Media Resources

This media resource features a guide to searching topics of race and ethnicity in Chronicling America, including a thesaurus of historically accurate keywords that may help produce more results. Remember, primary documents from the past contain sensitive content, and the suggested keywords are often offensive to several different communities of people.  

Funded in part by the NEH, Chicago00: A Flight on the 1893 Ferris Wheel is a two-minute virtual reality (VR) video simulating the experience of riding the original Ferris Wheel, built as the central attraction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Selma, Alabama served as a major site of civil unrest in response to the disabling conditions of Jim Crow laws for Black Americans in the South. This page outlines Selma’s history, the Bloody Sunday massacre, and the ensuing responses to these racial injustices. Testimonies from activists and foot soldiers recorded by faculty and graduate students at Auburn University offer a comprehensive survey of Selma’s civil rights history and maps the legacy of these protests onto social justice movements in the twenty-first century. 

Visualizing Emancipation is a comprehensive map and timeline illustrating the slow decline of slavery in the United States. It provides quick access to thousands of primary source documents in connection with this timeline.