This post republishes a review of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Met History” webpages that I wrote in 1998 for the HomeworkCentral.com Top 8 Newsletter. From 1997-2001, every week I reviewed five, and in later years eight, of the learning materials flooding into the internet. Most of those early nuggets of gold in the internet swamp remain online — often enhanced with new technology like the music delivery you will get by clicking the above image. Extensive database materials and a photo archive are now available. My 1998 review follows:

The majestic history of structures, seasons, and singers of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera fills these pages of the Met’s Website. Students of music history and biography will find this a unique resource. From the time it was founded in 1884, the Metropolitan has played a major artistic role New York and throughout the opera world. Contemporary photographs of the great singers in costume grace the pages of text describing specific performance, taking us back through the years to relish great music, grandly given. As Algernon St. John-Brennon wrote in 1915 in the New York Telegram: “The loveliness, the allurement, the seductiveness, the reverie, and the dream were in the glorious utterance of the singer. We cannot ask for more.”

For a node to learn about the Anglo-Saxon impact that remains up to our times turn to a Modern Poetry lecture from Open Yale courses. These people of long ago echo to us in Ezra Pound: Here is an expatriate poet writing in the voice of the Anglo-Saxon wanderer, a figure deprived of his kinsmen, who is out in the elements, far from land, far from his nation and home.

For much more from the Anglo-Saxons, browse at Georgetown the Labyrinth Old English resources. Western Michigan University’s Medieval Institute has an excellent introduction to The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language and a page at the University of Pittsburgh diagrams Anglo-Saxon church structures.

Biography of people alive today is being preserved with new, robust digital methods. A good place to find out examples of this kind of preservation is the Library of Congress Blog, where for example the new recording of people recalling history is described in this post: Library Preserves Voice of Last Living World War I Veteran.

Remembering World War I in a different way are memorial structures and spaces. These are studied in The Open University’s Arts and History course on the Commemoration of War, which includes this page on The Royal Artillery Memorial.

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A biography learn node of William Penn with the story of his role in the history of Pennsylvania is a large topic. The Internet has many excellent nodes of materials on the subject. This blog post is a small learnode combining a sampling of William Penn webpages:

The image that illustrates this post is from an excellent introduction to Penn at HippoCampus.org. To see the image in the introductory presentation click on “Pennsylvania and Delaware” on HIppoCampus’s page: Browse US History, English Colonies.

Long, official and authoritative Penn biographies are woven into the online exhibits of two official institutions of the State of Pennsylvania and one from the university of the state to the south of Penn’s former colony, at the University of Virginia:

- Pennsylvania General Assembly of history: The Quaker Province: 1681-1776
- Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
- Extensive account of the life of William Penn at the University of Virginia

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The Suez Canal, featured in this learn node, is an enormous topic spanning the globe in influence, and with a story that continues over several millennia. This learnode contains 3 sources that individually and together provide a general overview and lead into other materials so you can traverse this rich subject for yourself.

The postcard that forms the title illustration, “Port Said, Steamer Traversing the Suez Canal,” is from the TIMEA collection. The postcard is displayed on a Rice Connexions unit about Places in Egypt: Lower Egypt, which gives this historical background:

Linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, this feat of engineering opened in 1869. Although not the first canal (earlier ones, though not exactly in the same location as the modern one, include ones built by Darius I and Trajan), the modern canal stretches over a hundred miles, from Port Said on the Mediterranean to Suez and the Red Sea. Its opening was the cause of international celebration and was attended by royalty from all over the world; it was also marked by the opening of the “Old” Cairo Opera House, which has since been demolished.

For general background to this vast subject a good place to begin is the Suez Canal overview at Tour Egypt! Another rich cluster of knowledge and links to more for the Suez Canal is the BBC Key map webpage for the 1956 Suez Crisis.

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This learn node from American history begins where the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosts the website where you can:

“Take a virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin. This site compiles paintings, historical documents, and commentary from contemporary experts so you can explore the intersections of two cultures, both in Catlin’s time and today.”

The museum also welcomes visitors to a George Catlin Indian Gallery where 34 of his paintings can be studied individually. As an example of following history and art through the fenceless trail of the open Internet:

- Catlin’s painting of Pipestone Quarry leads us to locate a National Parks Website about that famous Minnesota location.
- The Pipestone County Museum provides very local and detailed memory of the area’s history.
- And the famed poem The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow echoes in our thoughts:

On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.

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Frederick Douglass materials that are not enslaved by proprietary Internet barriers are plentiful and authoritative online. The University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project offers letters, images, writings, links and other educational resources and opportunities. The project is the work of the University of Rochester Libraries with the support of Xerox Corporation. The University of Pennsylvania offers online Douglass books. The Library of Congress offers a large depository of Douglass’ papers, openly available to the online visitor. Documenting the American South makes available more documents and more links.

Each of the sources you can click to above will provide paths to click to more and more about Frederick Douglass. The networking among the open online resources for this great and famous man is far richer, more complete and authoritative than any previous resource for the topic. It includes, for example, video clips from Biography.com.

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This tasty learn node includes reports of discoveries in the history of chocolate from the Los Angeles Times, New York Science Times and other open sources relaying to the public science news that is from a source is limited to its paid subscribers (in this case the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

The chocolate news from the LA Times report:

Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate, according to new findings that push the earliest known use of cacao back about 500 years.

Residue scraped from pottery vessels dating to 1400 B.C. to 1100 B.C. indicate that residents of Honduras’ remote Ulua Valley fermented the sweet pulp of the chocolate plant to make an alcoholic drink well before they began grinding the bitter seeds and mixing them with honey and chiles to produce the equivalent of modern cocoa. . . .

Open chocolate history, chemistry and food information are richly available online. To pick a few pieces out of the virtual chocolate knowledge box: This MIT Kitchen Chemistry page includes a topic-by-topic online chocolate topic tour. Chicago’s Field Museum has an online chocolate knowledge feast Chocolate: The Exhibition. And the US Food and Drug Administration has a page (from which the image of chocolates above is taken) on its standards for chocolate.

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An iron curtain has descended across the continent.
The speech in which Winston Churchill used those words and gave the phrase “iron curtain” to the 20th century Cold War era was given in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946. A few of the sentences from the speech, including the words above and Sir Winston’s enunciation of the “capitals of the ancient states” behind the curtain can be accessed in Churchill’s voice from the Library of Congress. This audio node is included in a major exhibition by the LOC and Annenberg Foundation titled Churchill and the Great Republic. The exhibition networks photographs, texts, sounds and commentary into a distinguished digital biography of Churchill. (For a look at some realities of the Cold War that the Iron Curtain brought on: The Berlin Airlift.)

The Internet has many superb Churchillian nodes, which when interlinked form a web of Sir Winston’s rich weave into the fabric of 20th century history and thought. The grand appreciation for him is expressed in a BBC archived exhibit of his state funeral. To catch something of the vigor and courage of this great man, the Churchill Center’s page of quotations is a good place to start. For example, Churchill told the United States Congress in 1941:

“I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. ‘Trust the people’ that was his message….I owe my advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose servant I am. In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters. Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly….By the way, I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own!”