Lower East Side Tenement Museum [Quicktime, Realplayer]
http://www.tenement.org/
The majority of National Trust Park properties commemorate the lives of famous politicians and other well-known Americans, but the Lower East Side Tenement Museum commemorates the everyday (and in some cases extraordinary) lives of some of the 7,000 immigrants who lived at 97 Orchard Street from 1863 to 1935. At the site, visitors can take virtual tours of immigrant family apartments, including those of an Italian Catholic family. The tours allow visitors to move through their apartments, along with the ability to listen to an audio presentation that offers additional details about the day-to-day experiences of immigrants in the Lower East Side. Particularly helpful is a 97-page online Tenement Encyclopedia, which defines and discusses terms common to the immigrant experience. Finally, reflecting the fact that the museum is in an urban milieu, information about businesses and local culture in the Lower East Side is also provided for persons journeying to New York to visit. [KMG]
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Lionel Hampton: His Life and Legacy
http://www.uidaho.edu/hampton/index.html
On August 31st 2002, the world lost Lionel Hampton, one of the century's most loved jazz performers, to illness. Mr. Hampton had a long association with the School of Music at the University of Idaho, and this site serves as excellent testimony to the power of music and Mr. Hampton's prodigious talents and generosity. A brief biographical sketch provides a bit of material about Mr. Hampton's long and productive performing and recording career. Another section, titled Tributes, provides written tributes to the late jazz artist from his peers, including Quincy Jones and James Moody. For those seeking to see "Hamp" in action, a video section provides some extraordinary clips of Mr. Hampton performing at the University of Idaho on several different occasions. The site concludes with some nice audio and video clips of Mr. Hampton's memorial service, which was held at the Riverside Church in New York. [KMG]
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MoMA: The Changing of the Avant-Garde
http://www.moma.org/gilman/main.html
This Web exhibition from MoMA presents a history of modern utopian and visionary architecture, using architectural drawings donated to the museum by the Howard Gilman Foundation in 2000. The drawings date from the late 1950s to the 1970s. The main menu is two spheres, Megastructures (larger, public buildings and complexes) and Postmodern Roots (smaller buildings, retail and houses), from which users can select names to view particular projects. Each project consists of two to four drawings and explanatory text, with larger views of all the drawings available. An interesting example under Megastructures is Superstudio, a group of five Italian architects who, in the 1960s, created a set of purely theoretical drawing that impose gigantic, white, grid-patterned structures on natural landscapes such as rivers, ocean coastlines, and the Alps. Megastructures give way to Postmodern Roots in the 1960s, where drawings of projects by Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, James Stirling, Rem Koolhaas, and others can be seen. [DS]
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History of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcoll/tnb/
The Department of Special Collections at the University of Washington has created an excellent online exhibit documenting the rise and (literal) fall of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State, an event referred to as the Pearl Harbor of engineering. The massive structure was built between 1938 and 1940 and, at the time of its completion, was the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The bridge displayed some notable wavelike motions during the final stages of construction, but no one was prepared for what happened on November 7, 1940, when the entire structure began to buckle, and shortly collapsed into the water below. Amazingly, the only fatality was a dog that was trapped in one of the vehicles on the main span of the bridge. The online exhibit documents this amazing event, with numerous photographs of the bridge under construction, and most incredibly, dramatic shots of the bridge buckling and its fall taken by several bystanders. This exhibit will be of particular interest to engineers, particularly those working in the field of bridge construction. [KMG]
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Conelrad
http://www.conelrad.com/
Conelrad is a site devoted to all aspects of atomic culture in the United States, presented in an informative and visual stimulating fashion. Founded in April 1999 by two Cold War veterans, Ken Sitz and Bill Geerhart, the site is a vast clearinghouse of articles, interviews, book reviews, and visual and audio documents related to the post-WWII atomic culture that flourished for close to two decades. While the site does not have an internal search engine, it is easily navigated. The best feature of Conelrad are definitely the short films and audio clips originally produced by the Civil Defense Board, including tracks from the 1962 LP, "If the Bomb Falls" and the unintentionally hilarious 1964 LP, "NORAD Tracks Santa." For those who remember the fallout shelter craze, the site also contains several virtual exhibitions dealing with this aspect of the atomic age, including one specifically dealing with fallout shelters in California. [KMG]
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The Collegiate Way: Residential Colleges and Higher Education Reform
http://www.collegiateway.org/
Much ado has been in made in recent years about how best to reform or modify undergraduate education, from developing inclusive and multicultural curricula to creating a supposedly more "student-friendly" environment. Dr. Robert J. O'Hara (who has thirteen years experience in residential college life and administration) has developed this Web site to provide information about how colleges and universities might address the problems surrounding student life. On the Web site, Dr. O'Hara provides a wealth of information about the residential college model, which may serve as a remedy to some of the cacophony and disorder that has come to characterize some large campuses in the United States. The site contains six main areas, some of which highlight materials on how to build a residential college, frequent objections to the collegiate model, and a substantial list of recommended readings. Dr. O'Hara also maintains an updated news section on the site featuring reading materials on developments within the world of residential colleges, both extant and proposed. [KMG]
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Airline History: The History of Commercial Aviation
http://airlines.afriqonline.com/
Designed and maintained by Sarah Ward, a former commercial pilot, this site offers essays about almost every major airline, both contemporary and historical. A complete alphabetical list runs from the ABA Swedish Air Lines all the way to ZAS Airline of Egypt. Each profile gives details about the types of planes used by each airline; what type of business they conducted (and where); and numerous photographs of the planes, many taken by Ms. Ward. Along with the airline profiles, another section of the site titled Aircraft by Decade offers basic statistics about different plane models and types introduced during every decade of the 20th century. Special features of the site include a photographic tribute to the planes that travelers might have seen as they traversed through London's airports in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Ms. Ward has taken a great deal of care in compiling the material on the site (along with the help of contributors), and the material here will be a joy for aviation fans and visitors interested in knowing a bit more about the history of different airlines. [KMG]
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