This site provides documents, essays, and questions about the events leading up to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 and places the events within a broader context of secession and southern independence.

There are nine chronological sections and students must make decisions at five "critical junctures," soliciting advice from official and unofficial advisors. Students can compare their choices with Lincoln's, and a commentary section challenges students to explore multiple interpretations of events. "Hotwords" provide additional information on topics throughout the simulation.

Provides over 200 references in the bibliographic section.

Well-designed activity for helping students at the high school and college level explore the issues surrounding the Civil War.

This collection of historical maps, includes maps of the United States divided into 38 topical sections covering pre-1500 through 2000. These units include a variety of materials—from a text introduction and review questions to interactive graphs and maps.

The collection also offers 18 modules on European, Latin American, and African history, ranging in time between Greek civilization and 2000.

Interactive maps and graphs require a shockwave plug-in to access. Useful as geographic aids for those studying U.S. explorations in North America, westward expansion, campaigns against Native Americans, and slavery, among other topics in U.S. and world history.

Photographs from 1839 to the late 20th century are on view in 12 exhibits that offer 100- to 600-word introductory essays and a diverse range of images.

"The Face of Slavery" presents 10 photographs of African Americans from 1855 to 1905.

The work of Southworth and Hawes, a photography team active between 1843 and 1862, is represented by eight daguerreotypes of women.

In "Do You Believe?" visitors may consider evidence of ghostly existence offered by 22 "spirit photographs" taken between 1875 and 1932.

In "Photography as a Fine Arf!," 16 photos from the 1850s to the 1950s "explore the complex relationships of people and dogs."

In "At Ease," nine photographs from around 1850 refute the popular notion that early portraiture was stiff.

An exhibit of the trick photography of William H. "Dad" Martin presents eight photos produced between 1894 and 1912 that show exaggerated ordinary objects.

In "Of Bricks and Light," the museum exhibits 33 architectural photographs.

Business executive and photographer Shotaro Shimomura took pictures of his trip around the world in 1934-35; nine of these are exhibited in "An Eye for the World."

An interactive exhibit of nine cartes de visite allows visitors to investigate details such as the hats worn by men in Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession.

"Scott Mutter: A More Perfect World" presents 11 "hyper-realistic" photomontages by the acclaimed image maker.

"Masterworks of Photography" includes 25 images produced from 1840 to 1975, including English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot's "The Footman," of 1840, considered the earliest photograph on paper of a human being.

In addition, the museum showcases 42 of its favorite pieces.

The site also provides a 1,700-word explanatory essay on photographic processes and links to 25 other resources concerning the history and art of photography. This site cannot be searched by subject, however, which limits its usefulness for research.

This site displays approximately 90 primary documents from the 15th century to the mid 20th century. Features eight subjects: the presidency; Congress, law, and politics; military affairs; diplomacy and foreign policy; arts and literature; science, medicine, exploration, and invention; African-American history and culture; and women's history. The collection emphasizes "prominent Americans whose lives reflect our country's evolution," including 23 presidents and figures such as Carter Woodson, Thurgood Marshall, pioneer physician Elizabeth Blackwell, Wilbur Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell.

Each subject is accompanied by a useful 100- to 400-word background essay and a link to the document's host collection. Also includes a 2,000-word essay entitled "Collecting, Preserving, and Researching History: A Peek into the Library of Congress Manuscript Division." Although limited in size, this site provides an eclectic group of documents of national interest.

This exhibition presents 14 of the " most significant and compelling documents from the National Archives holdings." The site furnishes, in whole or part, facsimiles and in some cases transcriptions of the following documents: the July 2, 1776, resolution by the Continental Congress proclaiming independence from Great Britain; George Washington's first inaugural address; the Louisiana Purchase agreements; a casualty list of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War; a police blotter that reports the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; an 1868 treaty with the Sioux Indians; a U.S. Navy memorandum reporting the Titanic disaster of 1912; a court verdict concerning gangster Al Capone; Eleanor Roosevelt's 1939 resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution in protest of the group's refusal to allow singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race; President Franklin Roosevelt's speech to the Congress requesting a declaration of war against Japan; a draft press release announcing the United States's recognition of Israel in 1948, signed by President Harry S. Truman; speech cards used by Presidents John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Ronald Reagan in 1987 for their historic visits to Berlin; President Richard Nixon's 1969 diary entry relating to his telephone conversation with Apollo 11 astronauts; and Nixon's resignation letter of 1974. The materials are accompanied by brief descriptions of 100-200 words, photographs, audio files, and links to related National Archives documents. This site exhibits national relics well, but does not investigate their historical significance and meanings.

This site contains selections from 13 interviews with former slaves conducted between 1936 and 1938 by journalists working for the New Deal Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Each selection is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of the interviewee, a photograph or drawing of the interviewee taken at the time of the interview, and in one instance, an audio component. Includes guidelines for reading slave narratives, a bibliography of 16 scholarly works on the history of slavery, and 21 links to related sites in general American history, southern history, and African-American history. A useful sample of first-hand testimony on American slave experience and culture.

This website offers more than 4,000 primary sources, including newspaper stories, photographs, statistics, oral histories, and personal narratives, related to children and childhood in urban America, specifically in the greater Milwaukee area, from 1850 to 2000. The search page is the most direct route to these sources and is accessible by clicking on the purple kite in the top, right corner of some pages. On other pages, "search entire site" in the footer is the only link. The site is organized around five sections-Work, Play and Leisure, Schooling, Health and Welfare, and "Through Children's Eyes." Each section offers a 150-word introduction, a gallery of five to 40 images, and approximately five "Special Topics" that combine a background essay (300 to 500 words) and a collection of five to ten relevant primary sources. "Special Topics" range from the Socialist Party, religion, and newsboys to National Child Health day and polio in Milwaukee County.

A section for teachers and students offers 25 possible research questions and tips for middle school, high school, and college and cover a host of topics, from games to newspaper coverage of children to the impact of technology on the lives of children. This website is useful for studying childhood and urbanization during a time when what it meant to be a child was changing rapidly.

This video archive assembles Library of Congress webcasts in one easily accessible location. The biography and history section offers 159 webcasts of talks by historians, writers, commentators, and political figures, including historians Joseph J. Ellis, John Hope Franklin, Jill Lepore, Lawrence W. Levine, David McCullough, and Robin Shields and writers and commentators David Brooks and Andrea Mitchell. The wide variety of subjects discussed include Vietnam, Iraq, Abraham Lincoln, early American printers and the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor, the national character, early African American life, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The section on government has 67 webcasts by current and former government officials, such as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, George Shultz, and David Weinberger. Subjects include intellectual freedom, global democratic governance, and guardianship and the First Amendment. Moreover, the site offers 56 webcasts on culture and the performing arts and 305 webcasts on poetry and literature. There are also sections on religion, science and technology, and education. This website is a useful resource for information on historical subjects from the historians and authors who have written about them.

This extensive archive assembles some 16,000 historical and biographical articles preserved in scrapbooks at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The primary focus of the collection is the people and communities of Wisconsin. Most of the articles were published between 1860 and 1940 in hundreds of local Wisconsin newspapers. Together the articles contain more than 50,000 pages, all of which are available in the archive. Articles are displayed as page images, but transcripts are not provided. Visitors can search the collection by keyword or search by dropdown menus of counties, newspapers, or topics. Topics include agriculture, architecture, education, government and politics, Indians and Native Peoples, industry, and transportation. Full-text searching of the articles is not possible. An excellent resource for researching the social, cultural, and political history of Wisconsin and its people.

This site offers an extensive archive of material on the history and culture of Pittsburgh, including full-text published works, maps, images, and census records, as well as archival finding aids. The full-text collection, covering the colonial period through World War I, presents more than 500 books on Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania history, including manuscripts, reports, dictionaries, diaries, and periodicals. The collection can be browsed by author, genre, date published, or categories such as culture and society or people and personalities. It can also be searched by keyword or bibliographic information including author, title, and subject. The map collection offers visitors the ability to search and view 1,122 plates from 26 volumes of Hopkins Real Estate maps (1872 ñ 1939) and the 1914 Warrantee Atlas of Allegheny County. The more than 8,000 images can be browse by time period (1860s to 1980s), location, collection, or through four thematic presentations focused on work, play, home life, and personalities.

Also available are searchable U.S. census schedules for Pittsburgh from 1850 to 1880 and for Allegheny City from 1850 to 1870 and archival finding aids to 700 archival collections. Additionally, there is a timeline of Pittsburgh history from 1750 to 2000 and two lesson plans for teachers based on the material in the site's collections, one on using census data and one on using the map collections. A useful resource with a variety of primary source material for anyone researching the social or cultural history of Pittsburgh.