CYBERSPACE

* Celebrating Civil Rights: Though the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was Thursday, today is the official holiday. Why not spend the day learning more about the man and the civil rights movement? Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project (https://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/King/) has documents by and about King, plus a chronology, a link to Stanford’s King Center for Nonviolent Social Change site, a history of the center and research activities. Holidays on the Net has a King Day page with a bio and text of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. You’ll find audio files of the speech that you can download at https://www.webcorp.com/civilrights/mlk.htm. The National Civil Rights Museum’s collection of civil rights artifacts and the text of many of King’s speeches can be seen at https://www.mecca.org/~crights/. And then there’s a site devoted to assassination theories, https://www.parascope.com/mx/luther1.htm

* Controversial Topic: Twenty-five years ago Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion. There are sites dedicated to each side of the issue; you decide which one’s for you. Two site examples: Celebrating the Freedom to Choose is the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League site at https://www.naral.org/anniversary/. Twenty-Five Years of Life Denied is an anti-abortion site at https://www.prolife.org/rvw

* Gold Rush: Did anyone ever really say, “There’s gold in them thar hills”? If so, it was probably 150 years ago--soon after Jan. 24, 1848, when James W. Marshall discovered a gold nugget near Sutter’s Mill in Northern California, leading to the California Gold Rush of 1849. The San Francisco Museum site has a variety of articles about the Gold Rush (https://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/index0.1.html#gold), including “Life in California Before the Gold Discovery,” “Miners 10 Commandments” and a gold hunter’s farewell to his wife. At https://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~scring/index.html, you can read an authentic memoir from the Gold Rush, put up by the grandson of the journal’s author. Take a virtual tour of the California Gold Country at https://www.malakoff.com/vcgc.htm. And visit the Marshall Gold Discovery National Park at https://www.windjammer.net/users/isg/coloma

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