This week, I’m offering three sites I typically share with my American Literature Class:
The Library of Congress, American Memories, which is site that contains a treasure store of American cultural artifacts, like advertising, maps, dime novels, etc. It will link you to many more external sites as well.
Voices and Visions was a wonderful, and now old, series on American Poets. Here you’ll find episodes posted to the web on the Annenberg Media Site (wonderful in it own right). The loading can be slow, but the videos are a comprehensive introduction to some important American poets.
Find a Grave, which is a little odd, but fun. You can put in the name of any famous (or unfamous) person in the U.S. and find out where they are buried. And many of the entries include photographs of tombs and gravestones. So, if you want to see Emily Dickinson’s grave instead of read her work…
After bashing the U.S. earlier this week, maybe this celebration of its artists and prominent citizens will balance the scale…maybe.
Filed under: American Life, Art, Culture, Death, Education, Exploration, History, Knowledge, Literature, Poetry, Society, Teaching
Joe: I am hereby tagging you for the Meme: List your main five strengths as a writer.
My personal five main strengths as a writer? That’s tough. I think I might have three at most. But I’ll give it a try, maybe tomorrow.
I’m assuming this means I have to tag someone else. Hmmm…. —D
The last link especially intrigues me. I wrote a short story not too long ago called “Grave Memories” about a girl investigating her deceased grandfather’s collection of headstones. This website would have come in handy! Thanks for sharing.
What an interesting subject for a story—I especially like the idea of collecting something so unwieldy, impractical, and odd.
The grave site is one some of my students actually do seem to visit. Every once in a while, one of them will mention seeing an author’s grave. I always ask if they visited it, feeling all warm and fuzzy because they’ve developed that level of affection for a writer, and then they say, “No. Online.” I wonder if it counts as reverence if you don’t have to journey there. Thanks for visiting! —D
That last one is awfully useful. I have a friend, the mother of my sister-in-law (eek, what are we?), who took a group of New Mexico writers all over Ireland to visit the graves of famous Irish novelists and poets. I wonder if she used Find A Grave.
I found it when someone in class just wondered idly what Melville’s grave might look like, whether it was nautical or not. I can see how it would be really useful though. I tried to find some of my relative’s graves, but the site is better with famous and famous by proxy people. You can find the grave of Ben Frankin’s grandson, for instance, and the friends of some American authors. I don’t do it all often but wandering around in a cemetery can be interesting, and if you do it online you don’t seem so morbid! —D
Emily Dickinson’s grave is nice, too. It always has a bunch of little trinkets on it, but it’s in a pleasant little cemetary surrounded by more modern streets so you can stroll around but not feel too isolated from the living world. I went to school nearby and some of us used to visit once in a while.
That would make a great pilgrimage. I could see visiting Emily Dickinson. I’m not sure she would see me, but she’s no longer in the position to deny visitors. It’s nice to think she might know how much we value her now. —D