Click here to see a list of sites offering a thematic approach to American History.

For students: DoHistory is a site specifically designed to help students learn to deal with historical documents, particularly primary sources, using as a tutorial the diary of a midwife named Martha Ballard who lived from 1735 to 1812 and a collection of documents from or about the period when she lived. The site is designed in such a way that teachers may usepart or all of it to teach the methodology of historical research to students ranging from early adolescents to adults. Available at: http://www.dohistory.org/.

For teachers primarily, but also for researchers and students: all of the sites listed below are intended for teachers as well as researchers (ex.: the American Memory site). However, the History Project of the University of California at Davis is specifically aimed at teachers. It offers thousands of images, essentially (but not exclusively) dating from the period between 1870 and 1970. The collection consists of slides (to which we in Europe have no access, of course), but a large number of these images can be seen on the website, classified by theme, and the files can be copied. The university states that it has researched the copyrights and has posted the images in good faith, although errors are always possible. A very wide selection is available — advertisements, photos, posters, paintings — and the collection is still expanding since some topics a are not yet fully scanned. Extremely useful for American History and American Civilization classes. Available at: http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/imageapp-us.php.
Click here to go to the "Teaching American Studies" page, where you will find links to sites specifically designed for teachers and which contain lesson plans and teaching aids. See also the "Teaching Brown" site presented at the bottom of this page.

For general approaches to US history as well as for literary history, social and political history, history of ideas, history of science and technology, etc., consult Intute: Arts and Humanities (ex-Humbul Humanities Hub) (http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/). This "Google for researchers" is the Rolls Royce of webcrawlers, run by the Resource Discovery Network at Oxford University as a service to teachers and researchers in the humanities. A keyword search of Humbul produces considerably fewer references than the general run of webcrawlers but no duplicates, no repeats and few dead links. This is because sites catalogued by the Humbul Hub have been tested and examined by a panel of specialists whose evaluations you may consult if you wish to know more about the site. Dead links can be reported to Oxford University Computing Services (click on Help Desk) who respond rapidly, track down the author of the vagrant site whenever possible and correct the entry when they can. You may also suggest sites to add.

A Chronology of US Historical Documents, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma College of Law, offers a number of primary source documents, the earliest of them in modernized English, for use by students and teachers.

http://www.theatlantic.com
         Very useful site for articles (even 19^th century archives) about social issues

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html For teachers, this site offers a lesson plan entitled "Who really built America?" which will help them to train students to use primary source materials (http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/98/built/). It also offers a digitized library of twenty-three 19th-century popular magazines in the section entitled "The Nineteenth Century in Print": (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html). This collection is, in fact, a complete bank of collections — over 100 are currently available — and is constantly being added to. It is wise to visit the home page occasionally to see what has been acquired; click on the "List all collections" link. The American Folklife Center (http://www.loc.gov/folklife/) offers a number of photos, sound recordings, streaming videos of folk-music concerts, etc., catalogued by type. One of the most interesting thematic collections is "Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting," photographs and sound recordings documenting working-class life in the city (founded 1791) considered to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is a joint venture of the National Digital Newspaper Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress which has opened on-line with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. Over a period of 20 years starting in Spring 2007, this site will expand to become a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. The site also provides information about newspapers published in the US from 1690 to the present. The fully-searchable site is available at http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/.

Cultural Maps is a project of the American Studies program at the University of Virginia. It is the manifestation of an on-going project to produce an on-line historical atlas and offers numerous (and often wonderful) maps, as well as links to other map sites. Unfortunately, it does not offer a sourcebook or advice for teachers. Access at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MAP/map_hp.html#maps

Documenting the American South: the Southern experience in 19th-century America. This site provides the full text of biographies,  autobiographies, narratives and slave narratives, and early Southern literature at http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/docsouth

The Interactive Journal of Early American History brings together scholars, activists, journalists, filmmakers, teachers, history bufffs to discuss everything from politics to parlor manners at http://www.common-place.org

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/9061/USA/usa.html

History: American and British http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/history/history.shtml This site has morphed over time into a "gateway" site consisting of commented links to other history and American/British Studies sites, including primary sources and full-text documents.

The Library of Congress's catalogue for the Prints and Photographs Division is available online. A wide selection of images belonging to the Division and to other units of the Library can be consulted, listed by topic or title of collection. Copyright information is provided whenever possible for those wishing to publish or distribute the images. In some cases, however, only thumbnail-size images are available on the web because of copyright restrictions. The catalogue is available at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html. The photo site, Flickr, is currently offering a satellite site entitled "The Library of Congress' photostream." It contains several thousand black and white and color photos dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries (until 1942) which have no known copyright restrictions (which means you can use them freely) but which also are only partially identified. The idea was to offer them to the public and ask for further identification of the photos. We have no idea how many have been successfully identified, but the photos are there for the taking.

Making of America, sponsored by the University if Michigan and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the pre-Civil War period through Reconstruction. The collection claims to be particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American History, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles from the 19th century. Available at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/

NARA (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) is an independent agency which provides access to federal documents, including congressional documents, the archives of the Federal Register and various presidential libraries. For teachers, there is a digital classroom to help them use these documents in class. In 2008, NARA selected over 1,200 historical documents of all types (letters, treaties, photographs...), scanned them and made them available in facsimile form, along with a commentary, on the Digital Vault. It is possible for teachers to create a "Pathways Challenge" for their students by linking several documents together with clues that the students must discover.This archive is fun to browse but users must be warned that it is not a methodical overview of American history. For example, you will not find the facsimile of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) that gave Mexican territory in the Southwest to the fledgling U.S. You will find correspondance concerning a ranch involved in a lawsuit that went from Mexican to American courts because of the treaty.

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery is a treasure trove of over 275,000 images digitizedfrom primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and much, much more. Something for everybody. There are also some Irish, English, Russian and sundry European documents, but the focus is on American History. Access: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm

The Our Documents Initiative is a cooperative effort among National History Day, The National Archives and Records Administration, and USA Freedom Corps. It is constructed around 100 milestone documents in American History and can be used by both students and teachers — it offers an online teacher's sourcebook for teachers of American History and American Civilization.

The Public History Resource Center is a centralized archive of links to and information about resources and websites in public history. Its most recent addition is a review of 31 websites dedicated to the Progressive Era. Available at: http://www.publichistory.org

A teacher of American History maintains a page of internet resources for history students for his Advanced Placement class. The site is anonymous but seems to be updated regularly and is accessible on the site of the Murray City School District in Utah at: http://www.mury.k12.ut.us/mhs/apus/handouts/resources-ap.htm

Thematic Approaches to American History

Afro-American history: a website dedicated to the history of Black Americans sponsored by a Maryland newspaper, The Afro-American, at  http://www.afroam.org/history/history.html.

Database of documents (personal and official) concerning Abraham Lincoln (1815-1861) at http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/

Harper's Weekly has made available a website on the Electoral College Controversy of 1876-1877. The Website contains a detailed overview and timeline of the controversy, illustrations and cartoons, with explanatory notes and biographical sketches of the presidential candidates. http://elections.harpweek.com/controversy.htm 

The Living Room Candidate: this site contains, among other things, a retrospective of campaign publicity since 1952 and right up to 2004 at http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.php . This site is one of a series of online exhibitions proposed by the Museum of the Moving Image.

Land and Freedom is a site created by the Henry George School of Social Science. It offers five lesson plans for teachers who want to explore in class the relationship between land — the ground we stand on — and history, economics, politics and...ecology. Each of the five lessons offers readings, activities, performance objectives and sources for further investigation. Available at: http://www.landandfreedom.org/

The Louisiana Purchase: two sites on the Internet commemorate the bicentenary of this, the largest real estate deal in history. One is in French, very esthetic but slow to downloand (<http://www.louisiane.culture.fr/>); the other is in English (<http://www.louisiana.culture.fr/>. Both sites offer similar or identical resources.

The Cornell University Library Race, Ethnicity & Religion Project is an online bibliography of resources dealing with these subjects, with links to digitized or .pdf versions of the works whenever they are readily available on the web. Available at: http://racereligion.library.cornell.edu/

Native Americans: Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI) has recently searched out and compiled the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions covering a period of some 400 years. The index to the archives is available online but not the documents themselves which can be consulted at the university library or via inter-library loan. The collection includes photos, microfilms and sound recordings. Marquette has also done a survey of Catholic Indian mission school records covering the same period. http://www.marquette.edu/library/collections/archives/Mss/BCIM/BCIMsc1-history.html and
http://www.marquette.edu/library/collections/archives/Special_Collections/christianity_and_native_america.html

Teaching Brown: this university website is essentially the curriculum of a professor, Jack Dougherty, at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. It is intended to help other teachers prepare courses on the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision, a decision steeped in history as well as myth and whose consequences affected ordinary people's lives as well as national policy, even today. It contains first-person essays by well-known professors and useful resources for rethinking how we teach this important 1954 school desegregation decision. Available at: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/educ/brown/

This thematic approach to American History is organized around 59 document projects with over 1600 primary documents. It is sponsored by the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York at Binghamton and can be accessed at: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/

P.S. The following site is still under construction and may not always be available in the same form and at the same address. A conference on anti-Americanism held Feb. 28-March 1 2003 has given rise to a site located at http://www.bordersphere.com dedicated to the fall-out of the conference and to the subject of anti-Americanism in general.