Teaching American History: Some Valuable US History Websites American Memory (Library of Congress) http://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html This expansive archive of American history and culture features photographs, prints, motion pictures, manuscripts, maps, and sound recordings going back to roughly 1490. This site offers more than seven million digital items from more than 100 collections on subjects ranging from African-American political pamphlets to California folk music, from baseball to the Civil War. History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web (CHNM, George Mason University) http://historymatters.gmu.edu Designed for teachers of U.S. History survey courses at high schools and colleges around the world, History Matters provides a range of resources, including: 900 primary documents in text, image, and audio; an annotated guide to 700 of the best U.S. History websites; guides to using various kinds of online primary sources, such as oral history and maps; and moderated discussions about teaching. Do History (Film Study Center, Harvard University) http://DoHistory.org/ This experimental, interactive case study explores the remarkable 18th-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard, including two versions of the 1400-page diary, facsimile and transcribed full-text; more than 300 documents, interactive exercises, and teaching resources. Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920 (Duke University Digital Scriptorium) http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/ Contains images of more than 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating consumer culture in America. See also Ad*Access (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/) which presents more than 7,000 advertisements from 1911 to 1955. Making of America (University of Michigan) http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ This site is a ―digital library‖ of thousands of primary documents in American social history from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction. It offers more than 3 million pages of text from 10,000 volumes and 50,000 journal articles. WPA Life Histories, Virginia Interviews http://eagle.vsla.edu/wpa/ Provides 1,350 life histories and youth studies created by the Virginia Writers’ Project (VWP)—part of the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project—between 1938 and 1941. Also offers more than 50 interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the VWP’s all-black Virginia Negro Studies unit in 1936 and 1937 and six VWP folklore studies produced between 1937 and 1942. Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875 (Indiana University Digital Library Program) http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/ An ambitious attempt to digitize ―every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875,‖ this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. Most valuable is the ability to perform word searches on the whole database. The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory (Chicago Hist. Soc. & Northwestern Univ.) http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/index.html This exhibit commemorates the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire (1871). Offers an array of primary sources. ―The Great Chicago Fire‖ examines the fire through five chronological chapters, while ―The Web of Memory,‖ focuses on the ways in which the fire has been remembered.
Remembering Jim Crow (American RadioWorks) http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/remembering/ A companion to the NPR radio documentary on segregated life in the South, this site presents audio excerpts and photographs addressing social and cultural aspects of segregation, black community life, and black resistance as well as different reflections on Jim Crow by African Americans and whites. Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (University of Virginia) http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow/ A massive, searchable archive of thousands of pages of maps, images, letters, diaries, newspapers, and church, agricultural, military, and public records—all relating to two communities, Staunton, Virginia, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, before, during, and after the Civil War. The New Deal Network (Roosevelt Institute and Institute for Learning Technologies) http://newdeal.feri.org/ A database of more than 20,000 items relating to the New Deal, including newspaper and journal articles, speeches, letters, reports, advertisements, and other textual materials, more than 4,000 images, and featured exhibits, many with lesson plan suggestions. Africans in America (PBS Online) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/ This companion to the PBS series, Africans in America, traces the history of Africans in America in four chronological parts: ―The Terrible Transformation‖ (1450–1750); ―Revolution‖ (1750–1805); ―Brotherly Love‖ (1791–1831); and ―Judgment Day‖ (1831–1865). The site offers 200 primary documents, 75 images and maps, and brief descriptions by historians. Teacher guides offer ideas for questions, activities, and lessons for elementary and secondary students. A bit difficult to navigate, but worth the trouble. The Digital Classroom (National Archives and Records Administration) http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/index.html A series of activities, primary documents, lesson plans, links, and worksheets designed to help teachers use archival documents in the classroom. Includes 20 thematically-oriented teaching activities and 35 lessons and activities organized around constitutional issues. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (Steven Mintz, Sara McNeil) http://www.gliah.uh.edu/index.cfm More than 600 documents pertaining to American politics, diplomacy, social history, slavery, Mexican American history, and Native American history, searchable by author, time period, subject, and keyword. Multimedia resources and links for teaching American history. Also includes five high school lesson plans; 39 fact sheets on major historical topics; and 10 essays on past controversies. The Avalon Project (Yale Law School, International Relations and Security Network) http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm More than 600 full-text documents relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government. The documents are divided by century and each contains at least 150 full-text documents including treaties, presidential papers and addresses, and state and federal documents. The documents are grouped into 53 Major Collection categories as well, such as American diplomacy or the Cold War. A History Teacher’s Bag of Tricks (Area 3 History and Cultures Project) http://marchand.ucdavis.edu/index.shtml Offers 48 lessons designed by Roland Marchand, a historian who taught at University of California, Davis, until his death in 1997. Each lesson (6 middle school; 20 high school; 22 college) includes an introduction, assignment, and primary documents. In addition, the slide library contains more than 6,100 images—organized into 40 major categories and 187 subcategories—drawn from Marchand’s collection.