Best U.S. History Web Sites

Library of Congress

An outstanding and valuable site for American history and general research. Includes primary and secondary documents, exhibits, map collections, prints and photos, audio recordings and motion pictures. The Library of Congress American Memory Historical Collections, a must-see, comprises the majority of digitalized substances, but the Exhibitions Gallery is enticing and informative as well. The Library of Congress also provides a Learning Page that provides tools, activities, thoughts, and features for teachers and students.
The Library of Congress American Memory in particular is an outstanding resource for American history and general research. Included are multimedia collections of photos, recorded sound, moving images, and text that is unread. Utilize the Teachers department to explore primary set collections and themed tools. Teachers can get updates on new programs, professional development opportunities, and Library programs, events and providers.
The Library of Congress: Teachers
The new Library of Congress Teachers page provides tools and resources for using Library of Congress primary source documents in the classroom and contain excellent lesson plans, document analysis tools, offline and online tasks, timelines, presentations and professional development tools.
Center for History and New Media: History Matters
A production of this American Social History Project/Center of Media and Learning, City of University New York, and the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, History Matters is a wonderful online resource for history teachers and pupils. Among the numerous digital tools are lesson plans, syllabi, links, and exhibits. The Center for History and New Media’s resources include a listing of”best” internet sites, links to syllabi and lesson plans, essays on history and new websites, a link to their excellent History Topics web site for U.S. History, and more. The CHNM History News Network is a weekly web-based magazine which features articles by several historians. Resources are designed to benefit professional historians, high school instructors, and students of the history.
Teaching American History
This is a fantastic assortment of thoughtful and thorough lesson plans and other tools on teaching American history. Each project was created by teachers in Virginia at a Center for History and New Media workshop. All projects include a variety of lesson plans and tools, and a few even offer instructional videos on supply analysis. The lesson plans cover a variety of topics in American history and utilize engaging and interesting resources, activities, discussion questions, and assessments. Take your time surfing –you will find many to select from.
National Archives and Records Administration
The NARA delivers national archives, exhibits, classroom tools, census documents, Hot Topics, and more. In addition to its paper holdings (which will show the Earth 57 days ) it’s over 3.5 billion digital records. Users can research individuals, locations, events as well as other popular topics of interest, in addition to ancestry and military records. There are also features displays drawing from many of the NARA’s favorite sources. Among the most asked holdings would be the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, WWII photographs, along with the Bill of Rights.
The National Archives: Teachers’ Resources
The National Archives Lesson Plans section contains incorporates U.S. primary files and its excellent teaching tasks correlate to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government. Lessons are organized by chronological age, from 1754 to the present.
Digital Vaults
The National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults is an interactive exploration of background that assesses thousands of files, photos, and pieces of history that were incorporated in an electronic format. Upon going into the homepage, the consumer is given eight random archives to select from. Clicking on one provides a description and a brief record of the archive, in addition to exhibits a huge variety of archives that are similar. The consumer has the ability to shuffle, rearrange, gather, and research archives, in addition to search for specific points in history using a key word search. Although too little initial organization or index might appear overpowering, Digital Vaults is a wonderfully imaginative resource for investigating history in a digitally compiled manner.
Teach Docs With DocsTeach, teachers can create interactive background activities that incorporate more than 3,000 primary-source materials in a variety of media in the National Archives. Tools on the website are made to teach critical thinking skills and incorporate interactive components such as puzzles, maps, and graphs.
Our Documents Offers 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings, that chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965. Features a teacher’s toolbox and competitions for teachers and students.
PBS Online
A great source for information on a myriad of historical events and personalities. PBS’s various and varied web displays supplement their tv series and normally include a list of each episode, interviews (often with sound bites), a timeline, primary sources, a glossary, photographs, maps, and links to pertinent websites. PBS productions include American Experience, Frontline and People’s Century. Go to the PBS Teacher Source for lessons and activities — arranged by subject.
PBS Teacher Resource Go to the PBS Teacher Source for lessons and activities — organized by subject and grade level — and subscribe to their newsletter. Categories include American History, World History, History on Television, and Biographies. Many lessons incorporate primary sources. Some lessons require watching PBS video, but many don’t.
Smithsonian Education
The Smithsonian Education site is divided only into three main categories: Educators, Families, and Students. The Educators section is keyword searchable and includes lesson plans — lots of pertaining to history. The Students section features an interactive”Keys of the Smithsonian” that teaches about the special collections at the Smithsonian.
The Cost of Freedom: Americans at War
This Smithsonian website skillfully integrates Flash text and video to examine armed conflicts between the U.S. from the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq. Each conflict contains a brief video clip, statistical advice, and a pair of artifacts. There is also a Civil War mystery, an exhibition self-guide, and a teacher’s guide. The New American Roles (1899-present) segment includes an introductory movie and short essay on the conflict as well as historic artifacts and images.
Edsitement — The Best of the Humanities on the Internet EDSITEment is a partnership among the National Endowment for the Humanities, Verizon Foundation, and the National Trust for the Humanities. All sites linked to EDSITEment have been reviewed for content, design, and educational impact in the classroom. This impressive website features reviewed links to top websites, professionally developed lesson plans, classroom activities, materials to help with daily classroom planning, and search engines. You are able to search lesson plans from subcategory and grade level; center school lessons are the most numerous.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There’s much quality material for art students, teachers, and enthusiasts at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art web site. Start with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History, a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world. Each timeline page incorporates representative art from the Museum’s collection, a graph of time intervals, a map of the region, a summary, and a list of key events. The timelines — accompanied by world, regional, and sub-regional maps — supply a linear outline of art history, and permit visitors to compare and contrast art from across the world at any time in history. There’s plenty more here besides the Timeline:”Just for Fun” has interactive activities for children,”A Closer Look” examines the”hows and whys” behind Met objects (like George Washington Crossing the Delaware),”Artist” enables visitors to get biographical materials on a selection of artists in addition to general information about their job, and”Themes and Cultures” presents past and present cultures with special attributes on the Met’s collections and displays.
C-SPAN in the Classroom
Access C-SPAN’s complete app archives containing all videos. C-SPAN from the Classroom is a free membership service that offers information and tools to aid educators in their use of primary source, public events movie out of C-SPAN television. You don’t have to be a member to use C-SPAN online resources in your classroom, but membership includes access to teaching ideas, activities and classroom applications.
Digital History
This impressive website from Steven Mintz at the University of Houston comes with an up-to-date U.S. history textbook; annotated primary resources on United States, Mexican American, and Native American history, and captivity; and succinct essays on the history of ethnicity and immigration, movie, private life, and science and technology. Visual histories of Lincoln’s America and America’s Reconstruction contain text by Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney. The Doing Background feature lets users reconstruct the past through the voices of kids, gravestones, advertisements, and other primary sources. Reference resources include classroom handouts, chronologies, encyclopedia articles, glossaries, along with an abysmal archive including speeches, book talks and e-lectures by historians, and historic maps, songs, newspaper articles, and images. The site’s Ask the HyperHistorian feature lets users pose questions to professional historians.
Civil Rights Special Collection
The Teachers’ Domain Civil Rights Collection is Made by WGBH Boston, in partnership with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Washington University at St. Louis. Materials are free but you have to register. Features an impressive array of audio, video, and text sources out of Frontline and American Experience reveals, Eyes on the Prize, along with other resources. Also offers an interactive Civil Rights movement timeline and four lesson plans: Campaigns for Financial Freedom/Re-Examining Brown/Taking a Stand/Understanding White Supremacy.
Science and Technology of World War II
One of the most impressive technology improvements of the modern era happened during World War II along with the National World War II Memorial has 8000 objects directly related to science and engineering. This impressive display includes an animated timeline, actions (such as sending encrypted messages), professional sound answers to science and engineering questions, lesson plans, a quiz, essays, and much more. An impressive demonstration.
Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008
Voting America assesses long-term patterns in presidential elections politics in the United States from the 1840s to now in addition to several patterns in recent congressional election politics. The project delivers a wide spectrum of interactive and animated visualizations of how Americans voted in elections over the past 168 decades. The visualizations can be used to research individual elections past the country level down to different counties, which allows for more complex analysis. The interactive maps highlight just how important third parties have played in Western political history. You could even find expert analysis and commentary videos that share a few of the most intriguing and significant trends in American ideology.
Do Background: Martha Ballard
DoHistory invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of regular people in the past. It’s an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went to the book and PBS film A Midwife’s Tale, which were both based upon the remarkable 200 year-old diary of midwife/healer Martha Ballard. There are hundreds and hundreds of downloadable pages from initial records: diaries, letters, maps, court records, town records, and much more and a searchable copy of the twenty-seven year diary of Martha Ballard. DoHistory engages users interactively with historic documents and artifacts from the past and introduces visitors to the critical questions and problems raised when”doing” history. DoHistory was designed and maintained by the Film Study Center at Harvard University and is hosted and maintained by the Middle for History and New Media, George Mason University.
The Valley of the Shadows The Valley of the Shadow depicts two communities, 1 Northern and one Southern, through the experience of the American Civil War. The project focuses on Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and it poses a hypermedia archive of thousands of resources that makes a social history of their coming, fighting, and aftermath of the Civil War. Those sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, photos, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. Students may explore the conflict and write their own foundations or reconstruct the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families. The project is meant for secondary schools, community colleges, libraries, and universities.
Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704
The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association/Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts has launched a rich and impressive website that focuses on the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, with the objective of commemorating and reinterpreting the event from the perspectives of all the cultural groups who were present — Mohawk, Abenaki, Huron, French, and English. The website brings together many sources — historic scenes, stories of people’s lives, historical artifacts and documents, essays, voices and tunes, historic maps, and a deadline — to light broad and competing perspectives on this dramatic event.
Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition
The Missouri Historical Society has developed a comprehensive award-winning web site and on-line program designed to complement their own Lewis and Clark, The National Bicentinnal Exhibiton. Written for grades 4-12, the units concentrate on nine important themes of the display and feature hundreds of primary sources from the display. The curriculum uses the Lewis and Clark expedition as case studies for larger themes such as Diplomacy, Mapping, Animals, Language, and Trade and Property. It presents both the Euro-American perspective and a particular Native American standpoint. The internet display has two sections. One is a thematic approach that highlights the content in the main galleries of the exhibit. Another is a map-based journey which follows the expedition and introduces main sources along the way, including interviews with present-day Native Americans.
The Sport of Life and Death
The Sport of Life and Death was voted Best Overall Site for 2002 by the Web and has won a slew of other web awards. The site is based on a traveling exhibition now showing at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey and bills itself as”an internet travel to the ancient spectacle of athletes and gods.” The Sport of Life and Death features dazzling special effects owing to Macromedia Flash technologies and its overall layout and organization are superb. There are useful interactive maps, timelines, and samples of art in the Explore the Mesoamerican World section. The focus of the website, however, is that the Mesoamerican ballgame, the oldest organized sport in history. The game is clarified through a gorgeous and engaging combination of text, images, expert commentary, and video. Visitors can even compete in a competition!
The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
A top notch exhibition created by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University. There are two major parts: the history of Chicago in the 19th century, and how the Chicago Fire was remembered over time. Included are essays, galleries, and resources.
Tech in the U.S. History in the Classroom
Here are some creative, engaging and technology-infused lessons & internet sites on U.S. History:
“Day in Life of Hobo” podcast
This interdisciplinary creative writing/historical simulation activity incorporates blogging and podcasting and requires students to research the plight of displaced teenagers through the Great Depression and then create their own fictionalized account of a day in the life of a Hobo. This project will be included in the spring edition of Social Education, published by the National Council of Social Studies.
“Telling Their Stories” — Oral History Archive Project of the Urban School
Visit”Telling Their Stories” and see, watch, and listen to perhaps the best student-created oral history project at the nation. High School students at the Urban School of San Francisco have generated three notable oral history interviews featured at this website: Holocaust Survivors and Refugees, World War II Camp Liberators, and Japanese-American Internees. Urban school students ran, filmed, and transcribed interviews, created hundreds of movie files associated with every transcript, and then posted the full-text, full-video interviews on the public website. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has acknowledged Urban School’s Telling Their Stories project using a Top Edge Recognition award for excellence in engineering integration. Teachers interested in running an oral history project can contact Urban School technology manager Howard Levin and should consider attending his summer teacher workshop.
Student News Action Network
This student-produced current events journal includes contributions from around the globe and is directed by five student-bureaus: The American School of Doha, Bishops Diocesan College, International School Bangkok, International School of Luxembourg, and Washington International School. The students have cleverly adopted the free Ning system and far-flung pupils work tirelessly to create an interactive, multimedia-rich, and student-driven online newspaper.
“Great Debate of 2008″
Tom Daccord created a wiki and a personal online social network for the”Great Debate of 2008” project, a student exploration and discussion of candidates and issues surrounding the 2008 presidential election. The job connected students around the country in a wiki and a personal online social media to share ideas and information related to the 2008 presidential elections. Pupils post information on campaign issues into the wiki and partake in online discussions and survey with different pupils in the private online social networking.
The Flat Classroom Project
The award-winning Flat Classroom job brings together large school and middle school students from all over the globe to explore the ideas presented in Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat. These collaborative endeavors harness the most effective Web 2.0 tools available including wikis, online social networks, digital storytelling, podcasts, social bookmarking, and much more.