USS Potomac - The Presidential Yacht Potomac [CA] Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/08/2008 - 13:35
Description

The USS Potomac was built in 1934, and is best known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential yacht. It served this purpose between 1936 and 1945, the year of Roosevelt's death (1882-1945). Today, the vessel serves as an interpretive center focusing on the years of Roosevelt's presidency (1933-1945).

The vessel offers exhibits, a 15-minute film, student educational cruises, two-hour history cruises, guided tours, self-guided tours, and a library with circulating materials. The website offers a gallery of historic photographs. Reservations are required for student cruises.

Pennsylvania Military Museum Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/08/2008 - 13:35
Description

The Pennsylvania Military Museum tells the story of Pennsylvanians who have served the United States through military enrollment, regardless of branch. The grounds served as the National Guard's first mounted machine gun troop's training grounds in 1916.

The museum offers exhibits; a film; guided tours of the museum and the National Guard's 28th Infantry Division Shrine; a themed, guided tour focusing on armored vehicles; self-guided tours; an information hunt or RECON mission; outreach PowerPoint presentations on changing battlefield technologies, field medicine, and being a historical interpreter; and a picnic area. The website offers teaching modules on the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II.

California State Military Museum

Description

The California State Military Museum is the official state military museum, under the U.S. Army. Today, the museum houses over 30,000 artifacts, a library with over 10,000 volumes, and archives. These collections include items of importance to state and national military history of all military branches, ranging in time from prior to the Spanish American War to World War II.

The museum offers exhibits, a research library, an image library with a number of online selections, and guided tours for school groups.

ABMC War Dead Database

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This American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) Burials and Memorializations database features over 224,000 records of individuals buried or memorialized in ABMC cemeteries and memorials worldwide. Covering 24 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries and 3 additional memorials in the U.S., this database provides online access to burial information of those killed in action primarily during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Additional individuals include veterans, active duty military, and civilians. The database also provides information on individuals in the Corozal American Cemetery (Panama) and the Mexico City National Cemetery (Mexico), including civilians and veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.

The database interface allows students to search by name, war or conflict, service or serial number, branch of service, unit, service entry location, cemetery/memorial, date of death, and keyword. Users can also search for service members who are missing in action and Medal of Honor recipients who are buried or memorialized by ABMC.

This organization of the material allows the user to explore a wealth of information. Students can research the geographic distribution of burials or explore representation among military branches in individual cemeteries. The ABMC database allows users to focus on who is buried and memorialized and to explore the experiences of individual soldiers as well as patterns and commonalities.

Students, for example, could begin to explore the number of women who served as nurses during World War I and the Influenza epidemic of 1918, or the experiences of the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army during World War II. Or they could chose to search for an individual from their home state or community and use the database’s information as a starting point to research the life of this individual. They can download search results and print, email, or share individual records.

This valuable research and teaching resource is accompanied by a robust “Education Resources” section featuring interactive timelines and campaign narratives, cemetery or memorial-specific mobile apps, publications, videos, lesson plans, and curriculum ideas. The “Flying Yanks: American Airmen in WWI” interactive, for example, provides historical background for students exploring the air war in WWI, a timeline and map with primary sources, as well as individual stories of airmen.

Students can use the database in conjunction with the learning materials to enrich their understanding of U.S. military history, memorialization, public history, and numerous other historical topics.

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U.S. Air Force

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The mission of the U.S. Air Force is to provide global air, space, and cyber intelligence, defense, and attack capabilities to the United States of America.

While all of the military branch sites seem to scatter the their historical information widely within their sites, this navigational difficulty is perhaps most pronounced on the Air Force sites. That said, the offerings could easily be applied in the classroom as early elementary activities through detail or visual aids for teaching military history in later high school.

Maybe you want to brush up on your own military history knowledge? If that's the case, your best bets are the short overview of Air force history; a collection of online history full-text books and pamphlets; or the suggested reading list, originally intended for airmen.

Short on time or looking for texts to share with your students? Try the speech transcripts from the past year, which may be useful for comparison to historical ideologies; online history essays and articles; or the brief overviews of popular topics, including aviation, WWI, WWII, Korean War, and Vietnamese Conflict history.

Other resources of note include lesson plans and teaching resource guides; a means of contacting historians, librarians, and volunteers who can answer specific questions; and a heritage page with focal sections on individual periods of time and a "this week in history" feature. Each time period link on the right side of the heritage page leads to relevant biographies, aircraft overviews, historical milestone lists, photographs, and artworks. Note that clicking on "more" for photos and artworks will take you to general image galleries, while the "more" function for people, technology, and milestones provides only information relevant to the selected range of time. The general image galleries, including history subsections, are divided into photograph and art options.

Finally, if you live near Dayton, OH, you could plan a trip to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. For those of you not in the area, the museum offers a virtual tour via podcast.

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