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The National Archives for Educators and Students
A great start for using primary sources as the basis for study. For teachers, they provide lesson plans with documents and online training features. For students, they feature activities, a research catalog and an introduction to research with the archives. |
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Chronicling America:
Historic American Newspapers - Created by the Library of Congress- Search and view American newspapers from 1880-1922 from multiple cities around the country. Find information about newspapers from 1690 to present.
If you are interested in US history, then you will love this site. You get to go back and view a snapshot of history from a primary source. Having a chance to give students an opportunity to digest information and form their own opinion of events makes them into historians instead of depending on other historians to tell them what people thought and felt. How did the people in cities across America react different as WWI unfolded in Europe? What things were important to people in the 1880s? |
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Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project-
A project created by the University of California, Santa Barbara. They have compiled thousands of songs, a few speaches, hymns, cakewalks and some vaudeville performances all from the early 1900's. The pieces were digitized from the original wax and metal cylinders and made available for free downloading or streaming. The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences sponsored this effort.
Music has long been a great medium for expression and conveying ideas and emtoions. This site serves as a great supplement to any studies taking place in the early 1900's or it could be a lesson about music and early recordings all unto itself. How did people respond with music during prohibition? What did people find funny in the humorous songs or comedy routines from 90 years ago? What songs did they write about the up and coming automobile? It even offers some speaches that are great such as Thomas Edison speaking about WWI or speaches from Roosevelt and Taft about the current social and political issues of the day.
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The American Memory Project
This is a digital collection from the Library of Congress and other sources which provides text, spoken word, prints, maps and other primary sources that span the majority of American history. Lets say you want to look at Alexander Graham Bell's family papers or advertising in America from 1850, they have digitized them into relative high quality pdfs. They have already exceeded their goal of making 5 million items available online. |
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Eye Witness to History
Learn history through the eyes of those who lived it. Stories from people who saw major historical events ranging from the ancient world to the 20th century. Some of the stories are interactive and some of the modern stories contain short video clips. These stories are much different to read than a typical history text and they are easily adapted into play scripts.
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Newseum (this link takes you directly to today's front pages)
A website from a Museum in Washington DC that exhibits five centuries of news history. The site has some good information, games and educational lessons but the real gem of the site is the front page section. They display (when this was written) 825 current front pages from 72 countries that are sortable by region. You can even go to a map view and select the city you want to look at. You see the paper just as it appears, not the digital versions served up by the newspaper websites. The front page of the newspaper says a lot about whats important to the people living there (or at least whats important to the media). |
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History Animated
If you have ever studied or taught about battles, you know how difficult it can be to understand or convey the movements of people and resources on the battlefield with static squares, arrows and dotted lines. The authors of history animated also use squares, arrows and dotted lines, but at least they move and are narrated by text as the story unfolds. They are always adding animations but they currently have very large collections of key confrontations from the US Civil War, the US Revolution and WWII Pacific battles.
Using this site as a supplement to a book or study about a particular conflict would be a great visual to help students see the battles unfold. As the students start to understand the strategy behind the movements, this could generate great discussions about what each of the generals should have done. |
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Remix America
They refer to themselves as the new digital public square, a place to let your voice be heard. What they created is a platform for users to take recordings from American history and remix them as they see fit. People are encouraged to express their dreams and frustrations through the voices and sounds of American greats. It is a fun way to get to know the words and faces of American figures and express yourself at the same time. Even if you don't want to create your own, the gallery can be pretty entertaining. |
