1492. Columbus. The date and the name provoke many questions related to the linking of very different parts of the world, the Western Hemisphere and the Mediterranean. What was life like in those areas before 1492? What spurred European expansion? How did European, African and American peoples react to each other? What were some of the immediate results of these contacts?

The United States Census Bureau has a long history of conducting research to improve questions and data on race and ethnicity. Since the first census in 1790, the Census Bureau has collected information on race/ethnicity and the census form has reflected changes in society and shifts that have occurred in the way the Census Bureau classifies race and ethnicity. Since the 1970s, the Census Bureau has conducted content tests to research and improve the design and function of different questions, including questions on race and ethnicity. Today, the Census Bureau collects race and ethnic data following U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines, and these data are based upon self-identification.

As faculty, you assess textbooks against a set of criteria that reflects your long experience and knowledge of student needs. You do the same with Open Textbooks, but there are a few additional considerations.

This report presents the results of a biennial independent survey done by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) commissioned by the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex), in collaboration with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), to examine the landscape of Open Educational Resources (OER) programs, policies, and practices at higher education institutions in Texas.

Contributions by African Americans to the arts, education, industry, literature, politics and much more are well represented in the vast collections of the Library of Congress. The Library's digital collections, online exhibits, online catalog, databases and other online resources provide a broad range of multi-formatted digitized material available for research on the African American experience. The primary purpose of this guide is to introduce the user to digitized primary sources available online at the Library of Congress. To broaden the user's search beyond the Library of Congress, a list of suggested external websites is included.

The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

It has been written that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could barely stand to be in the same room together. If Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had been contemporaries, they would have had difficulty being on the same planet with each other. The differences between Hamilton and Jefferson were to an extent differences between conservative and liberal philosophies. But Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Republican party, was by any definition an aristocrat, a thinker, a philosopher, a man who abhorred violence. He and Hamilton lived on the same social plane, though Hamilton's origins were more humble than those of Jefferson. Andrew Jackson, however, was a commoner, a man of humble origins, a fighter, a brawler who killed a man in a duel, and a figure who would have been distinctly out of place around Jefferson's table in the White House or at his home, Monticello. Andrew Jackson symbolized a new age, called by historians “the Age of the Common Man.”

Alexander Hamilton’s Final Version of the Report on the Subject of Manufactures [5 Dec 1971].

A person living in 1700 or 1800 or even earlier would not have been overwhelmed by the advances made during the previous century. But imagine Washington or Jefferson looking ahead about 100 years to the automobile, light bulb, telephone, cross-country railroads (200,000 miles by 1900), ocean-going streamships, airplanes, skyscrapers, factories full of heavy machinery and thousands of other advances. Although geniuses like Franklin and Jefferson might have foreseen such developments in their imagination, most people in 1800 could hardly conceive of such things. If one surveys the advance of science and technology over the centuries, it is apparent that for long periods the changes in the lives of working people were incremental. Sometimes, in fact, progress tended to reverse itself; the engineering achievements of the Romans, for example, were not replicated for much of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. And a person earning a living and in manufacture or farming in 1800 would not have led a life drastically different from the life of a small tradesmen or farmer a thousand years earlier. As many historians have pointed out, it is impossible to underestimate the impact that the growth of technology had on the lives of ordinary people.The rate of change in human society began to pick up in the early 1800s and has been accelerating ever since. Arguably, even the 20th century did not have such a profound impact on the way people lived their lives as the 19th.

The collection represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean.

Most of the items presented here are documented in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee in 1981. The bibliography contains approximately 2,000 maps and charts. Over the next several years many of the maps and charts in this bibliography will be added to the online collection each month.

These three documents, known collectively as the Charters of Freedom, have secured the rights of the American people for more than two and a quarter centuries and are considered instrumental to the founding and philosophy of the United States.

The American colonists had just fought a long and bitter war against a powerful centralized government; they were wary of creating another. The Second Continental Congress, which continued to function as the government of the new United States following the Declaration of Independence, drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777. They had Articlesorganized themselves sufficiently to conduct the war, but even during the fighting, the states werejealous of their own prerogatives. For example, when Washington's army was marching from Boston to New York early in the campaign, a welcoming party from the government of Connecticut approached the advance units and inquired by whose permission this "foreign army" was being brought into Connecticut. United in the cause of war, they still were separate political units jealous of their independence. Preoccupied as Congress was with the conduct of the war, and occasionally having to move to avoid the British Army, they failed to find sufficient agreement on the Articles until they were ratified on March 1, 1781.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

With the narrow approval of the Constitution in Virginia and New York, in June and July 1788, respectively, the Federalists seemed to have won an all-out victory. The relatively small states of North Carolina and Rhode Island would hold out longer, but with 11 states ratifying and all the populous ones among them, the Federalists had successfully waged a remarkable political campaign of enormous significance and sweeping change.

The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, on November 15, 1777. However, ratification of the Articles of Confederation by all thirteen states did not occur until March 1, 1781. The Articles created a loose confederation of sovereign states and a weak central government, leaving most of the power with the state governments. The need for a stronger Federal government soon became apparent and eventually led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The present United States Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation on March 4, 1789.

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee's attempt to invade the North.

The Battle of Antietam has been called the bloodiest single day in American History. By the end of the evening, 17 September 1862, an estimated 4,000 American soldiers had been killed and over 18,000 wounded in and around the small farming community of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Emory Upton, then a captain with the Union artillery battery, later wrote, “I have heard of ‘the dead lying in heaps,’ but never saw it till this battle. Whole ranks fell together.” The battle had been a day of confusion, tactical blunders, individual heroics, and the effects of just plain luck. It brought to an end a Confederate campaign to “liberate” the border state of Maryland and possibly to take the war into Pennsylvania. A little more than one hundred and forty years later, the Antietam battlefield is one of the best-preserved Civil War battlefields in the National Park System.

The battle of Chickamauga, fought on 19-20 September 1863, was the bloodiest battle in the western theater during the American Civil War. Along the banks of Chickamauga Creek in Northwest Georgia, less than a day's march south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Union Army of the Cumberland led by Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans clashed with Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee in a two day mêlée that left almost 35,000 men dead, wounded, or missing.

Cheers rang out in the streets of Washington on July 16, 1861 as Gen. Irvin McDowell’s Federal army, 35,000 strong, marched out to begin the long-awaited campaign to capture Richmond and end the war. It was an army of green recruits, few of whom had the faintest idea of the magnitude of the task facing them.

McDowell’s lumbering columns were headed for the vital railroad junction at Manassas. Here the Orange and Alexandria Railroad met the Manassas Gap Railroad, which led west to the Shenandoah Valley. If McDowell could seize this junction, he would stand astride the best overland approach to the Confederate capital.

On July 18, McDowell’s army reached Centreville. Five miles ahead a small meandering stream named Bull Run crossed the route of the Union advance. Guarding the fords from Union Mills to the Stone Bridge were 22,000 Southern troops under the command of Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard. McDowell first attempted to move toward the Confederate right flank, but his troops were checked at Blackburn’s Ford. He then spent the next two days scouting the Southern left flank. In the meantime, Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's army, stationed in the Shenandoah Valley with 10,000 Confederate troops, were ordered to support Beauregard. Johnston gave an opposing Union army the slip and, employing the Manassas Gap Railroad, started his brigades toward Manassas Junction, with most arriving July 20 and 21.

At the start of the Fredericksburg Campaign, the Union Army of the Potomac managed to steal a march on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. But owing to the failure of the Federals' pontoon bridge equipment to arrive at the crossing of the Rappahannock River as scheduled, the Southerners were able to block the road to Richmond. The Union commander, General Burnside, decided to launch a frontal assault against the Confederate position at Fredericksburg, resulting in one of the Union Army's most lopsided tactical defeats of the Civil War.