http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/index.html

The Jewish Virtual Library website is a project designed and maintained by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), which was established as a nonprofit organization in 1993. From the homepage, visitors are presented with a series of topical areas such as "History", "The Holocaust", "Politics", and "Travel", along eight other additional areas. The "Reference" area is quite helpful, as it contains a number of helpful fact sheets and a timeline for the history of Judaism. The "Israel & The States" section will also interest many visitors, as it contains detailed information about the nature of the relationship between each US state and the nation of Israel. The site is rounded out by a glossary of relevant terms, a selection of maps of the region, and a list of suggested readings. [KMG]

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/

Ever wonder where the word Winnebago came from, before it meant a large, lumbering motor home? What about a curlew, a gorget, or a round forty? All these terms and more can be found in the Dictionary of Wisconsin History, being built at the Wisconsin Historical Society, a spin-off from the Society's Turning Points digital project ( http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints), a special collection aimed at making documentation on the most important events in Wisconsin History easily accessible to teachers, students, and lifelong learners. As Society staff worked on materials for Turning Points, they found many words and proper names that were not defined in standard dictionaries, that might confuse readers. These terms were saved in a database, with short explanations, eventually becoming the Dictionary of Wisconsin History, with over 1,000 terms, including over 120 Indian tribes, and more than 300 short entries for prominent people. The Dictionary is still growing, and users are invited to submit terms. And, by the way, Winnebago is an obsolete name for the Ho-Chunk Indians, a curlew is a shore bird, a gorget is a breast plate, and a round forty is a forty-acre lumber allotment, "whose boundaries were not strictly observed by logging companies (who took so many trees outside of it that the parcel resembled a circle rather than a square)." [DS]

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/americancolony/

The American Colony in Jerusalem was founded in 1881 by two Midwesterners, Anna and Horatio Spafford, with the intent of beginning a Christian utopian society. Over the group's 60-year history, they were able to engage in a variety of philanthropic outreach efforts (such as running soup kitchens, hospitals, and orphanages) without proselytizing. Drawing on a number of pieces of historical ephemera donated by Mrs. Valentine Vester, the Library of Congress has created this online collection that documents the Colony's history and its work. Visitors can move through the different sections of the exhibit offered here, stopping to read brief descriptions of each featured item along the way. Overall, a very nice exhibit dedicated to one of the 20th centuries less well-known utopian communities. [KMG]

http://www.whitehousetapes.org/

Since 1940, six American presidents have secretly recorded close to 5,000 hours of conversations, many of which have been of great interest to presidential historians, the press, and the general public. This remarkable site provides access to a wide range of those conversations, and is hosted and maintained by the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. From the site's homepage, visitors can browse a list of highlighted audio clips (complete with full transcripts) and also access educational resource materials for use in the classroom. The site also has some additional virtual exhibits on a number of topics, including Vietnam and the civil rights movement. Finally, the site also contains a search engine so that visitors can quickly locate the audio clip or conversation they are looking for. [KMG]

http://images.lib.ed.ac.uk/chartingthenation/

Humans are generally fascinated with maps, both as historical and cultural documents, and in a very pragmatic sense in terms of wayfinding and navigating unfamiliar places. For those users interested in a wide array of maps of Scotland during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, this website will be a welcome find. The project was developed within the University of Edinburgh's Department of Geography, and is currently managed by Edinburgh University Library. The site provides access to 3,500 maps taken from a host of atlases and other bound books, and is complemented by a narrative piece titled "Mapping Scotland: An Essay" by Charles W. J. Withers. Along with looking over some of these many maps, visitors will also want to take a look at the "Useful Links" section, which provides direct access to other relevant sites, including The Gazetteer for Scotland. At the time of this report, the link to the Web browser client required to view the map collection was not working; however, users could download a full-featured Java-based viewer compatible with either Windows Internet Explorer or the Mac OS. [KMG]

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html

As home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, the nation of Iraq has some of the most important archaeological museums and institutes, many of which have suffered irreparable damage during the war in that country. In order to help with the recovery efforts, the University of Chicago's esteemed Oriental Institute has created this website which contains a number of very useful resources, including various bibliographies documenting the contents of museums and libraries in Iraq and a helpful database of objects contained within the Iraq Museum. Within that database, visitors can view objects by material, their provenance number, or by source. Additionally, the site contains a number of archaeological site photos provided by Professor McGuire Gibson and SPC William Peterson. [KMG]

http://www.bpl.org/central/bostonmovies.htm

The Boston Public Library's online collections and exhibits have caught the attention of the Scout Report several times in the past few years, and this recent addition should be interesting to those persons with a love of urban history and early examples of short films. Four films are made available here, including a panoramic view of the Boston subway from an electric car from 1901 and the short subject feature "Seeing Boston", which takes viewers on a trolley car past such landmarks as the Boston Public Library and Copley Square. It is also worth noting that as these video files are quite large, visitors are advised to view them from a computer with a very speedy Internet connection. The site is rounded out by a nice two-page history of these films written by Stephen Kharfen. [KMG]