Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, Website on history, Video website on history


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Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
	Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory is the website that explores the historic fire in ways that engender rich Language Arts activities. Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, the video website on history, provides a wealth of information in essays, electronic images of artifacts, and a library of relevant texts that vividly recreate Chicago before, during, and after the great fire. Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory has been created by Chicago Historical Society and the Trustees of Northwestern University in 1996, based on the Great Chicago fire that destroyed Chicago on October 8 through 10, 1871. Bessie Bradwell Helmer described the great fire as “It was like a snowstorm only the flakes were red instead of white.” The fire nearly destroyed the most representative city of the new nation.

Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory provides an impressive mix of archival materials and interpretive essays, which can serve a vast range of readers, starting from junior high school students through university researchers. There are actually two parallel websites can be found in Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory. The first one, The Great Chicago Fire, covers the context, causes, course and consequences of the fire. The second one, The Web of Memory, with the cultural representation of the fire, consisting of sections devoted to such issues like “The Eyewitnesses”, “Media Event”, “The O’Leary Legend”, and “Commemorating Catastrophe”. Each sections of both the parallel sites is again further divided into three categories, viz. Interpretive “Essays”, “Galleries” that contains maps, photographs, sketches, lithographs, painting, and “Library” that contains manuscript or printed sources.

Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory is a real model for multimedia history and an excellent historical website that provides some well informative contents. It is ideal for the students of many levels, in fields ranging from general US and urban history to popular culture.

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