The New Georgia Encyclopedia

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A web-based reference work, this site provides authoritative and accurate information on people, places, institutions, and events for many aspects of Georgia's life, history, and culture. The encyclopedia offers close to 2,000 articles and 8,000 multimedia files on a range of categories, including art, business, education, politics, history, religion, and sports with specific articles on topics such as architecture: building types (houses, public schools, roadside, and vernacular), military bases, folklife projects, and gymnastics at the University of Georgia.

Within the essays, there are links to related essays and external websites. There are also video and audio clips as well as images and some maps. New material is added regularly and the site also offers basic stats on the state, features and destinations, and galleries.

American Memory Learning Page

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Designed to provide support for elementary, middle, and high school history teachers, this site makes the entire American Memory collection at the Library of Congress available for classroom learning. Using the more than 7 million digital sources available through American Memory's 100 collections, the creators have written and collected 140 lesson plans for teaching American history. Organized chronologically and thematically, the lesson plans are detailed suggestions for classroom activities. Each has a recommended age group and uses primary sources collected by students or teachers from American Memory.

Especially useful are the included guides on using primary sources, using American Memory resources, and using digital or Internet sources in the classroom. A "Professional Development" section offers online workshops and tutorials to improve teachers' digital literacy. An excellent resource for the classroom, this site would be useful to both student and teacher.

The United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Cultures

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Designed to explore the historical similarities and contrasts, ethnic diversity, and interactions between Brazil and the United States, this site contains almost 1,000 images from the rare book, manuscript, map, print, and photographic collections of the Library of Congress and the National Library of Brazil.

The site includes letters (including letters from Thomas Jefferson concerning the independence of Brazil), illustrations, 18th-century maps, and other textual items, including poetry.

The sources are available in five categories: "Historical Foundations," "Ethnic Diversity," "Culture and Literature," "Mutual Impressions," and "Biodiversity" (right now, only the Historical Foundations section is completed). The site is viewable in both English and Portuguese, and is appropriate for high school and college students, as well as teachers and researchers.

Utah Digital Newspapers

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This site includes digitized versions of 28 Utah newspapers as part of the Utah Digital Newspapers project. Currently, the site contains more than 600,000 pages. Researchers using this digital archive may browse each individual newspaper by issue, or elect to search by keyword, article title, weddings, deaths, and births.

The site also features a map that users can scroll over to determine which counties in Utah had newspapers that are currently archived in this database, and the dates covered.

The collections begin in 1879, and feature PDF versions of the newspapers.

Women of Valor

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This site introduces Emma Goldman—an immigrant, an advocate of free love, a promoter of birth control, and an anarchist. The designers have done a splendid job in tying the many facets of Goldman's public life together into one set of interrelated narratives. An "Introduction" is divided into 13 thematically coherent sections, such as Early Years, Anarchism, Use of Violence, and Deportation. Each runs approximately 500 words. A Timeline is useful for placing Goldman into historical and cultural context.

There are several dozen artifacts, including the full text of two books, six cartoons, four historical documents, an analytical essay, two personal letters, 12 news clippings, and 16 photographs. The information is well documented, and includes a detailed bibliography.

The care that the producers took in explaining potentially confusing or problematic terms (like feminism and suffrage) makes the site particularly appropriate for high school and undergraduate students. Although not a comprehensive archive, this site nonetheless provides an informative introduction to Goldman and her role in American history.

The Zora Neale Hurston Plays

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This site offers 10 unpublished plays (four sketches or skits and six full-length plays) written by American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Although the plays were written and submitted to the Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, they remained unknown until 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experiences.

As an anthropologist and folklorist, Hurston traveled the American South, collecting and recording the sounds and songs of African Americans. Her research in Haiti is reflected in the voodoo scenes and beliefs woven into several of the plays.

The collection holds approximately 700 digitized pages. These are scanned as she wrote them and have not been transcribed. This site would be useful for research in early-20th-century southern or cultural history.

The Story of Virginia

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This attractive website offers a presentation on the history of Virginia from prehistoric times to the present with essays, images, and teaching resources. There are 10 chapters: the first Virginians; the settlement of colonial Virginia; Virginia's society before 1775; Virginians in the American Revolution; Virginians as Southerners, Confederates, and New Southerners; Virginians in the 20th century; the struggles of African American and female Virginians for equality; and a final chapter on images of Virginia in popular culture. Each chapter has an essay featuring images of relevant items in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society.

The "resource bank" collects all 95 images from the chapters of people, documents, places, and objects. Additionally, the site offers a teacher's guide for each chapter listing the standards of learning, a summary of key points, classroom activities and lesson plans, links to related websites, and information on tours, outreach programs, and hands-on-history programs.

An excellent introduction to the history of Virginia and its people with useful resources for class projects and classroom instruction.

San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection

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This collection of 30,000 historical photographs contains scenes of San Francisco from 1850 to the present and includes views of streets, buildings, and neighborhoods, as well as photographs of famous San Francisco personalities. Visitors can search for photographs by neighborhoods using the interactive map, one of the site's most engaging options. There are also miniature tours of such locales as the Barbary Coast, Nob Hill, and Telegraph Hill.

The San Francisco neighborhoods are searchable through a list of subjects, which includes monuments, nightclubs, orphanages, parks, and stadiums.

There are several specialized collections, such as the James A. Scott Collection featuring 27 pairs of "before-and-after" images of the city with the photographer's notes and comments.

A photo morgue of the daily newspaper, San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, dating from the 1920s to 1965, completes the site.

Presidents of the United States - POTUS

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A reference resource for basic information about the U.S. Presidents. Each president's page includes election results; cabinet members; a list of notable events during term of office; and historical documents, such as inauguration speeches, proclamations, and significant public addresses.

The site provides links to sites about important events and biographies of family and cabinet members. Audio files are available for presidents from Grover Cleveland to George W. Bush. Links to two to 10 internet biographies and one to 13 related sites are provided.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

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In the past decade new media and new technologies have begun to transform even the ancient discipline of history. CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web challenge historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) was established in the fall of 1994 to contribute to and reflect upon this transformation and challenge. The Center produces historical works in new media, tests the effectiveness of these products in the classroom, and reflects critically on the promises and pitfalls of new media in historical practice. The Center's resources are designed to benefit professional historians, high school teachers, and students of history.

Includes links to more than 1,000 history departments around the world; and a wide variety of teaching, scholarly, and exhibition resources—online databases, informative sites, and software. For example, Declaration: Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation provides translations of the American Declaration of Independence into French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, along with commentaries on the practice and problems of translating documents.

With the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York (ASHP/CML), CHNM produces History Matters, a resource site for teachers and students of American history.