Website Review: Disability History Museum

THE DISABILITY HISTORY MUSEUM website hosts a digital collection, educational materials, and museum exhibits exploring the historical experience of people with disabilities and their communities.

The Library Collections section contains a broad range of digital objects including letters, memoirs, chapbooks, postcards, photos, cartoons, and more that shaped the experiences of people with disabilities. Users can browse by category or search the collection.

The Education section provides ideas for teaching with primary sources. The materials explore ways to weave disability history topics into history, civics, and literature classes. After exploring an overview, users can examine lesson plans and other teaching tools of interest.

The Exhibits section is currently under development.

With over 3,000 primary source documents and images to explore, librarians will find this website to be an excellent tool for weaving the historical experiences of people with disabilities into the curriculum through the use of primary sources.

To visit the website, go to http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/.

Special Event Website Review: Veteran's History Project

In honor of Veteran’s Day, spend some time exploring the Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project.

The VETERAN’S HISTORY PROJECT from the Library of Congress gathers the personal accounts of American war veterans and makes them available online. First-hand accounts from U.S. veterans from World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, and the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have been posted. From Army medical volunteers to Air Force pilots, a wide range of military positions are represented. Primarily an oral history program, most of the interviews are available in audio- or video-recorded formats along with transcripts. In many cases, memoirs and collections of photographs, letters, diaries, maps, and other primary source documents have been digitized and are included.

Since the project began nearly fifteen years ago, thousands of interviews have been uploaded to the database. Users can search by era, branch of service, gender, media type, and other categories. It’s also possible to search within fields such as location of service and highest rank.

Encourage students to seek out areas of interest such as female nurses of the Vietnam War, African American airmen of the Korean War, or Japanese American soldiers of World War II.

Visit the website at http://www.loc.gov/vets/.