Americana
Internet sites selected for the readers of Duke University Libraries

Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements: Highlights From the Motion Picture Archives at the Library of Congress

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colahome.html

The Coca-Cola Company has recently donated its entire collection of historic television commercials, over 20,000 ads spanning fifty years, to the Library of Congress in what is the largest gift of corporate archives in the Library’s history. This preview, part of the American Memory Project, includes some of the most famous Coke commercials (Mean Joe Greene, "I'd Like to Buy the world a Coke," the first Polar Bear commercial), as well as outtakes and experimental footage. Visitors can search for video selections by keyword or browse by title. Special presentations on the site include a timeline of Coke advertising themes, a brief history of television advertising, the story of the "Hilltop" commercial, and a biography of Coke's inventor. Videos are available in RealPlayer, QuickTime, and MPEG formats.

First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncuhtml/fpnashome.html

This Web site documents the culture of 1860-1920 in the American South from the viewpoint of southerners. It was compiled from diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives in the collections of the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documented here are not only the lives of prominent individuals, but those of relatively inaccessible populations as well: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/

The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program has recently released this online collection, which is a joint presentation of its Prints and Photographs Division and the Manuscript Division. The collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery, over 9,500 page images with searchable text, bibliographic records, and five hundred black and white photographs of former slaves, including 121-year-old Sarah Gudger from North Carolina. Also included are over two hundred photographs gathered from private collections and made available to the public for the first time.

Early American Paintings

http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/

This attractive online exhibit from the Worcester Art Museum explores early American painters and their works. The site features biographies of twenty artists and detailed information on fifty-three works, plus numerous comparative images from other collections. It encompasses all the paintings in the museum's collection that were created prior to 1830 by artists who were either born or active in America, including works painted abroad by those artists. Visitors may browse the collection via an interactive timeline or by artist, genre, or place of origin. A keyword search engine is also provided.

If you would like to recommend a Web site for inclusion in a future issue of Duke University Libraries, contact Joline Ezzell at joline.ezzell@duke.edu.