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- Link
- http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vshome.html
- Category
- Arts and Humanities
- Subject
- American Studies, Dance, Drama, Music
- Medium
- Film/Video, Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Streaming/Download
The American Variety Stage is a multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. The collection illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theatre playbills and programmes, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini. [Figures taken from site 5/2015]. Searches can be undertaken by subject, author and title. The 61 motion pictures in the Variety Stage collection include animal acts, burlesque, dance, comic sketches, dramatic excerpts, dramatic sketches, physical culture acts, and tableaux. The films represented date from copyrights of 1897 to 1920; the majority are drawn from the Library’s extensive Paper Print Collection. The remaining films were produced by Hans A. Spanuth in Chicago from 1919 to 1920 for the series "Spanuth’s Original Vod-A-Vil Movies.
Other 
Online 
Moving image 
Audio
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- Link
- http://www.paleycenter.org/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Media Studies, Radio Studies
- Medium
- Film/Video, Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Blogs, Streaming/Download
The Paley Center for Media is a not-for-profit cultural organisation based in New York and Los Angeles, which is dedicated to fostering an ongoing dialogue about the significance of television, radio and new broadcasting technologies on the lives of media professionals and the public. The centre’s media collection contains over 160,000 television and radio programmes and advertisements, searchable through an online database which offers synopses, along with production credits for the programmes. Although most of the collection is not online there is, nonetheless, a lot of freely available interesting audiovisual content, made accessible via a selection of curated online exhibitions on the site’s Perspectives on the Collection page. This page feature hand-picked clips and programmes chosen by the centre’s curatorial team, which are presented with contextual essays and notes. The range of subjects covers the whole spectrum of US media history - particularly the post-war period, with interesting items on everything from the media’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, to a history and appreciation of Rod Serling’s classic science fiction series The Twilight Zone.
Other Online Moving image Audio
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- Link
- http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php
- Category
- Arts and Humanities, Bio-Medical, Science and Technology, Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Art, Drama, Film Studies, Information Studies, Languages, Literature, Politics and Government, Social Studies, Technology
- Medium
- Film/Video, Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Streaming/Download
These webcasts consist of lectures and talks by experts, academics, researchers and archivist. The Library of Congress has many different sites, collections and projects, covering a wide range of subjects: all are well-represented here and have been divided into eight broad subject areas: Biography, History, Performing Arts, Education, Government, Poetry and Literature, Religion and Science & Technology. Users can narrow their searches further within these broad headings, according to project/site/collection eg. The American Folklife Center, the Music Division, the Digital Future and You project, to name but three. The webcasts come with a brief description, date when uploaded and fully searchable transcripts. There is also a section for recently added webcasts. Although the talking head format is slightly old-fashioned the content is good and its searchability makes it a useful and user-friendly resource.
Other Online Moving image Audio
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- Link
- https://www.hippocampus.org/HippoCampus/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities, Bio-Medical, Science and Technology, Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Environmental Studies, General Science, History, Mathematics, Nature, Physics, Politics and Government, Social Studies
- Medium
- Film/Video
- Type of resource
- Video Sources, Web Links
This website delivers thousands of free academic and educational multimedia content, including videos, animations and simulations. The site’s strengths are in Mathematics and the Sciences, but also cover History, Economics, English and Religion. The videos on the site are aggregated from other American educational collections (including the Khan Academy) and arranged by broad subject areas which are then subdivided into narrower concepts, and laid out on the page in a logical and easy to follow screen display. It is slightly frustrating that there is little contextual information associated with the videos, in the form of descriptions, contributors, and other useful metadata. It is also not possible to click through to view the video on its original home page. Nonetheless, worth visiting for the range and quality of material available.
Other Online Moving image
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- Link
- https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu//virtualarchive/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities
- Subject
- American Studies, Politics and Government
- Medium
- Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Streaming/Download
The Virtual Vietnam Archive contains over four million pages of scanned materials, including documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids. The resource is part of the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University. The focus of the material tends to be personal, rather than official in nature: eg. photographs, letters home and home movies. Non-copyrighted material which has been digitised is freely available for users to download. The audiovisual materials pages alone includes over 650 donated digitised films as well as material generated by the Vietnam Center and Archive itself: lectures, conference proceedings and interviews. The donated films include items from various collections, much of it originally filmed on 8mm or 16mm film. The films can be viewed in MP4 format or downloaded as MP4s or WMV files. To enable navigation of such a huge resource the archive has provided a Research help page, which includes subject guides, links to various search pages and focused browse pages eg. Browse the Digitized Audio and the Oral History page.
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- Link
- https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Literature, Media Studies, Politics and Government
- Medium
- Film/Video, Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Streaming/Download, Web Links
The Harry Ransom Center is a library, archive and museum based at the University of Austin, Texas. Its mission is to advance the study of the arts and humanities by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible original cultural materials. Amongst its holdings are over 36 million literary manuscripts as well as a smaller collection of film and television materials. The centre’s multimedia page features an eclectic selection of videos, including talks by writers, features on aspects of conservation, and films about selected artefacts and objects held in the Center’s archives.
Also available is the Mike Wallace Interview collection. Wallace was an American journalist noted for his direct interviewing style, whose programme ran from 1957 to 1960. He donated the show’s footage, on 16mm kinetoscope, to the Ransom Center in the 1960s. A wide range of notable personalities submitted themselves to Wallace’s probing, hard-hitting approach, including Henry Kissinger, Frank Lloyd Wright, Diana Barrymore, Jean Seberg, Gloria Swanson, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Sanger. The 65 interviews are freely available to view (five are audio only) and come with full transcripts.
Other Online Moving image Audio
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- Link
- https://archive.org/details/911
- Category
- Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Media Studies, Politics and Government
- Medium
- Film/Video
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Streaming/Download
This resource, which is hosted by the Internet Archive, is a library of clips covering the events of 11th September 2001 and its aftermath, as presented by American and international broadcasters. Containing over 3,000 hours of footage, selected from twenty channels over seven days, and accompanied by analysis from media scholars and academics, this is an invaluable resource for anyone studying how television represented the events on and subsequent to September 11th 2001.
Other Online Moving image
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- Link
- http://www.darrenreidhistory.co.uk/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities
- Subject
- American Studies, History
- Medium
- Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Podcasting, Streaming/Download
This website was created by Dr Darren Reid who teaches American Studies at the University of Edinburgh and features podcasts, interviews, links, and reviews on American cutlure and history. Reid’s site hosts his two main podcasts: one on the History of the American Frontier, the other on The Artist in American History which presents a series of lectures and documentaries which explore how comic books have reflected and informed the societies that made them. Another of Reid’s podcasts - American Studies and History- is available at iTunes and considers American history through the lens of artists, musicians, chroniclers and film makers.
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- Link
- http://www.jackkerouac.com/home/audio-2/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities
- Subject
- American Studies, Literature
- Medium
- Radio/Sound
- Type of resource
- Archives/Museums, Streaming/Download, Video Sources, Web Links
This resource is an interactive archive and exhibition space devoted to Jack Kerouac and connected topics, particularly relating to Lowell, Massachusetts, the city of Kerouac’s birth and childhood. There is a nice selection of audio recordings, taken from a large of collection of Kerouac-related material owned by the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The recordings feature contributions from Kerouac’s childhood friends, as well as fellow-writers William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, covering subjects such as Kerouac’s sexuality, the idea of the ‘vision quest’, religion, childhood, life on the road, and, less obviously Kerouac’s similarity to the Fonz from the television show Happy Days.
A small selection of video clips feature Professor Todd Tietchen discussing the first part of The Town and the City, as well as a clip of Allen Ginsberg speaking at UMass Lowell. The audiovisual resources are complemented by links and a bibliography.
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- Link
- http://www.filmsforaction.org/
- Category
- Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences
- Subject
- American Studies, Current Affairs, Development Studies, Economics, Environmental Studies, Media Studies, Politics and Government, Social Studies, Social Welfare
- Medium
- Film/Video
- Type of resource
- Video Sources
The mission of Films for Action is to fight against the homogenisation and conformity of the mainstream US media. This American site features thousands of films, videos, news items, and articles relating to social, environmental, and media issues not covered by the mainstream news. The core of the site is the video list: content can be filtered by a subject search and the films are free to view. Among the subjects covered are Elections and Democracy, Net Neutrality, Peak Oil and Terrorism.
Other Online Moving image
Learning on Screen