Who is William Steinway, and what makes his diary so noteworthy? From some perspectives, Steinway is a perfectly average person, giving readers a view into daily life in the 1800s. However, he also happened to be a partner in the newly formed (and later famed) family business Steinway and Sons, a name likely familiar to readers who have played the piano. Another point in the favor of the importance of the diary is that its 2,500 pages begin just eight days after the beginning of the Civil War and three days before William's wedding—a time of personal and national change. While William was not a soldier, his younger brother Albert was, giving the diary a perspective on both home and military life in the Civil War. The diary continues until November 8, 1896, within a month of William's death.

The website offers a digitized and fully transcribed version of William's diary. For any page, you can view both the original and the transcribed text. It's also possible to enter any date of your choosing, and go straight to that page. Users can also find a family tree with short biographies of William and Albert Steinway, as well as William's first wife Elizabeth Roos Steinway; more than 50 photos of the family, useful for putting faces to William's story; and Resources such as scholarly articles on the piano industry of the day and lists of abbreviations and German words and phrases found within the diary.

Eventually, users will be able to search the diary by topic as well.

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.

One year after the sub-prime mortgage crisis, this website presents a small collection of historical materials and information surrounding four financial crises in the 19th and early 20th century: the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1873, the Bankers' Panic of 1907, and the Great Crash of 1929. Each section includes a brief explanation of the crisis, including causes and consequences, and between four and six primary sources, including maps, images of bank notes, title deeds, and letters. These sources highlight the complexity of crises and their increasing internationalization over time, as well as issues surrounding historical interpretation of the crises.

The website also includes sections on the Waltham Watch Company, which drew on lessons learned during the Panic of 1937 to mechanize the production of watches; and the real-estate boom of the early 1920s, which has been used recently by economists and historians to better understand current connections between real estate markets and financial crisis. Finally, a bibliography of close to 30 works on the history of these crises, links to manuscript collections, trade publications, and financial databases, give website visitors suggestions for further study.

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.

The 580 maps of more than 80 South Carolina towns and cities in this archive reveal urban landscapes and the locations of businesses, mills, colleges, depots, and other buildings between 1884 and 1923. The collection includes 232 unpublished, hand-drafted maps from the years 1899 to 1937. All maps are displayed with original color coding. Users can zoom in and out of maps and can pan right, left, up, or down to examine details. Every map is accompanied by bibliographic data. The full collection can be browsed or the user can choose to browse just the unpublished maps. The collection can be searched by city, year of publication, and county. The maps provide many details about mills and are particularly useful in revealing spatial relationships and location of railroad lines. There is also a link to the Union List of Sanborn and other fire insurance maps. An extremely useful resource for those researching the business or urban history of South Carolina in the decades around 1900.

Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.

Examples of brass band music from the 1850s through the 19th century. "Bands of this kind served in the armies of both the North and the South during the Civil War, in the field as well as for the entertainment of the officers." Including both printed and manuscript music, the collection features more than 700 musical compositions, as well as eight full-score modern editions, 19 recorded examples of brass band music in performance, and a gallery of 37 photographs taken of bands during the Civil War.

Also provides a 10,000-word "Special Presentation" entitled, "The American Brass Band Movement: A Historical Overview," that includes 15 drawings and photographs. Useful primarily to music specialists, the site may also be of interest to those studying the popular culture of the Civil War era.

A collection of 2,100 early baseball cards, featuring more than 1,000 major and minor league players who represented teams in 13 leagues and 75 cities. Includes legendary players, such as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, and Walter Johnson, in addition to managers and owners, such as Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Charles Comiskey. Provides a nine-title bibliography. Searchable by keyword for material written on the cards, and by name, team, league, and city. Primarily of interest to sports historians, the cards, originally distributed as advertising material in cigarette packs, can also be used in the study of commercial advertising and printing processes.