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.

Features more than 200 "social dance manuals" and related materials in western dance history, from Burgundian dances of the Late Middle Ages to Ragtime dances in vogue between 1890 and World War I. The site offers a rich selection of manuals--including the rare document, Les basses danses de Marguerite d'Autriche, published around 490--as well as histories, theoretical studies, treatises on etiquette, antidance literature, and other items. Designed to "illuminate the manner in which people have joyfully expressed themselves as they dance for and with one another," the site also provides a 13,000-word introductory essay, "Western Social Dance: An Overview of the Collection," which is illustrated with 44 images, 75 video clips demonstrating selected dances from the manuals, and a bibliography of 77 titles. A well-organized presentation that will interest students of dance and of the cultural history of Europe and the U.S.

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 website offers access to the digital collections of six Alaska universities and museums. The more than 3,700 historical images of Alaska can be browsed in their entirety or by selecting specific thematic collections organized under the two broad themes. "Alaska Native History and Cultures" has 12 collections with themes that include ceremonial life, education, native leadership and politics, making a living, and health care facilities. "Movement to Statehood" has seven collections with themes such as government, business and commerce, natural resources, transportation, and society and daily life.

Both "Alaska Native History" and "Movement to Statehood" can be browsed by region or time period. Bibliographic data accompanies each image. The user can also search the collection by phrase or keyword. Future stages of the project will add oral histories, maps, documents, and film clips in multiple formats. Alaska's Digital archive is an outstanding resource for those seeking images of Alaska's history.

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 website serves as a comprehensive resource for information on newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present. Its digital content comprises more than 680,000 individual newspaper page images drawn from close to 100 newspapers published in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, between 1880 and 1910. Large cities are well-represented (for example, Washington D.C., and New York), as are medium-sized cities (Richmond, VA, and Louisville, KY) and smaller towns (Berea, KY).

This content is fully keyword searchable, and search terms appear highlighted on each newspaper page. Newspaper pages can then be zoomed for detailed viewing and downloaded in high-quality .jpg or .pdf format. By 2011, the website plans to include newspaper page images dating back to 1836. The website also provides basic publication information about more than 11,500 newspapers published from 1690 to the present. This information includes date, place, and frequency of publication, as well as holdings information for researchers interested in visiting the libraries where these newspapers are kept. The database can be searched by keyword, language, ethnic audience, or labor focus (from "agricultural industries" to "woodworkers").

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.

This small "digital library" offers a collection of eight historical medical books related to the development of medicine in the U.S. PDF files of the original documents are accompanied by a transcription and a brief description. Additionally, most of the documents have a link to a "historical note" with a more detailed description of the document. The text of the documents is searchable. The eight medical works are Clara Barton's 1878 pamphlet on the Red Cross; Thomas N. Chase's 1903 Atlanta University conference report on the mortality of African Americans in cities; Benjamin Coleman's observations on smallpox inoculation, written during the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic; an 1825 description by Robert Waln, Jr., of the Friends Asylum near Philadelphia, the first private hospital in the United States entirely dedicated to the treatment of mental illness; William T. G. Morton's 1847 work on producing anesthesia by the inhalation of sulphuric ether; L. Emmett Holt's 1894 book on the care and feeding of children; Benjamin Rush's 1808 pamphlet on medical care for U.S. Army soldiers; and the text of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

This small archive provides more than 850 images from the mid-18th century to the present of the Santa Clara Valley in California. Browse the archive or view images through six thematic groupings: agriculture (91 images); education (147 images); people (467 images); technology (182 items); transportation (125 items); and urban life (78 items). There is some overlap between the collections. Keyword and advanced searches are also available. There are seven lesson plans on the history of the Santa Clara Valley, primarily for high school. Topics include the 1906 earthquake, the history of technology, urban development, the Ohlone Indians, women in Santa Clara County, and transportation.