Library of Congress
An outstanding and invaluable site for American history and general studies. Contains primary and secondary documents, displays, map collections, prints and photos, audio recordings and motion images. The Library of Congress American Memory Historical Collections, a must-see, comprises the bulk of digitalized materials, but the Exhibitions Gallery is enticing and informative as well. The Library of Congress also provides a Learning Page that provides activities, tools, thoughts, and features for teachers and students.
The Library of Congress American Memory particularly is an outstanding resource for American history and general research. Contained are multimedia collections of photographs, recorded sound, moving images, and digitized text. Utilize the Teachers department to research primary set collections and themed resources. 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 resources and tools for using Library of Congress primary source records from the classroom and include exceptional lesson plans, document analysis tools, online and offline activities, timelines, presentations and professional development resources.
Center for History and New Media: History Matters
A Creation of this American Social History Project/Center of Media and Learning, City of University New York, along with the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, History Matters is a wonderful online resource for history teachers and students. One of the many digital tools are lesson plans, syllabi, links, and displays. The Center for History and New Media’s tools include a listing of”best” internet sites, links to syllabi and lesson plans, essays on history and new media, a link for their excellent History Topics web site for U.S. History, and more. The CHNM History News Network is a weekly web-based magazine that has articles by various historians. Resources are designed to benefit specialist historians, higher school instructors, and students of the history.
Teaching American History
This is a wonderful assortment of thoughtful and comprehensive lesson plans and other resources on teaching American history. Each job Was Made by teachers in Virginia in a Center for History and New Media workshop. All projects include a variety of lesson plans and tools, and some even offer instructional videos on supply analysis. The lesson plans cover a variety of topics in American history and use interesting and engaging resources, activities, discussion questions, and assessments. Take your time browsing–there are many to select from.
National Archives and Records Administration
The NARA delivers federal archives, displays, classroom tools, census records, Hot Topics, and much more. In addition to its paper holdings (which would show the Earth 57 times) it has more than 3.5 billion electronic records. Users can research people, locations, events as well as other popular topics of interest, in addition to ancestry and military records. Additionally, there are features exhibits drawing from a lot of the NARA’s popular sources. One of the most requested 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 comprises incorporates U.S. primary documents and its excellent teaching tasks correlate to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government. Lessons are organized by chronological era, from 1754 to the present.
Digital Vaults
The National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults is an interactive exploration of background that examines thousands of documents, photos, and parts of history which were integrated in a digital format. Upon going into the homepage, the user is given eight arbitrary archives to select from. Clicking on one will give a description along with a brief record of the archive, as well as exhibits a large variety of similar archives. The user has the ability to shuffle, rearrange, gather, and research archives, as well as search for certain points in history using a keyword search. Even though too little initial organization or index might appear overwhelming, Digital Vaults is a superbly imaginative source for exploring history in a compiled way.
Teach Docs With DocsTeach, teachers can create interactive background activities that incorporate more than 3,000 primary-source substances in a variety of media from the National Archives. Tools on the site are made to teach critical thinking skills and integrate interactive components such as maps, puzzles, and charts.
Our Documents Offers 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings, which chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965. Attributes a teacher’s toolbox and contests for teachers and students.
PBS Online
A great resource for information on a plethora of historical events and personalities. PBS’s assorted and diverse web displays supplement their television show and generally include a list of every episode, interviews (often with sound bites), a timeline, primary sources, a glossary, photographs, maps, and links to pertinent sites. PBS productions comprise American Experience, Frontline and People’s Century. Proceed to the PBS Teacher Source for activities and lessons — arranged by subject.
PBS Teacher Source Go to the PBS Teacher Source for lessons and activities — arranged by topic and grade level — and then sign up for their newsletter. Categories include American History, World History, History on Television, and Biographies. Many lessons include primary sources. Some lessons require watching PBS video, but many don’t.
Smithsonian Education
The Smithsonian Education website is divided simply into three chief classes: Educators, Families, and Students. The Educators section is keyword searchable and includes lesson programs — many pertaining to history. The Students section comes with an interactive”Keys of the Smithsonian” that teaches about the special collections at the Smithsonian.
The Price of Freedom: Americans at War
This Smithsonian website skillfully integrates Flash video and text to analyze armed conflicts involving the U.S. in the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq. Each conflict includes a brief video clip, statistical advice, and a pair of artifacts. There’s also a Civil War mystery, an exhibition self-guide, and a teacher’s guide. The New American Roles (1899-present) section includes an introductory film and brief essay on the conflict in addition to historic artifacts and images.
Edsitement — The Best of the Humanities on the Web 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; middle school lessons are the most numerous.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There’s a lot of excellent material for art students, teachers, and fans 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 across the world. Each timeline page incorporates representative artwork from the Museum’s collection, a chart of time intervals, a map of the area, a summary, and a list of important events. The timelines — accompanied by regional, world, and sub-regional maps — supply a linear outline of art history, and permit people to compare and contrast art from across the globe at any moment in history. There is plenty more here apart from the Timeline:”Just for Fun” has interactive activities for children,”A Closer Look” examines the”hows and whys” behind Met objects (such as George Washington Crossing the Delaware),”Artist” enables visitors to access biographical stuff on a choice of artists in addition to general information about their job, and”Topics and Cultures” presents past and current cultures with special attributes on the Met’s collections and exhibitions.
C-SPAN in the Classroom
Access C-SPAN’s complete program archives including all videos. C-SPAN from the Classroom is a free membership service which features advice and tools to aid teachers in their use of source, public affairs video from C-SPAN television. You do not need to be a member to use C-SPAN online resources in your classroom, but membership includes access to teaching ideas, tasks 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 sources on United States, Mexican American, and Native American background, and slavery; and succinct essays about the history of ethnicity and immigration, film, private life, and science and technology. Visual histories of Lincoln’s America and America’s Reconstruction contain text from Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney. The Doing Background feature lets users rebuild the past through the voices of kids, gravestones, advertising, and other primary sources. Reference resources include classroom handouts, chronologies, encyclopedia articles, glossaries, along with an abysmal archive including speeches, book discussions and e-lectures by historians, and historic maps, songs, newspaper articles, and images. The site’s Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to 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 must register. Features an impressive array of sound, video, and text sources from Frontline and American Experience shows, Eyes on the Prize, and other sources. 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 advancements of the modern age happened during World War II and the National World War II Memorial has 8000 objects directly related to science and engineering. This impressive display contains an animated timeline, activities (such as sending encoded 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 election politics in the United States in the 1840s to today in addition to several patterns in recent congressional election politics. The job offers a vast spectrum of animated and interactive visualizations of the way Americans voted in elections over the past 168 years. The visualizations can be used to explore individual elections past the state level down to individual counties, allowing for more sophisticated analysis. The interactive maps highlight exactly how significant third parties have played in Western political history. You could also find expert analysis and commentary videos that share some of the most intriguing and important trends in American political history.
Do History: Martha Ballard
DoHistory invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary men and women in the past. It is an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went into 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 as well as a searchable copy of this twenty-seven year diary of Martha Ballard. DoHistory engages users interactively with historic artifacts and documents from the past and introduces visitors to the critical questions and issues 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, one 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 presents a hypermedia archive of thousands of sources that creates a social history of the forthcoming, fighting, and aftermath of the Civil War. Those sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. Students may explore the conflict and write their own histories or rebuild the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families. The project is intended for secondary schools, community schools, 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 viewpoints of all of the cultural groups who were present — Mohawk, Abenaki, Huron, French, and English. The site brings together many sources — historic scenes, stories of people’s lives, historical artifacts and documents, essays, voices and songs, historical maps, and a deadline — to light broad and competing perspectives on this spectacular 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 match their own Lewis and Clark, The National Bicentinnal Exhibiton. Written for grades 4-12, the units concentrate on nine major themes of the display and feature tens of thousands of primary sources in the display. The program uses the Lewis and Clark expedition as the case studies for larger themes like Diplomacy, Mapping, Animals, Language, and Trade and Property. It presents both the Euro-American perspective and a distinct Native American perspective. The internet display has two sections. One is a thematic approach that highlights the content from the main galleries of this display. Another is a map-based travel that follows the expedition and presents main sources along the way, such as interviews with present-day Native Americans.
The Sport of Life and Death
The Sport of Life and Death was voted Best Site for 2002 by the Internet and has won a ton 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 gods and athletes.” The Sport of Life and Death features dazzling special effects courtesy of Macromedia Flash technologies and its general design and organization are superb. You will find helpful interactive maps, timelines, and samples of artwork in the Explore the Mesoamerican World section. The focus of the site, however, is the Mesoamerican ballgame, the oldest organized sport ever. The game is clarified through a beautiful and engaging combination of images, text, expert commentary, and video. Visitors can also compete in a competition!
The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
A first-rate exhibition created by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University. There are two major components: the history of Chicago from the 19th century, and the way the Chicago Fire has been remembered over time. Included are essays, galleries, and sources.
Tech at the U.S. History in the Classroom
Here are some creative, engaging and technology-infused classes & internet sites on U.S. History:
“Day in Life of Hobo” podcast
This interdisciplinary creative writing/historical simulation activity incorporates blogging and podcasting and calls on students to research the plight of displaced teenagers through the Great Depression and then make their own fictionalized account of a day in the life of a Hobo. This project is going to be featured 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 read, see, and listen to possibly the very best student-created oral history project at the nation. High School students at the Urban School of San Francisco have generated three impressive 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, generated hundreds of movie files connected with every transcript, and then posted the full-text, full-video interviews with the public site. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has recognized Urban School’s Telling Their Stories project with a Top Edge Recognition award for excellence in technology integration. Teachers interested in conducting 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 diary features contributions from around the globe and is led 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 adopted the free Ning system and far-flung pupils work collaboratively to create an interactive, multimedia-rich, and student-driven online paper.
“Great Debate of 2008″
Tom Daccord produced 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 elections. The project connected students across the nation in a wiki and a personal online social media to share ideas and information related to the 2008 presidential election. Students post information on campaign issues to the wiki and partake in online discussions and survey together with different students in the private online social networking.
The Flat Classroom Project
The award-winning Flat Classroom project brings together high school and middle school students from around the world to learn more about the ideas presented in Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat. These collaborative endeavors harness the most powerful Web 2.0 tools available including wikis, online social networks, digital storytelling, podcasts, social bookmarking, and more.
Read more: crossfitinception.com