Top Shelf

by Mark Hammond and John Tibbals, SWC Librarians

Top Shelf is a weekly column where librarians share some of the top resources they've discovered -- for school, for fun, or just for curiosity's sake.

Book Selection
Derks, Scott. Working Americans 1880-1999, Millerton: Grey House Publishing, 2000.
Call #: Reference HD 8066 .D47 2000

The introduction to Working Americans 1880-1999 describes it as “the first volume of a multi-volume set that looks, decade-by-decade, into the kind of work they did, the homes they lived in, the food and clothes they bought, and the entertainment they sought, as well as the society and history that shaped the world Americans worked in from 1880 to 1999.” The set consists of three volumes, one each on the working class, the middle class, and the upper class. Within each time period each book provides one or more family profiles, historical snapshots, and economic profiles.

These are books that are useful as research sources, but are also fun to browse. It is particularly interesting to take a particular time period and compare the information provided for the three socioeconomic classes.
-Mark


Website Selection
Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC)
http://www.lanic.utexas.edu/ (can also be accessed via a link on our webpage under Internet Resources/History)

A very comprehensive directory of websites about Latin America in English, Spanish and Portuguese intended "to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, on Latin America." Topics cover a wide range including such areas as education, economy, government, humanities, media, science, society and culture, etc. Users can search by subject, by region or by individual country. All periods are covered from pre-history and colonial to contemporary (e.g. Malvinas War and Guatemalan death squads). "Contains over 12,000 unique URLs, one of the largest guides for Latin American content on the Internet."
-John T.