REMEMBERING The historian John Hope Franklin took pains to remind us of how much of his and our history we would like to forget.

When he was a boy in segregated Oklahoma, where he was born in 1915, John Hope Franklin used to indulge in a subversive bit of wordplay like a small act of public and private theater.

“My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin said not long ago, his voice full of artful pauses, words pulled out like taffy. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.”

Even in a country where the far-fetched, for better and for worse, so often becomes reality, few historians achieved the stature, both as scholars and as moral figures — and as combinations of the two — that Dr. Franklin did. When he died last week, at the age of 94, an American epoch seemed to vanish with him.

Dr. Franklin was first and foremost a major historian, whose landmark book, “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans,” first published in 1947, was a comprehensive survey that sold more than three million copies. The book also permanently altered the ways in which the American narrative was studied.

“What distinguishes his history or historiography is that he, like few other historians, wrote a book that transformed the way we understand a major social phenomenon,” said David Levering Lewis, the New York University historian, who like Dr. Franklin studied under Theodore Currier at Fisk University in Nashville.

“When you think of ‘From Slavery to Freedom,’ there’s before and there’s after, there’s the world before and then we have a basic paradigm shift,” he said. “Before him you had a field of study that had been feeble and marginalized, full of a pretty brutal discounting of the impact of people of color. And he moved it into the main American narrative. It empowered a whole new field of study.”

Dr. Lewis and others argue that Dr. Franklin’s work helped empower not just African-American studies, but the whole range of alternative stories — of women, gays, Hispanics, Asians and others — now so much a part of mainstream academia.

Dr. Franklin accomplished this not through advocacy but rather through the traditional means of scholarly inquiry. In his discussion, for instance, of the intersection of race and imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Franklin observed: “The United States, unlike other imperial powers, had a color problem at home and therefore had to pursue a policy with regard to race that would not upset the racial equilibrium within the United States. In Puerto Rico, for example, approximately one-third of the population was distinctly of African descent, and many so-called white Puerto Ricans had sufficient black blood in their veins to qualify as African-Americans in the United States.”

Complete Story Here…

John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness – NYTimes.com.

It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books. Complete  Article  Availaible at…

The Future of Reading – In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update – Series – NYTimes.com.

Valentine’s Day History: Roman Roots

Cherubs float like balloons in an 1880s Valentine’s Day card produced by a Boston, Massachusetts, company. Valentine’s Day cards–then mostly handwritten notes–gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in earnest in the early 1900s.

More than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine’s Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See “Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.”)

The lovers’ holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

“It is clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the Christians are trying to close it down,” Lenski said. “So there’s reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, we’ll just call this a Christian festival.”

The church pegged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.

According to the story, in the third century A.D. Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.

For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.D. 270—on February 14, the story goes.

While it’s not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, “it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia.”

Valentine’s Day 2009: What Recession?

Even as the economy crumbles, today’s relatively tame Valentine’s Day celebration is expected to generate some $14.7 billion in retail sales in the United States.

The average U.S. consumer is expected to spend $102.50 on Valentine’s Day gifts, meals, and entertainment, according to an annual U.S. National Retail Federation survey—down from $122.98 per person in 2008. “If anything, [people] are probably scaling back on more discretionary purchases, so that they can feel comfortable spending on Valentine’s Day,” said Ellen Davis, the federation’s vice president.

About 92 percent of married Americans with children will spend the most money on their spouses: $67.22.

The remainder goes to Valentine’s Day gifts for kids, friends, co-workers, and pets, according to the survey.

Valentine’s Day Cards

Greeting cards, as usual, will be the most common Valentine’s Day purchases. Fifty-eight percent of American consumers plan to send at least one, according to the survey.

The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, says 190 million Valentine’s Day cards will be sent. And that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of cards schoolchildren exchange.

“Giving your sweetheart or someone [else] a Valentine’s Day card is a deep-seated cultural tradition in the United States,” said association spokesperson Barbara Miller. “We don’t see that changing.”

The first Valentine’s Day card was sent in 1415 from France’s Duke of Orléans to his wife when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt, according to the association.

Valentine’s Day cards—mostly handwritten notes—gained popularity in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Mass production started in the early 1900s.

Hallmark got in the game in 1913, according to spokesperson Sarah Kolell. Since then—perhaps not coincidentally—the market for Valentine’s Day cards has blossomed beyond lovers to include parents, children, siblings, and friends.

Valentine’s Day Candy: Cash Cow

An estimated 45.8 percent of U.S. consumers will exchange Valentine’s Day candy, according to the retail federation survey—adding up to a sweet billion dollars in sales, the National Confectioners Association says.

About 75 percent of that billion is from sales of chocolate, which has been associated with romance at least since Mexico’s Aztec Empire, according to Susan Fussell, a spokesperson with the association.

Fifteenth-century Aztec emperor Moctezuma I believed “eating chocolate on a regular basis made him more virile and better able to serve his harem,” she said.

(Related: secrets of ancient candy.)

But there’s nothing chocolaty about Valentine’s Day’s most iconic candy: those demanding, chalky little hearts emblazoned “BE MINE,” “KISS ME,” “CALL ME.”

About eight billion candy hearts will be made in 2009, the association says—enough to stretch from Rome, Italy, to Valentine, Arizona, and back again 20 times.

(Also see in Traveler magazine’s Valentine’s Day special: best U.S. cupcake bakeries.)

What Is Love? Evolution and Infatuation

Valentine’s Day is all about love. But what, exactly, is that?

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on love, including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.

Fisher breaks love into three distinct brain systems that enable mating and reproduction:

• Sex drive
• Romantic love (obsession, passion, infatuation)
• Attachment (calmness and security with a long-term partner)

These are brain systems, not phases, Fisher emphasized, and all three play a role in love. They can operate independently, but people crave all three for an ideal relationship.

“I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a range of partners,” she said.

“I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, and attachment evolved to tolerate that person at least long enough to raise a child together as a team.”

Valentine’s Day, Fisher added, used to encompass only two of these three brain systems: sex drive and romantic love.

But “once you start giving the dog a valentine, you are talking about a real expression of attachment as well as romantic love.”

WATCH VALENTINE’S DAY VIDEO: LOVE ON THE BRAIN:

Valentine’s Day Facts: Gifts, History, and Love Science.

In high doses, ultraviolet light can damage skin and DNA molecules, but the body does need some UV light to help us produce vitamin D. Our bodies use melanin to regulate how much UV light our skin lets in.

Courtesy George Chaplin

Ultraviolet Light And Pregnancy

Because women build babies in their wombs, they need more vitamin D to produce extra calcium for the baby’s bones. Could that explain this difference: When scientists look at the underarm skin of men and women in every color group of humans, the women on average are always lighter than the men. Are the ladies lighter to produce a little extra Vitamin D for the babies?

• Listen: Dr. Nina Jablonski describes the “Under Arm” test.

To begin, please point your elbow to the ceiling.

Then imagine yourself naked.

Then look at the patch of skin on the inside of your upper arm, the part of you that almost never sees the sun.

Whatever color you see there is what experts call your basic skin color, according to professor Nina Jablonski, head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

And that color, the one you have now, says Jablonski, is very probably not the color your ancient ancestors had — even if you think your family has been the same color for a long, long time.

Different Place, Different Color

Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage, Jablonski says. Recent developments in comparative genomics allow scientists to sample the DNA in modern humans.

By creating genetic “clocks,” scientists can make fairly careful guesses about when particular groups became the color they are today. And with the help of paleontologists and anthropologists, scientists can go further: They can wind the clock back and see what colors these populations were going back tens of thousands of years, says Jablonski.

She says that for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that’s as few as 2,500 years), “almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color.”

Over the last 50,000 years, populations have gone from dark pigmented to lighter skin, and people have also gone the other way, from light skin back to darker skin, she says.

“People living now in southern parts of India [and Sri Lanka] are extremely darkly pigmented,” Jablonski says. But their great, great ancestors lived much farther north, and when they migrated south, their pigmentation redarkened.

“There has probably been a redarkening of several groups of humans.”

Why We Change Color

The repigmenting process is increasingly well understood.

“Humans started in Africa,” Jablonski says, the part of Africa near the equator where it is intensely sunny with lots of ultraviolet light.

Ultraviolet light, or UV, in high doses can age the skin and damage the DNA molecule, which makes it harder to build a fetus. Not to mention that ultraviolet light can sometimes cause skin cancer.

On the other hand, if a human is plopped down in, say, Norway, where the days can be short and there is precious little ultraviolet light, this creates problems, too. All vertebrate animals need ultraviolet light to help produce vitamin D. Vitamin D helps us absorb calcium from our food to build strong bones. If we don’t get enough ultraviolet light, we’re less likely to survive to reproductive age to produce strong-boned babies.

Thus the dilemma: People who live in sunny climes around the equator have too much UV. People who move away from the equator eventually have too little UV.

Hooray For Melanin

The solution is what Jablonski calls “a really cool molecule”: melanin. In different concentrations, melanin makes skin lighter or darker. Kind of like a Venetian blind, it can let UV light in or keep it out.

Melanin has evolved in many different animals. Humans have had it for a long, long time and what Jablonski and others have learned is that when early humans migrated from the equator, their melanin levels changed.

That doesn’t mean they lost their tans. It means they had very specific genetic changes that allowed them to live and successfully reproduce in less sunny places. Darwin teaches that these changes began randomly. Somebody in the population at some point had a baby, and that baby, just by chance, had a little change in its DNA that made her skin, for example, a little lighter. When that baby moved north to Europe, lighter skin gave her an advantage as a grown-up, because it helped her produce strong-boned babies who could survive and have babies of their own.

Successive mutations created successive generations of lighter and lighter people as they moved north.

“This, in short, really created the gradation of skin color that we see in modern humans today,” says Jablonski. Her map of UV radiation levels on Earth closely mirrors the array of skin colors on Earth.

Skin Color Is A Fleeting Thing

The big surprise is how fast these changes can occur.

“Our original estimates were that [skin color changes] occurred perhaps at a more stately pace,” Jablonski says. But now they’re finding that a population can be one color (light or dark) and 100 generations later — with no intermarriage — be a very different color.

Figuring 25 years per generation (which is generous, since early humans walked naked through the world — clothes slow down the rate), that’s an astonishingly short interval.

It’s “a blink of an eye,” she says.

Audio & More available at NPR (Click Below)

Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color : NPR.

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama paid tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, at a celebration for the reopening of the theater where he was slain.

“Despite all that divided us — North and South, black and white — he had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people,” Obama said last night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. “And because of Abraham Lincoln, and all who carried on his work in the generations since, that is what we remain today.”

Obama, the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, often invokes the name and symbols of the assassinated president who ended slavery and brought the U.S. through the Civil War. Both men rose from the Illinois state legislature to the highest office in the land and both built reputations as skilled political orators.

The reopening of Ford’s Theatre after an 18-month refurbishment coincides with a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Obama, 47, who took the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible, will travel to Springfield, Illinois, today to mark the bicentennial.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined politicians and Ford’s Theatre donors to watch a series of songs, readings and speeches performed by celebrities such as Ben Vereen and Kelsey Grammer.

The theater also unveiled a videotape, to be shown at its museum, in which the four living past-presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, accompanied by Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.

Empty Presidential Box

The Obamas watched from the front row alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the nation’s leaders have sat in the presidential box since John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln there during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

The event was a retrospective of Lincoln’s life, from his humble beginnings described by James Earl Jones’s baritone to Vereen’s impassioned reading of the Emancipation Proclamation without the prompter, which broke mid-show.

The highlight for the audience of about 650 was classical violinist Joshua Bell’s “Variations on Yankee Doodle,” which was by turns playful and mournful.

Broadway singer Cheryl Freeman gave an electrifying rendition of a song from the play “The Civil War,” followed by Audra McDonald, Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which earned a standing ovation.

Host and actor Richard Thomas called the facility the most-famous theater in America, which had morphed from a scene of tragedy into a symbol of Lincoln’s legacy.

Lincoln Medal

The gala event included the presentation of the Lincoln Medal given each year to someone whose work, accomplishments and attributes “exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation’s history,” Ford’s Theatre said. This year, the recipients were filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the government bought the theater, which dates to 1861, from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to Lincoln, and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it looked that night. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Red Upholstery

The theater has just 658 seats, done up in red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

The renovation was part of a larger $50 million fundraising effort known as the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign that’s also supporting the building of a new education center. The campaign benefited from a $5 million donation from Exxon Mobil Corp. and $2.5 million from the State of Qatar, the theater said.

Other donors included AT&T Inc., BP America Inc., General Dynamics Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to Ford’s Theatre.

Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture.

Improvements in the Kindle 2 design bring a thinner footprint, a metal back plate, and stereo speakers. As I mentioned last October, when the first Kindle 2 pictures surfaced, the design cues bring back memories of the first Apple iPods. As usual, the information is purely speculative but the forum reads that Kindle 2 will be available on February 24 for $359.

Kindle 2 features rounded corners, a black and white screen (apparently the same size as the original Kindle), a 3.5mm headphone jack with a sliding sleep button at the top and a unified QWERTY keyboard under the screen. Smaller navigation buttons are placed on both the left and right sides of Kindle 2. A joystick now replaces the original Kindle scroll wheel.

Amazon’s new Kindle will use the same EV-DO wireless technology for over-the-air downloads as the original. Storage-wise, Kindle 2 is said to come with a 2GB on-board memory. Form the leaked pictures, no SD card slot can be seen but my guess is that there will be a way to expand Kindle’s memory – maybe a microSD slot.

Leak: Amazon Kindle 2 Pictures and Pricing – PC World.

Email Picture

Pam Risdon / PBS

‘A RELIEF’: “It was like a boil being lanced,” says Gates of being freed from the burden of his idealized views of Lincoln. Glorifying Lincoln has served different agendas, he adds.

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln

Henry Louis Gates’ documentary examines the 16th president from many angles.

For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the challenge of making a documentary about Abraham Lincoln was daunting but ultimately too good to pass up.

The only question was, which Abraham Lincoln?

“I got this reading list, and every book I read had a different Lincoln in it,” says the Harvard University history professor by phone from Washington, D.C.

There was Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the White Supremacist, Lincoln the Martyr, Lincoln the Tyrant/War Criminal, Lincoln the Romantic Lover, the Melancholic, the Atheist, the Orator, the Opportunist, the Gay, the Hero of Fidel Castro. . . . “And ultimately Lincoln the Unknown,” Gates summarizes. “I thought it could be fun, without even using the word, to do a postmodern Lincoln.”

That’s the Honest Abe (or one of them) who emerges in “Looking for Lincoln,” the lively, intriguing two-hour PBS documentary that airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET. Written and presented by Gates, “Looking for Lincoln” leaves no stovepipe hat unturned in its search for the prismatic 16th president. Although, or perhaps because, he is the most written-about of America’s chief executives, Lincoln remains something of an Rorschach blot. His Mt. Rushmore-sized legacy rests on the fault lines of the nation’s most painful and complex themes and leitmotifs: slavery, black-white relations and the sometimes precarious balance between states’ rights and federal unity. Gates, who grew up in Piedmont, W.Va., learning to rote-idolize Lincoln, was no exception. But as he dug deeper into his research, he unearthed a number of jarring insights. “All of a sudden I find out Lincoln used the ‘N’ word, Lincoln liked ‘darky’ jokes, Lincoln liked minstrel shows.”

In “Looking for Lincoln,” being shown to coincide with the bicentennial of its subject’s birth, Gates fittingly begins and ends his meditations at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In between, he attempts to carve through the monumental marble icon and discover the flawed, flesh-and-blood human within.

During his odyssey, he receives assistance from historians Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Herbert Donald, and Harold Holzer; former Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett; former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton; historical reenactors; and a number of ordinary Americans. “Lincoln is a composite of all these images that people see refracted and reflected inside themselves,” says Gates, who specializes in African American history and literature. “He is the mirror of the American soul.”

Gates acknowledges that looking for Lincoln required some soul-searching of his own, as a historian, an American and an African American. In the documentary, he quickly takes aim at what may be the most sensitive aspect of Lincoln: his attitudes about race.

In reality, Gates says, this discussion comprises three “sub-discussions”: one on race and slavery, a second on racial equality and a third on colonization. “My metaphor is like braiding hair.”

Although Lincoln found the institution of slavery morally abhorrent, he didn’t believe that blacks and whites were equal. He probably would’ve been appalled at the idea of an African American becoming president, an awkward twist considering that so many prominent politicians, civil rights leaders and other Americans regularly invoke his name as the patron saint of their righteous causes.

“He’s certainly my favorite president,” Gates says. “He’s George Bush’s favorite. And, my God, Barack Obama has adopted him as his father.”

Lincoln at various times advocated shipping blacks to Africa or Panama. “Whereas abolition was part of his moral compass, equality was not,” Gates says. It was pragmatism, more than dawning enlightenment, that finally drove him to write the Emancipation Proclamation. “The irony of Abraham Lincoln is that he changed,” Gates says. “He changed for two reasons. One is that he met Frederick Douglass [the venerable abolitionist, reformer and newspaper publisher]. And he decided that he needed black troops to win the war.”

But it was only with the adoption of the 13th Amendment several months after Lincoln’s assassination that slavery was formally abolished (in law, if not fully in practice). And despite the amendment’s passage and the mixed results of Reconstruction, three more generations of racial apartheid would persist in the South in the form of Jim Crow.

Gates also learned that Lincoln, like many whites in his day, apparently never sat down to a meal with a black person or spent an entire day in one’s company. Those facts typically were bowdlerized from the official hagiography that took shape practically from the instant that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, 1865.

Pondering these revelations, Gates felt a bit disillusioned with his hero. Then his colleague Goodwin — whom he says played Yoda, the sagacious advisor, to his questing Luke Skywalker — snapped him out of it. “Get over it,” she told him. “It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of all the historians who’ve represented him this way.”

Gates began to reconsider Lincoln in this new light, recalling W.E.B. DuBois‘ adage that Lincoln was “big enough to be inconsistent.” “It was like a boil being lanced,” he says of being freed from the burden of his idealized views of Lincoln. “It was a relief.”

Gates says that the idealization of Lincoln served different agendas for white and black Americans. The myth of Lincoln the Saint salved white consciences by allowing America’s Anglo-European majority to tell itself that it had done its part to liberate blacks by fighting the Civil War, and any further social progress was up to African Americans themselves.

The same myth may have impeded blacks by creating a shining model of white behavior that bore scant resemblance to the attitudes of most white Americans from the 1870s through at least the 1930s, a period that Gates calls “the nadir of black-white relations.”

For the historian, researching the program “challenged me to be tolerant of diverse views at the extremes,” never more so than when he attended a convocation of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. On camera, Gates assiduously avoids making judgments about the perspective of the organization or its members. “It’s easy to be a professor at an Ivy League school where everybody’s a liberal,” he says. “But I had to put myself inside the heads” of SCV members.

If there’s a moral to the epic, multi-shaded story of Lincoln’s evolving racial attitudes, Gates believes it’s that his example demonstrates how any of us likewise can modify or put aside our prejudices.

“Race and racism haven’t gone anywhere. But I think the capacity to confront one’s limitations, stare them in the eyes and become a better person in the larger good is what I want people to take away from the film.”

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln – Los Angeles Times.

You’ve come to terms with the reality of the current job market. There are jobs available; but, it will take focus, dedication, and a bit of savvy to land one. No problem.

You’re ready to take a no-excuses approach to your job hunt and you’ve diagnosed any underlying job search issues. You’ve spotted a few areas where you need to improve your job search skills. Working with a career professional isn’t an option for you right now. So, what other options are available?

Here are seven, no-cost resources to help you become a more savvy job hunter that has the skills to compete in the current job market:

1. LinkedIn.com – LinkedIn is a social network for business professionals. An updated LinkedIn profile is practically a must-have for every job hunter. However, LinkedIn isn’t just for job hunters. It’s an essential tool for anyone who understands the importance of networking as a career management tool. You can connect with current or former colleagues and alumni and request recommendations (a professional endorsement) from people you’ve worked with in the past. LinkedIn also offers a great opportunity to connect with people within organizations you are targeting during your job search.
2. O*NET Online – A full-access version of the occupational network database. This is an invaluable tool for researching industries and discovering occupations that you might not have previously considered, but closely match your skills.
3. JibberJobber.com – This career management tool works seamlessly with LinkedIn or any spreadsheets that you might already be using. This tool will enable you to keep track of all of your job search and networking contacts and any correspondence or follow-up.  Best of all, if you need to resume your job search in three years, the information you collected this go-round will still be there waiting for you.
4. VisualCV.com – This online tool truly allows you to bring your resume to life – complete with presentations, documents, video, and a photo, if you so desire. It is especially useful for creatives with large portfolios. However, it can be a great way for any job hunter to stand out. Rather than just reading about your accomplishments, an employer can view a presentation you gave, see certificates you’ve received, and go through your portfolio. Note: The VisualCV does not replace your traditional resume. Rather, it should be used in conjunction with it.
5. JobRadio.fm – Up late worrying about tomorrow’s interview or wondering whether you should have listed every job you’ve ever had on your resume? JobRadio.fm – available online 24/7 – will keep you company and keep you informed about the latest job search strategy news. Listen to career and job search-related podcasts anytime or download a show and listen to it on your computer or MP3-player at your convenience. JobRadio.fm features content from Secrets of the Job Hunt, Career Communique, Jobacle, Jobs in Pods, Total Picture Radio, and the SavvyJobseeker Podcast – hosted by yours truly.
6. TheJobLab.com – Get 24/7 access to article, video, and audio libraries; online forums; and a number of other tools and resources for job hunters. Need more support at a minimal price? A low-cost upgrade gives you access to live workshops and bi-weekly Q&A sessions.
7. Free community resources – CareerOneStop is a great online and local resource for job hunters. Many local employment networks, libraries, and churches are now offering job search training or hosting job search support groups or networking groups. Do your homework and find out what is available in your community.

The current job market certainly requires a savvier jobseeker. However, there are lots of resources and sources of support available to job hunters – regardless of budget. Take advantage of any available resource that will help you to improve your job search skills and your job search fortune.

Cleveland Job Search Examiner: Seven no-cost solutions for the savvy job hunter.

Hands on: Vincent Dotoli started his school with one classroom and 12 first graders.

Zina Mingo has lived in Harlem for all her 40 years and now teaches in a Harlem public school. But committed as she is to the community, she wasn’t willing to subject her son, Devon, now 8, to the educational system she works for. “Most of the schools in Harlem are failing schools, and that’s just not an option to me,” she says.

Instead, Mingo is pinning her hopes for Devon on Harlem Academy, a four-year-old not-for-profit school just north of Central Park. With its small classes, focus on rigorous academics, required parental involvement and long school day, the school gets results; 90% of third graders score above the national median in reading and math. Students arrive at 7:30, begin sports at 3:45 and leave at 5 or 6, depending on whether they want homework help after sports. For that, parents pay as little as $400 a year and as much as $16,000, depending on income.

Harlem Academy is the passion of headmaster Vincent Dotoli, 39, whose lawyer father and cpa mother could afford to buy him a private school education at Far Hills Country Day in New Jersey. After college he taught in rural Maine and Rhode Island and then for four years at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a well-endowed 125-year-old private school in Cambridge, Mass. But he didn’t feel his efforts there made much of a difference. “Those students were going to be successful whether I was there or not,” he says.

So in 2001 Dotoli enrolled at Columbia University to earn a master’s in education administration. His thesis was on a model for a private urban school that could skirt the public school bureaucracy dragging down big city schools, while involving parents, who are too often treated as a nuisance in those same schools. Edmund W. Gordon, director of Columbia’s Institute for Urban & Minority Education, joined Dotoli in meeting with prospective students and parents. Harlem Academy opened in September 2004 with 12 first graders in one room rented from an arts group. In 2005 it moved to bigger quarters and now has 74 first-through-fifth graders.

Country Day In Harlem – Forbes.com.

Racial jokes? Shipping freed slaves to Africa? These aren’t the sorts of things most people generally associate with Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday is on Feb. 12. In a new book, “Lincoln on Race & Slavery,” and a new series airing Feb. 11 on PBS, “Looking for Lincoln,” Harvard professor and documentary filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes a fresh look at the 16th president. (For more on Lincoln, see Dorothy Rabinowitz’s television review and the book review.)

PBS

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Wall Street Journal: There have been 14,000 books written about Lincoln, according to you, more than any other American. Isn’t that enough?

Mr. Gates: The only person who has received more attention in print is Jesus, which is astonishing. But, no one has done a book or film from my particular perspective.

Which is?

Here’s the complicated truth: Lincoln was always opposed to slavery as an institution, [but] he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people. He gave a speech [in 1858] in Charleston, Ill., in which he said he was opposed to interracial marriage, opposed to blacks serving on juries or serving in the military and said the difference between the white and black races was permanent and fixed by nature. This is a long way from being the Great Emancipator, man. He had a penchant for the n-word [before 1860] and he proposed a constitutional amendment funding the colonization of the freed slaves.

Yet you grew to like him even more after delving into his racial attitudes, correct?

The difference between Lincoln and everybody else is that he had a capacity to grow. In the last speech of his life, Lincoln said for the first time in the American presidency: “I want to give the right to vote to [a few] black men.” He thought the Declaration of Independence included black men. Thomas Jefferson didn’t do that.

We’re in the midst of a Lincoln revival. Steven Spielberg is in the process of doing a Lincoln movie with a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Barack Obama has been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln’s cabinet. Why is he so enduringly popular?

There’s a Lincoln for all seasons in America. There are dozens of Lincolns. There’s Lincoln the atheist, the Northern Lincoln, the Confederate Lincoln, Lincoln the war criminal, Lincoln the savior of the union, Lincoln the humorous, Lincoln the melancholy. One guy wrote a book about Lincoln as gay, another of Lincoln the heterosexual lover. Lincoln the white supremacist; Lincoln the Great Emancipator…

In the film you criss-cross America, visiting a high-school class in downtown Chicago, the Ford Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated, and the Harlem office of President Bill Clinton. In Lincoln’s New Salem, Ill., a recreated town inhabited by Lincoln devotees, a woman threatened to eject you for hinting that Lincoln had an affair with Ann Rutledge. Were you surprised?

New Salem is all reconstructed log cabins and [its people] are dedicated to protecting the myth of Abraham Lincoln — the idea that he did no wrong. I find it charming, but as a scholar, it’s ridiculous.

Barack Obama swore the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible and references Lincoln frequently in speeches.

Barack Obama is the logical extension of Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery in the South and his embrace of black rights at the end of his life. Also, Lincoln was the Great Reconciliator “with malice toward none”: That’s Barack Obama.

In the film you show “Abraham Obama,” a work by street artist Ron English that melds Lincoln and Obama’s faces into a single image. Do you think the comparison is appropriate?

When we filmed they gave me a poster. I’m looking forward to having Abraham Obama sign it.

—Christina S.N. Lewis

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Takes a Look at Lincoln in His New Book and PBS Series – WSJ.com.