General U.S. History
Jews in America: Our Story, Center for Jewish History
This website explores the history of American Jews within the larger history of the United States from the 17th century to the present through essays, images, video presentations, and interactive timelines. It presents this history in eight sections divided by time period. Each section has short topical essays explaining the period, video and audio presentations, and a gallery of 590 images. Some sections have “featured artifacts” that provide more detailed information.
Naval Historical Center, United States Department of the Navy
This website contains collections of photographs and paintings of navy people, ships, and aircraft; historical overviews; chronologies; bibliographies; and documents on the history of the U.S. Navy. “Wars and conflicts of the U.S. Navy” offers material on wars and naval campaigns from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, including overviews of naval history, chronologies, bibliographies, and oral histories from World War II. The photographic section offers hundreds of paintings and photographs of U.S. Navy ships and aircraft from the early republic to the present. There are also sections specifically on African Americans and nurses. The site provides dozens of links to archives holding material on the U.S. Navy.
Experiencing War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center
http://www.loc.gov/vets//stories/ex-war-home.html
This website makes available a collection of video oral histories and additional material—memoirs (some lengthy), letters, diaries, photo albums, scrapbooks, poetry, artwork, and official documents—from American veterans of 20th-century wars. The site currently provides materials from 44 veterans, grouped into six thematic categories: courage, patriotism, community, sweethearts, buddies, and family ties. The 25 video interviews currently available range from 25-minutes to two hours in length. The material presented is part of a rapidly growing archive, the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to collect stories from the 19 million veterans presently alive. The materials provide an array of personal views on the American war experience along with visual examples of oral history methods.
Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive, Columbia River Ethnic History Project
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/crbeha/
This site offers a large archive of selected documents, reports, records, maps, photographs, newspapers, artifacts, and oral history interviews. Items are searchable by ethnic group, keyword, archive, type of material, date, or subject. Another section has lessons plans for teachers on African Americans, immigration and settlement, migration, and ethnic culture and identity, 1850–1950. Historical overviews are provided on the various ethnic groups that settled the Columbia River Basin. A discussion forum offers a place to talk about discoveries in the archive or questions. Topics currently include ethnic groups, ethnicity and race, work and labor, immigration and migration, family life, religion, social conditions, discrimination, and civil rights.
Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History, and Government, William C. Gray and Lisa A. Spar
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm
This website is a collection of over 3,500 full-text documents relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government. The documents are divided into five century categories: pre-18th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st. It includes treaties, presidential papers and addresses, and colonial charters, as well as state and federal constitutional and legal documents. The documents are grouped into 64 Major Collection categories as well, such as Thomas Jefferson’s papers, American diplomacy, and the Cold War. Though most of these documents are directly related to American history, the site also includes over 100 documents on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance history, European history, and modern diplomatic documents such as the Hamas Covenant. The site is ideal for researching American diplomacy, constitutional, political, and legal history.
Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia, Jerry Goldman, Northwestern University
This website features audio files, abstracts, transcriptions of oral arguments, and written opinions on more than 3,300 Supreme Court cases. It includes more than 2,000 hours of audio of arguments in selected cases going back to 1955 and all cases since 1995. The site also includes links to all the written opinions of the Court since 1893, and audio of speeches by several justices. Oyez is of great value for those practicing law and studying its history.
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, American Memory and University of Washington
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/pacific/
This archive includes more than 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text illustrating the everyday lives of American Indians in the Northwest Coast and Plateau regions of the Pacific Northwest. The materials illustrate the American Indians’ housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, employment, and other aspects of everyday life. Each item is accompanied by information on the source, medium, repository, catalog information, and other descriptive notes of interest. The site also offers ten 2500-word essays authored by anthropologists on specific tribal groups and cross-cultural topics that help K-12 students and teachers understand and effectively use the sources in the collection.
Native American Documents Project, E. A. Schwartz, California State Univ. at San Marcos
http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/nadp.htm
This site presents full-text transcriptions of primary documents pertaining to federal Indian policy in the late 19th century. It includes published reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Board of Indian Commissioners that shaped most aspects of Indian policy during the late 19th century, and 111 indexed documents that include letters received by the Office of Indian Affairs, newspaper editorials, and government reports. It also includes the Allotment Data Collection. Allotment was a process by which the government allowed most of the land base left to the Indians in the West to fall into other hands by the latter half of the 19th century. These tables trace the redistribution of Indian lands through land acquisition and agricultural data from the 1870s to the 1910s.
History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Designed for high school and college teachers of U.S. History survey courses, History Matters provides a range of resources, including: 1000 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.
