Looking back to the late nineteenth century, one can find traces of the earliest distance education learning programs at the university level at places like the University of Chicago and Columbia University. It would take six decades before an entire university was created specifically as a distance teaching institution, and it would happen on the other side of the Atlantic. This school is Open...

The Brookings Institution has a broad range of research interests, ranging from informed commentary on the Middle East to energy policy here in the United States. One of the organization's more recent pieces analyzed participation in the USDA's food stamp program, in conjunction with Census 2000 data. Their report revealed a few troubling situations, including the fact that only about one-half of...

Housed at Washington and Lee University, the Lee Family Digital Archive (LFDA) was established to create a comprehensive annotated edition of all the known papers of the immigrant founder Richard Lee (who lived in the 17th century) and his offspring. Support for the project comes from the Lee-Jackson Educational Foundation, the Society of the Lees of Virginia, and the Harlan R. Crow Library. To...

During the eighty-five year period after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Great Britain, Spain, France, Native Americans, and the young American republic engaged in a number of conflicts, alliances, and battles on the North American continent. Drawing on primary source materials from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and numerous other organizations, this delightful exhibit looks at the crucial...

Created by a group of Kentucky's legal service providers, the focus of the Legal Aid Network of Kentucky's website is to provide helpful information about legal services available to specific "groups of vulnerable Kentuckians". These groups include people who meet certain income guidelines, people 60 years and older, and in some cases, those people who are victims of domestic violence. Visitors...

Cornell University's Law School has an international reputation for scholarly activity, and Scout Report readers will be glad to learn about the online resources afforded by its Legal Information Institute (LII). Founded in 1992 by co-directors Thomas R. Bruce and Peter W. Martin, the LII publishes electronic versions of "core materials in numerous areas of the law". Some of the key materials that...

The Harvard Law School Library has quite an impressive collection of legal art and visual materials, and as of late, they have been working to digitize these works and place them online for the web-browsing public. The collection includes images of jurists, political figures, legal thinkers, and lawyers that date from the Middle Ages all the way up to the late twentieth century. As the website...

Summer is quickly making an exit in anticipation of fall's blustery arrival, but that doesn't mean it is too late for a trip to the American West. This site, developed and maintained by Kathy Weiser, may provide the inspiration visitors need to pack up and make a move out to one of the Western states. Legends of America was inspired by Weiser's love for history and travel, and as such, contains a...

In the late 1840s, Henry Lehman made the journey from Germany to Alabama, where he established a dry goods store. Several years later, he was joined by his two brothers and over the coming years the firm of Lehman Brothers would become a commodities broker buying and selling cotton for the planters in the area. They opened a New York office in 1858, and during the next century and a half they...

The late Herbert H. Lehman served in the United States Senate from 1949 to 1957, prior to that he was the Governor of New York from 1933 to 1942. He was also the son of Mayer Lehman, who helped found the noted investment banking firm, Lehman Brothers. The Columbia Universities Libraries Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds the Lehman Special Correspondence Files, which contains the Lehman family...