The American Sign Museum is the only public collection of its kind, and it is located in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its fun, colorful website just may bring back memories for some visitors. Users should definitely watch the video tour of the museum with the founder, Tod Swormstedt. The link can be found near the top of the homepage, and is entitled "Take a Video Tour." The founder explains his goals in...

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 presents the history of American vernacular painting from the Colonial era until the early 20th century. Most of the pictures in the earliest section, "Inventing American Stories, 1765-1830", are portraits of individuals or family groups, reflecting the taste of the time for commissioned portraits. But, there are a few scenes showing larger...

Greatly revised and expanded since its last Scout Report mention, (March 13, 1999) Ken Middleton's American Women's History: A Research Guide includes over 2100 citations to print and Internet sources and hundreds of links to digitized primary sources, as well as frequent updates and link checking to ensure the currency of cited resources. The Research Guide now consists of 4 main sections: an...

The United States gets over half of its electricity from burning coal, and this tremendously important resource remains one of the nation's greatest assets. However, it is not an asset without problems, as the burning of coal has brought with it tremendous levels of air pollution and other problems. This latest radio documentary from the American RadioWorks group was produced by Catherine Winter,...

Over the past several decades, a host of organizations have developed for the purpose of lobbying on behalf of the arts throughout the United States. Americans for the Arts was created in 1996 when the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies and the American Council for the Arts merged. The primary purpose of the nonprofit organization is to advance the cause of the arts in America through...

Several decades before Ernest Hemingway came to Paris to spend some quality time with Gertrude Stein near the Jardin de Luxembourg; there were a multitude of other American artists inspired by the City of Lights. Paris was, without a doubt, the art capital of the 19th century, and as Henry James remarked in 1887 "when to-day we look for 'American art' we find it mainly in Paris." Staff members at...

Rice University has a well-developed digital scholarship archive and this particular area of the site "strives to represent the full range and complexity of the Americas history by bringing together key documents." The Americas Digital Archive project is under the direction of two scholars at the university, and they have worked with colleagues to digitize over 1,000 documents. Visitors to the...

As the birthplace of the skyscraper, it seems almost fitting that plans were announced this week heralding a proposed 115-story skyscraper on Chicago’s lakefront. The team behind the project includes Christopher Carley, a local developer, and the renowned “starchitect”, Santiago Calatrava. Renderings of the proposed skyscraper (which would be the tallest in the United States) indicate that the...

Drawing on a long tradition in the United States of voluntary community service, the AmeriCorps program was formally created during the presidency of Bill Clinton, and its stability and increased success was ensured by President Bush in 2003, when he signed the Strengthen AmeriCorps Program Act. First-time visitors to the site may want to begin by looking through the “About AmeriCorps” section....

In their quest to increase their visibility and general accessibility, a number of academic journals are going online. In some cases, they are just starting online in the first place. One journal of note that is just starting online is AmeriQuests, which is defined as "a forum for writing and research about real and metaphorical quests towards "America", defined as either an absolute but an...