History Resources on the World Wide Web

General History Websites

A Biography of America
A joint project of the City University of New York's American Social History Project/ Center for Media and Learning and George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

History Matters
Produced by WGBH Interactive for Annenberg/CPB.

National Archives and Records
The first group of digitized images of some of the National Archives and Records Adminstration's most significant documents.

HistoryBuff
This site, now part of discovery.com, is devoted to press coverage of events in American history. It includes an extensive, searchable, library with the categories Civil War, Baseball, Engravings, Journalism Hoaxes, Old West including Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Crime figures such as Bonnie & Clyde, Lizzie Borden and over a dozen other categories.

Charters of Freedom
Sponsored by the National Archives.

Library of Congress: American Memory Collections

Smithsonian Institute

Digital History

The Internet Public Library:
Select "History" from the Arts and Humanities.

TheHistoryNet (The National Historical Society)
World and American History, aviation and technology history, military history, and women's history.

Best of History Websites

Eye Witness to History.com

Documents in American History
A hypertext on American History from the Colonial Period to Modern Times.

15th/16th Century

European Voyages of Exploration
European voyages of exploration and conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

17th Century

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Virtual Jamestown

Colonial Williamsburg

Witchcraft in Salem Village
Created by the Danvers Archival Center and hosted by the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, offers a number of primary documents and other materials related to the Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692

18th Century

Liberty!: The American Revolution
Companion site to the PBS documentary Liberty!: The American Revolution.

Early America Review
An online "ezine" chronicling 18th-century America.

Archiving Early America
Including a link to Early America Review, a full-text online journal.

The Franklin Institute Online

Benjamin Franklin

19th Century

Documenting the American South
From University of North Carolina, a treasury of materials on 19th-century America.

The American Civil War Homepage
Maintained by Dr. George Hoemann at the University of Tennessee.

The Valley of the Shadow Archive: Two Communities in the American Civil War
An extraordinary use of the WWW, from University of Virginia.

Making of America

Letters Home from a Civil War Soldier
From Private Scott, letters to friends and family.

Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
This companion site to Ken Burns' film is highlighted by the Archive: a timeline of the trip; a collection of related links; an extensive bibliography; and over 800 minutes of unedited, full-length RealPlayer interviews with seven experts.

The World's Columbian Exposition: Idea, Experience, Aftermath
Chicago's 1893 World Fair -- a hypertext thesis, by Julie K. Rose, on the cultural and technological changes that bedazzled the Gilded Age.

20th Century

The Great War: 80 Years On
This site from the BBC commemorates the war and offers users a number of interesting resources. Multimedia offerings include a ten-minute video collage of photos and newsreel footage produced by the Imperial War Museum and a selection of fascinating and poignant audio interviews of veterans, including one man who was just fourteen when he left to fight in France.

World War II Commemoration
From Grolier Encyclopedia -- some extensive articles and a treasury of photographs.

Life History Manuscripts from the Folklore Project, WPA Federal Writers' Project, 1936 - 1940
from the Library of Congress, a fascinating, multi-media project, complete with interview excerpts read by modern actors.

WWI Document Archive

American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century

New Deal Network

World War II Resources

Presidents

Presidential Libraries

George Washington Papers
Incoming correspondence, military reports and records, letters of reference for applicants for Federal office, military commissions and honorary degrees received by Washington, and notes he wrote on political and agricultural topics.

The Papers of George Washington

Mount Vernon Educational Resources

The Thomas Jefferson Papers
Approximately twenty-seven thousand items organized into nine series with a total of 83,000 images.

Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive

Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln Papers
Users can browse the collection chronologically or search by keyword. The site also includes two special presentations featuring original documents and images on the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's assassination.

Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
Digital versions of documents, images, and even music related to Abraham Lincoln's life in Illinois.

Abraham Lincoln Online.Org

The White House

Internet Public Library Pesidents of the United States

U.S. Presidents of the Twentieth Century

Women

American Women's History: A Research Guide
Created by Ken Middleton, reference librarian and graduate student in American Women's History at Middle Tennessee State University

Women in America: 1820 to 1842
From University of Virginia.

Sophia Smith Collection
Smith College has digitized some of its archival holdings relating to women's history.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000,
From SUNY at Binghamtom. Each module contains an introductory essay and, in most cases, between fifteen and twenty primary documents.

Living the Legacy: The Women's Rights Movement 1848-1998
Provided by the National Women's History Project, this site offers numerous resources to help educators and activists commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848.

Motherhood, Social Service, and Political Reform: Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage,
Related to the foundation of a National Museum of Women's History in Washington, DC.

Women of the West Museum

Women in American History

Suffragists Oral History Project

Women’s Studies: E-sources on the Web

African Americans

The Amistad Case--NARA
Primary documents relating to this important case in U.S. History, from the National Archives and Records Administration.

African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
From the Library of Congress's extensive holding of African-American artifacts, manuscripts, etc. This website will continue to grow over the next five years thanks to a grant from Citicorp.

Freedom's Journal
The digitization of all 103 issues of Freedom's Journal, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States, published weekly in New York City from 1827 to 1829.

African Voices
This site, from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, takes full advantage of the computer's capabilities. Excellent use of time-lines.

Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent
Visitors have several options to access the collection of over 3,000 slides, 500 photographs, and 50 hours of sound from 45 African nations.

Internet African History Sourcebook
A huge and nicely organized directory of resources, from Fordham University.

African Studies Resources
From University of Pennsylvania.

Art and Life in Africa
From the University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

We Shall Overcome: Historic Place of the Civil Rights Movement
An online itinerary maintained by the National Register of Historic Places, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Parks Service.

Black History Museum
Interactive exhibits.

Been Here So Long
These narratives are from the 2,000 interviews with ex-slaves collected during 1936-1938 by journalists and other writers employed by the Federal Writers Project.

Remembering Jim Crow

The African American Mosaic Exhibition

Africans in America

Politics,Government and Law

The Avalon Project at Yale

Connecticut

Connecticut History Online
The Connecticut Historical Society, Mystic Seaport, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut have combined efforts to create this site, a major online archive of Connecticut historical images

Maps/Atlases

The Perry-Castañeda Map Collection
From the University of Texas at Austin.

Historical/Cultural Interactive Atlases
Most of these maps require Shockwave Director (links available at this site) -- from University of Oregon.

Library of Congress
Historical maps, photos, documents, legislative information and more.

World History
E-texts and Maps on Antiquity, the Middle ages, and the 20th Century.

Other

Encyclopedia Mythica
Encompassing mythology, folklore, and legend, the Encyclopedia Mythica--a collaborative reference resource with over 150 contributors--contains more than 4400 definitions of mythical and legendary figures and almost 200 images.

Spartacus Educational:
Encyclopedia of British History: 1700-1900, Child Labour: 1750-1900, Parliamentary Reform: 1750-1900, The Peterloo Massacre, First World War Encyclopedia, Investigating the Vietnam War, and Emancipation of Women: 1860-1920.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
From Washington, D.C.

The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
Marvelously conceived and executed. One of the best uses of the WWW we've seen.

Out of the Past: 400 Years of Gay and Lesbian History
Put together and presented by PBS. To make full use of this site, you'll need a fast connection.

Religious Freedom in America
Maintained at the University of Virginia by Jeffrey K. Hadden.

Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives
The newest addition to the Library of Congress (LOC) American Memory Collection.

Country Studies
From the Library of Congress, includes extensive historical outlines.

Selected Historic Decisions of the Supreme Court

Famous Trials

100 Milestone Documents

A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates

The Sixties Project
On the 1960s, from the University of Virginia.

Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project
The subject is the forcible internment of Japanese Americans on the American west coast. From the University of Washington.

The Wars for Vietnam
From Vassar College, with links to several important documents.

Digital Images from the Radicalism Collection
An extensive list of brochures, with uncopyrighted images you can use, plus the language of the brochures, from American Indian Movement to Birth Control. Maintained by Michigan State University.

The Nationalism Project
Created and maintained by Eric Zuelow, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this site serves as a scholarly resource for the study of nationalism in all its forms.

Today in History
From the Library of Congress, with hyperlinks to the LOC's vast online collections.

Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation
The "Middle" Centuries from Byzantinium to the French Revolution.

The Greeks

The Roman Empire in the 1st Century

The History Guide
Lectures on Ancient and Medieval History

World History
E-texts and Maps on Antiquity, the Middle ages, and the 20th Century.