Gateway to History Websites & Primary Source Archives
This feature searches pre-approved history websites and primary source archives to help filter out non-history related content. Please also see our Website Reviews for detailed analysis of particular resources.
Historic Sites for Fieldtrips
Learn more about the Preserve American Initiative or look for a Preserve America community near you. Or use the National Park Service's Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary Series and Teaching with Historic Places website to learn from and identify local and national resources.
Research Tools
Zotero
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use, open source research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser and helps users gather, annotate, organize, cross-reference, and share the results of their research.
Flickr
Flickr is a free, online photo management, repository, and sharing application.
Online History Lectures
Website Reviews
Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls
More than 2,300 covers of American "dime novels," and their British counterparts, the "penny dreadfuls," are available on this website.
Native American Documents Project
These four collections of data and documents address Federal Indian policy in the late nineteenth century.
Studs Terkel: Conversations with America
Created to honor Studs Terkel, the noted oral historian, radio host, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this website makes available more than 400 audio clips of interviews Terkel conducted over fifty years.
Amateur Athletic Foundation Digital Archive
For those studying the history of the Olympics, sports history, and the history of leisure and recreation, this website provides more than 45,000 documents (in .pdf format) pertaining to official Olympics history as well as other sports.
Search Website Reviews
National Centers
Explore this listing of federal organizations and highlights of their resources for teaching and learning American history.
Smithsonian
Nineteen museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo comprise the nation's largest museum complex and research organization.
U.S. Department of Education
The vast resources of the U.S. Department of Education provide an overview of the national educational system and priorities and include materials for teaching excellence, explanations of federal programs and initiatives, and links to lesson plans and resources for the classroom.
Ask a Historian
Questions will be answered via email, and may also be posted in our archives for others to review.
Did President Lincoln actually foretell his death to a reporter the day before he was killed?
Accounts of Abraham Lincoln's dream of a presidential assassination vary, and so do the interpretations.
Why does the Confederate battle flag have 13 stars on it, instead of 11 stars, one for each of the seceding states?
At first, the number of seceding states did number thirteen; but changes in the governments in Kentucky and Missouri changed their allegiance to the Confederacy.
