libraries' digitization project with special features on the Haymarket Bombing, Ida B. Wells, Frances E. Willard, and the Pullman Strike.
"Railroads and the Making of Modern America explores the dynamic social change that came between 1850 and 1900 with the growth of railroads, telegraphs, steam ships and other technologies. We concentrate on the railroad network, the nation's first major system. The railroad's expansion and development brought profound economic, social, and political changes. This project aims to collect documentary materials on the railroads' social consequences and to create network visualizations that allow users to explore sources, compare digital objects, and manipulate data." Directed by Will Thomas, John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
The Federal Judicial Center has a site on Teaching Judicial History. Cases of interest to teachers of Gilded Age/Progressive Era include:
- The Trial of Susan B. Anthony – When the leading advocate of woman suffrage votes in a federal election, a federal court must decide what political rights are protected by the Constitution.
- Chew Heong v. United States: Chinese Exclusion and the Federal Courts – A Chinese immigrant's petition to reenter the United States divides a California federal court and forces the Supreme Court to decide if immigrants' rights are protected by the nation's treaties.
- The Debs Case: Labor, Capital, and the Federal Courts of the 1890s – In the depths of an economic depression, government attorneys seek court orders to halt a strike, and labor leaders defend the right of unions to organize and represent the interests of workers.
For each there is an essay providing historical background, a set of primary sources, and suggested teaching activities.
(Curated by Carl Smith, Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University), a joint project of the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, provides a narrative and a wealth of documentation concerning the events leading up to and away from the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886.
Through a Glass Darkly: Images of Race, Region, and Reform is an online exhibition documenting conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War. In particular, it looks at the stereotypes popularized in the northern press, and the ways that these depictions were countered--or in some cases, reinforced--in the letters written for northern readers by freedmen's teachers and freedmen themselves.
Chronicling America is the Library of Congress' massive newspaper digitization project that has already made millions of pages available online for the years between 1836 and 1922. Topics in Chronicling America puts together collections of news accounts of widely covered events and developments. Topics as of February 2012 range from The Anarchist Movement (1886-1920) and The Annexation of Hawaii (1887-1898) to Yoga (1905-1918) and Yosemite National Park (1855-1916). New topics will be added on a regular basis. Users may suggest topics to the LOC staff.
