This site highlights Orville and Wilbur Wright's pioneering aviation work that led to the world's first powered, controlled, and sustained flight. The collection contains approximately 49,000 digital items, including correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and 300 glass-plate photographic negatives. The papers cover the years 1881-1952, although the years 1900-1940 are especially well represented. The diaries offer detailed records of the brothers' ideas, as well as their successes and failures; and photographs include the first flight, taken at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. The materials are particularly valuable because the brothers so carefully documented their work and ideas, and because they corresponded so often with members of their family.

The site includes a Wright Brothers timeline and a Wright family tree. This site would be of particular use to anyone interested in the Wright Brothers or the history of flight, but is also useful in examining the role of photography in history and invention.

Based on an exhibit of the same name, this website provides a look at the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) photographs of the Western United States from 1895 to 1924. The site is arranged for easy browsing into nine sections: DPC History, "How did they do it?," Cityscapes, Everyday Life, Foreign Views, Getting Around, Michigan Views, Nature, and Workplace; and each section contains 24 to 38 photographs. The first section covers the early years of the company and provides information about DPC photographers and the creation and distribution of pictures. The everyday life photos include images of cowboys shooting craps, children in Chinatown, and an African American Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, VA. The foreign views section consists of snapshots taken in Mexico, Venezuela, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. Roughly 40 photographs focus on the state of Michigan. The nature images, the most popular of the company's photographs, are majestic and many of them fed the growing tourist industry. The section of workplace images rounds out this site and includes harvest scenes, loggers in Michigan, smelters, oyster pickers in Louisiana, and cotton gin workers. For those interested in the history of photography, this easily navigable site is a valuable resource.

Thousands of pages of documents concerning the U.S. plan to annex Hawaii, realized in 1898, have been digitized and presented in searchable form, with more material promised in the future. One section contains the 1,436-page Blount Report of 1894-95, initiated by President Grover Cleveland on the history of relations between the U.S. and Hawaii and the planned annexation. Another section offers Congressional debates on the Hawaii Organic Act, passed in 1900 to establish a territorial government in Hawaii. Hawaiian anti-annexation petitions from 1897-98 are available as are 10 anti-annexation protest documents, including six written to American officials by Queen Liliuokalani from 1893 to 1897. The site provides search capabilities within each section and across all materials. Although the site provides little context beyond the documents, the texts offer a rich resource for exploring the diplomatic history of early American imperialism, debates within Congress, and resistance in Hawaii.

Divided into six galleries, this website features 21 online exhibits. The first gallery, Binding the Nation, includes six exhibits such as "The Post and the Press" and "Moving West" which explains how the postal service contracted with stagecoach lines to transport mail across the frontier. The second gallery, Customers and Communities, uses a series of exhibits to examine the development of mail delivery to the growing urban and rural populations in the 20th century. For example, through a virtual tour of the "Mail by Rail," visitors learn about the revolutionary Railway Mail Service. Moving the Mail is the third gallery, with three exhibits, and Art of Cards and Letters, the fourth gallery, spotlights the important role mail has held as a medium for personal communications, including "Undercover: The Evolution of the American Envelope." The fifth gallery, Artistic License comprises six exhibits; and the last, the Philatelic Gallery, includes exhibits entitled "Rarities Vault" and "Inverts." This gallery also features changing exhibits featuring special objects from both the Museum and private collections, including an online version of "Mail to the Chief," a collection of original drawings by Franklin Roosevelt of the many stamps he designed.

There are also two research guides online for the Benjamin B. Lipsner Airmail Collection and for the 1847 Federal Postage Stamp Correspondence. An Activity Zone offers materials for young students and free downloadable curriculum guides (grades K through college level) are available for teachers. The 24 online articles from EnRoute, the National Postal Museum's membership magazine, complete this rich site.

This website contains articles and extracts about early radio and related technologies in the United States from 1897-1927. It is organized chronologically and divided into 24 sections. Each section is a long-form essay, containing numerous hyperlinks to reproductions or transcriptions of original primary documents, including documents relating to the efforts to provide entertainment and news over the telephone in the first decades of the 20th century. Essays vary in length, most 1,000 - 2,000 words, and many are original essays by the site's creator. The first section offers an overview of the individuals, activities, and technical advances that characterize the early 20th century. The subsequent sections include essays entitled "The Electric Telegraph" and "Radio at Sea." The latter argues that navigation was the first major use of radio and it helped to reduce the isolation of ships and save lives. There are also essays about the early development of the radio industry and the radio during World War I. "Early Government Regulations, 1903-1946" contains 18 documents covering early international and national control of radio and the final section on U.S. radio history covers such topics as "Washington D.C. AM Station History" and "Mystique of the Three-Letter Callsigns" about U.S. radio and television station call letters.

The site is a fascinating place for those interested in the early history and development of the radio and its subsequent effects on related technologies.

This site illustrates the ways in which the late 19th-century history of Minnesota is tied to the rise of and connection between four industries: lumbering, sawmilling, farming, and flour milling. The site uses a comic book-like format (large picture panels with minimal text), and incorporates the diaries and personal recollections of four Minnesotans who participated as lumbermen, sawyers, farmers, or flour millers. The colorful format attracts attention and the short presentations are appropriate for younger viewers (elementary, middle, and even high school students). The site relies primarily on Flash to present the stories, but viewers can also read and view the stories in HTML.

Each segment provides links to outside resources (about 40 in all) for additional information. Explanatory links define terms that might be unfamiliar to visitors, suggest topics for discussion, and offer additional supporting materials (for example, the site links internally to approximately 50 period photographs and diary entries). Teachers may find useful the nine suggestions for classroom activities, such as analyzing photographic evidence or examining the perspective of one of the storytellers.

These 66 photographs capture the diverse experiences of children from many different parts of the world from the 1840s to the mid-20th century. The collection includes early 19th-century daguerreotypes, turn of the century studio portraits, and 20th-century prints and stereographs of young people. The portraits of children include those born into privilege, such as Tad Lincoln, son of the President Abraham Lincoln, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as children of tenant farmers in Florida, California, and Texas during the Great Depression. There are also images of children from around the world, including children in Paris, Puerto Rico, Greece, and the Virgin Islands. There are poignant photographs of Cheyenne and Apache children from the Pacific Northwest, Mexican girls in Texas, and African American boys in Harlem.

The collection includes photographs culled from the American Red Cross Collection and the W.E. B. Du Bois Collection, in addition to pictures of African Americans in Washington D.C. by renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Four short descriptions (50 words) by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles and information about his book, produced in conjunction with the exhibit, When They Were Young, accompany the collection.

The U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission demonstrated in 1900 that the mosquito transmitted yellow fever. This archive is an extensive compilation of 5,500 items related to the Commission's findings. Documents span from 1850 to 1966 and include correspondence, reports, photographs, and artifacts. The site is organized into sections pertaining to six key individuals: Walter Reed, Jesse W. Lazear, Henry Rose Carter, Jefferson Randolph Kean, Albert E. Truby, and Philip S. Hench. Each section includes an introduction (800 to 1,000 words) and is searchable by date, series, subject, or keyword.

In addition, there is a 4,800-word essay entitled "United States Army Yellow Fever Commission." The Walter Reed Series (1874-1936) and the Reed Family Additions (1877-1902) comprise Reed's original letters concerning his seminal work with yellow fever in Cuba. The Jesse Lazear Series and Henry Rose Carter Series, which span from the 1860s to 1930s detail the men's involvement with the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba and their careers in public health. The other series include personal and professional correspondence and research during the period of the Yellow Fever Commission's work in Cuba. A separate section entitled "Books" contains a first edition biography of Walter Reed and a 1941 version of Walter Reed, Doctor in Uniform, a biography for young adults. "Highlights" comprises a sampling of 30 unique documents, many of which comment on the importance of the Cuban American relationship. Those interested in exploring the history of medicine and science, social history, military history, public health policy, tropical medicine, and biomedical ethics will find this site of great interest.

This archive makes available varied material on English, American, and Missouri history, including speeches, pamphlets, plat books, and government documents. The collection of Daniel Webster speeches offers more than 100 items that, in addition to his addresses and speeches in Congress, include sermons, addresses, orations, and speeches in his honor, as well as some correspondence. The Fourth of July orations collection contains more than 100 items, including orations by John Quincy Adams, Charles F. Adams, and Daniel Webster. The site also offers a collection of more than 110 Missouri county plat books published in 1930, a collection of various items of Missouriana, and a group of four miscellaneous texts that includes an 80-page text on the liberty of the press published in London in 1812. The collection of 17th- to 19th-century British religious, political, and legal tracts contains more than 400 documents and pamphlets published primarily during the English Civil War. Each collection can be individually searched. For anyone researching 17th- and 18th-century transatlantic history, the political history of New England, or the history of Missouri, this is a collection worth consulting.

This site contains the full text of the 185 primary documents, roughly a 600-page book, dealing with urban planning. Dozens of journals, conference reports, books, official documents, and other sources are easy to navigate. In addition to the key word search engine, the site includes a topical bibliography that provides more than a dozen headings, and alphabetical and chronological bibliographies. Each entry also has a link to the full text of the document. Essays discuss a broad range of issues, including surveys of the state of urban planning, discussions of how urban improvements should be made, and details of the legal issues of land use regulations. Each document includes a brief (about 1,000 words) general introduction that sets the material in historical perspective. The selections on the site include Frederick Law Olmstead's commentary on the City Beautiful movement and continue to his son's discussion of housing developments in 1919. This site will prove useful to anyone concerned with urban planning or urban history and especially valuable to those studying how urban planning developed through World War I.