This website features eight "toolboxes" designed to enable secondary teachers to enhance existing units or collaborate with university faculty and create in-depth summer seminars on prominent themes in American history. Topics include: American Beginnings: The European Presence in North America, 1492-1690; Becoming American: The British Atlantic Colonies, 1690-1763; Living the Revolution: America, 1789-1820; The Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1870-1912; The Triumph of Nationalism/The House Dividing: America, 1815-1850; The Making of African American Identity: Volume I, 1500-1865; The Making of African American Identity: Volume II, 1865-1917; and The Making of African American Identity: Volume III, 1917-1968. Each "toolbox" includes roughly 50 historical documents, literary texts, and works of art, divided into topics and accompanied by annotations, substantive discussion questions, an illustrated timeline of the era, and links to numerous additional online resources. Three more "toolboxes" are coming soon: The Unresolved Crisis: America, 1850-1870; Becoming Modern: America, 1918-1929; and Making the Revolution: America, 1763-1789.

[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This archive provides full-text access to more than 350,000 issues of more than 700 newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia. The majority of the collection focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and sheds light onto a wide range of political, social, cultural, and economic issues in both cities and smaller communities. The New York collection, for example, boasts 157 titles. While 80 of these were published in New York City, the collection also includes newspapers published in Troy, Utica, Catskill, and Ithaca. Massachusetts (137 titles), Pennsylvania (84 titles), Connecticut (47 titles), and Vermont (41 titles) are also well represented, followed by New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Rhode Island. Keyword searching capabilities combined with extensive browsing options allow both experienced researchers and those largely unfamiliar with early American history to make good use of the resources available here. Browsing options include dates and eras, article types (including news; poetry/songs; advertisements; birth, death, and marriage notices; cartoons and illustrations; maps; letters; and election returns), languages, places of publication, and newspaper titles. Newspapers are displayed as full-page scans, enabled with detailed zoom capabilities, and can be downloaded in .pdf format.

This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.

Since 1831, the Virginia Historical Society has been collecting materials documenting the lives of Virginians. This website provides information for researchers and the broader public interested in visiting the Society's headquarters in Richmond, including a collections catalog, finding guides to specific collections, and information about physical exhibitions. The website also includes significant digital holdings. While only five percent of the collection has been digitized, this represents more than 5,000 items, grouped into 14 digital collections. These collections include maps, drawings, paintings, postcards, prints and engravings, 19th century photography, as well as topical collections on African Americans, the Civil War, the Retreat Hospital in Richmond, Virginia's manufacturing of arms, the 1852 Virginia General Assembly Composite Portrait, the Reynolds Metal Company (forthcoming), the Garden Club of Virginia (forthcoming), and selections from the Society's ongoing exhibition, The Story of Virginia. The entire collections catalog is keyword searchable, and includes an option to limit the search to digitized materials.

Part of a larger "Famous Trials" website created by Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Law School, this site provides primary documents and other information on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93. Linder authored a roughly 1000-word essay on the events in Salem that includes links to biographies of key figures in the trial. The site also offers 18 primary documents concerning the witch trials, including the Reverend Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences, a pamphlet that details an episode of supposed witchcraft by a woman named Goody Glover; an arrest warrent from 1692; seven transcripts of examinations and trial records for accused witches and a sample death warrent. The site also includes approximately 500-word biographies of 17 key figures in the trials, such as accused witches, judges, accusers, and clergy. In addition, there are 14 images of the town of Salem and key figures in the trials. The site offers links to eight related websites and a bibliography of 22 scholarly books and articles and two videos on witchcraft. This site has no index, but is small enough to navigate easily. It is ideal for researching basic information on the Salem Witch trials.

This site, created by Professor Emeritus Leslie V. Brock, deals with the study of American colonial currency. During the colonial period, each colony issued its own paper money, which caused considerable conflict with Britain in the 18th century. This site contains five full-text 18th-century pamphlets on colonial economic and currency issues from 1720 to 1749; ten other contemporary writings about the economic situation in the colonies, including sermons, currency acts, and letters to Britain's Board of Trade, the governing body for colonial economic issues. The site also offers one article and excerpts from a book by scholars of colonial economy, and links to six other scholarly essays on similar topics. There are links to ten tables from Brock's book, Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates, as well as a very thorough bibliography of over 70 scholarly works on colonial economies. Additionally, the site offers a link to a site that provides images with roughly 100-word explanations of over 150 species of paper currency, lottery tickets, and fiscal documents from the 18th-century Anglo-American colonies and links to 14 other sources of information on monetary history. This is an ideal source for teaching and researching the colonial economies and money in 18th-century America.

This website, maintained by graduate student Rick Gardiner, is a gateway to sites that contain well over 500 primary documents and literature that was "most relevant to the colonists' lives in America." The collection is arranged chronologically and divided into five time periods: 500 BC to 500 AD contains works by classical philosophers and poets such as Aristotle and Socrates, the Bible, and works by figures such as St. Augustine; 500 AD to 1500 contains such works as the Laws of William the Conqueror, Magna Carta, and English law treatises; 1500-1600 provides such documents as the writings of Martin Luther, letters by Christopher Columbus, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs; 1600-1700 contains a variety of colonial maps and charters, an indentured servant's contract, the works of John Smith of Jamestown settlement and John Winthrop of Plimouth Plantation, among other documents; and 1700-1800 contains such documents as the Virginia Slave Laws, William Byrd I's diary, and the works of Lord Bolingbroke.

Each chronological category divides the documents into 15 to 25 subject categories. While there is no keyword search, the site's chronological and subject divisions make it easily navigable, and it provides a wealth of resources for those particularly interested in political, cultural, religious, or constitutional early American history.

Part of the National Geographic Society website, this is an interactive exercise in which the visitor follows a narrative compiled from several Salem witchcraft trial accounts. These trials took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The site places visitors in the shoes of one of Salem's accused witches, describing conditions in the jail, the ordeal of the trial, and the accused's eventual confession to performing acts of witchcraft. The site also provides links to brief, 100-word biographies of 11 persons involved in the trials, such as young accusers Ann Putnam and Abigail Williams, slave and accused witch Tituba, and Tituba's master, Reverend Samuel Parris. The narrative leads to a positive outcome--the accused is eventually released from prison--but it offers an optional link to discover what may have happened to a prisoner who refused to confess his or her guilt. The site also contains links to a discussion forum and to an "Ask the Expert" page which allows visitors to pose questions to Richard Trask, Danvers, Massachusetts, archivist and curator of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. There is also a four-item bibliography of recent works on the Salem trials. This site contains no primary documents, yet it is useful for conveying to younger secondary school students the sense of the panic that surrounded the trials.