A project of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, PhilaPlace explores the history of two neighborhoods in Philadelphia—Old Southwark and the Greater Northern Liberties—historically home to immigrants and the working class. Using an interactive map and more than 1,240 primary sources and audio and video clips, visitors to the site may navigate the neighborhoods and learn more about their development from 1875 to the present day.

Visitors may navigate the interactive map using filters found under two tabs to the left of the map: "Places" and "Streets."

Under "Places," click on marked points of interest to bring up photographs or audio or video clips describing the history of the location. These points of interest may be filtered by 14 topics (such as "Food & Foodways," "Education & Schools," and "Health") or by contributor (the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, its partners, or visitors to the site). The map may be set to show the city's streets in 1875, 1895, 1934, 1962, or the present day—note that points of interests from all time periods appear on all maps. Two virtual tours through the points of interest are available, one for Greater Northern Liberties/Lower North and South Philadelphia.

Under "Streets," visitors can view demographics for four streets—S. 4th St., S. 9th St., I-95, and Wallace Street—from 1880-1930. Buildings on each street are color-coded to show land use, the number of residents per building, and the ethnicity and occupation of each building's residents.

Collections allows visitors to search the more than 1,240 primary sources and audio and video clips available on the site. Filter them by topic, neighborhood, type, or contributor.

The site's blog presents mini-features on certain locations, notifications of updates, and information on professional development and other PhilaPlace-related events. Educators provides a timeline for each of the neighborhoods and four suggested lesson plan/activities, while My PhilaPlace lets visitors create free accounts and save favorite materials to them—or create their own up-to-25-stop city tour. The Add a Story feature allows visitors to tag locations on the maps with their own short descriptions or memories (up to 600 words long), and accompany them with an image or audio or video clip.

Attractive, interactive, and accessible, PhilaPlace may appeal to Pennsylvania educators looking for a tool to help students explore urban history.

This website—a small portion of the larger Documenting the American South project—presents the full text of more than 130 works of literature by more than 75 authors, published between the mid-1600s and 1920. Notable works include the first history of Virginia, written in 1673 by House of Burgesses member Robert Beverley, poems by Edgar Allen Poe, Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery, and several of Mark Twain's and Kate Chopin's works. Other works include collections of slave songs, sermons, and narratives published in the mid-1800s, including Frederick Douglass's famous narrative, several works addressing Ku Klux Klan activities, and many lesser-known works of fiction. Though there is no built-in search feature, all works are presented as lengthy text files and can be searched using a computer's "Find" function. Users new to Southern history may want to turn first to the "Introduction," which provides brief essays on many aspects of Southern history, literature, and culture, including early colonial-era literature, the genres of biography and autobiography, black literature, the Civil War, travel writing, folklore, and humor.

This site, part of the larger TeacherServe offers an interactive curriculum enrichment service providing teachers with creative lesson plans and access to materials for the secondary school classroom. To help teachers convey the importance of religion in the development of the United States, this site highlights the intersections between American history and religion at key points like the Puritan migration to New England, abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement. The site offers essays on 24 topics grouped into 17th- and 18th- century, 19th- century, and 20th-century categories. Subjects covered include Native American religion in Early America, witchcraft in Salem village, African American religion in the 19th century, the Scopes trial, and the American Jewish experience.

Each of the 2,000-word essays includes background to the topic, tips on guiding student discussion, a bibliography of approximately five related scholarly works, a discussion of historians' debates over the issue, and links to related resources. Teachers can submit questions and comments on teaching about religion in the classroom to the Center and its consulting scholars, and a discussion link posts these questions and answers. The site also offers links to three websites that offer additional advice on teaching about religion in public schools. This is an excellent site for high school history teachers and it also provides a useful framework for college survey courses.

Offers more than 235 annotated links, within 20 categories, to documents and materials about the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, and more broadly, 17th-century New England. Categories include primary sources, bibliographies, references for young readers, teaching materials, museums, Native Americans, witchcraft, religious heterodoxies, and Hollywood versions of history. In addition to links, the site's creator, a novelist and descendant of accused witch Rebecca Nurse, provides nine documents from the trials; an account of one witchcraft trial written by Cotton Mather; four documents from Salem court records; an annotated bibliography with 26 titles; a table listing more than 200 people accused of witchcraft with their place of residence, year of accusation, and jurisdiction; and a discussion of historical inaccuracies in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and the recent film version. As the site is checked regularly for dead links, it can be a valuable gateway to sites on 17th-century American cultures, religions, and social life.

A comprehensive gateway to more than 3,000 links that provide historical maps and information about the history of cartography, with an emphasis on early maps. Searchable by an index with more than 400 alphabetically-arranged subject terms or by keyword. Includes sites offering listings for conferences, discussion lists, fellowships, map societies, journals, images of early maps, map collecting, web projects on early cartography, histories of maps, and articles on cartography. Now incorporated into the World Wide Web–Virtual Library and updated weekly. Extremely useful as a starting point for online cartographic resources.

Designed for history educators and students, this useful portal provides access to more than 700 of the best history resources online. Sites are organized into 10 categories—Prehistory, Ancient/Biblical, Medieval, U.S History, Early Modern European, 20th Century, World War II, Art History, General Resources, and Maps. Many of the five-star Pre-history, Ancient, and Medieval sites are hosted by Smithsonian Institution, PBS, and the Internet History Sourcebooks; and the Library of Congress is the creator of a wide-range of top-rated sites for U.S. history. The 20th-century and World War II sections are voluminous, the latter presenting 42 sites. There are three special categories: Lesson Plans/Activities, Multimedia, and Research. "Multimedia" includes 18 map sites, including the Rumsey collection with more than 8,000 maps. Instructors will find the section on "Teaching with Technology" especially informative. It offers articles and advice about integrating computers into lessons and links to dozens of useful resources on teaching with technology. Visitors can sign up to receive monthly email updates.

The title of this site is somewhat misleading, as the history and artistry of the guitar and guitarists is the primary focus for the eight collections of images and 15 exhibitions—some produced in conjunction with other cultural institutions—that the site's creators, a collector and music scholar, offer. "Dangerous Curves: Art of the Guitar," an online version of a recent Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, presents more than 20 photographs of guitars from the Baroque era to modern times, including a number of celebrity instruments. This exhibition provides up to 200-word annotations on each image and a 4,000-word essay. "Bound for Glory: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie," a complement to the traveling Smithsonian Institution show, offers a 3,100-word narrative of the folksinger's life and songwriting career, with 23 audio files of songs and interviews, 32 photographs, four pieces of sheet music, and six reviews and articles on the original exhibition. "The Private Life of Mark Twain" displays photos of the author's 1834 Martin guitar, an edited version of Twain's poem "Genius," a 350-word article, an audio file of a song about Twain performed by the Kingston Trio, and a nine-minute National Public Record audio segment on Twain's guitar. O

ther exhibition topics include music in films, Elvis Presley, Django Reinhardt, music during World War II, and "the guitar as a potent sex symbol." The eight collections of images present historic guitars from the ragtime era to 1930s singing cowboy movies. The site also includes approximately 70 previously published articles on related topics. Valuable for those studying music history and American popular culture of the 20th century.

Provides nearly 1,500 images of 280 architecturally significant American buildings from the colonial era to the present, compiled by Professor Jeffery Howe for classroom use. Images are arranged according to period, location, architect, building type, and style. The site offers examples of houses, churches, public buildings, commercial buildings, and skyscrapers. It includes images from three World's Fairs, as well as sections on urban planning and comparative materials. Professor Howe also has digitized images and text from two mid-19th century books on design and ornament. Although image annotations are minimal, in conjunction with other materials, the images in this site will be useful to those studying American architectural history and urban history.