This educational resource complements an eight-part PBS documentary series by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, The West. The site is organized into several sections: a guided tour of the West, an interactive timeline to 1917, a hypertext map which includes migration and commerce routes, games and puzzles, and, most importantly, archival materials collected during the making of the series.

Primary sources, organized in chronological order, include memoirs, letters, government reports, and photographs. Visitors should not expect to encounter new perspectives on the American West offered by such historians as Patricia Limerick or William Cronon, or in-depth discussion of such important historiographical issues as gender or the environment. Political and military history, and to a lesser extent social and ethnic history of the West, however, are well represented in this account.

A syllabus and collection of documents for a course in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, exploring "two simultaneous tendencies in American life": fascination with "personal transformation—with self making, with economic mobility, and also the difference between the real and the fake"; and the emergence of detection "and the wide range of new techniques—like fingerprints, mug shots, and criminology generally—designed to pin down identity." Presents an array of primary material designed to examine these tendencies, organized in four excursions to an urban newsstand, a saloon, a theater, and a police station.

Includes the Horatio Alger novel Ragged Dick; 14 early motion pictures produced between 1897 and 1905; images depicting various "sciences" of detection used by urban police departments; photographs of saloons and crime scenes; an interview and audio file of pianist and composer Eubie Blake on ragtime music; an excerpt from the 1899 book Vitalogy, on achieving "vigorous manhood"; and posters from urban minstrel shows. Also gives a bibliography drawn from course readings.

Published annually by the State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States is the official record of major declassified U.S. foreign policy decisions and diplomatic activity, with material culled from Presidential libraries--including transcripts of tape recordings--and executive departments and agencies. Digitized material does not reflect the full range of published volumes. For the Truman Administration, the site provides "1945-50, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment." Three volumes are available for the Eisenhower years, on American republics, Guatemala, and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Cyprus. The Kennedy Administration is represented by 25 volumes that cover, among other areas, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin crisis, and exchanges with Premier Khrushchev. A complete set of 34 volumes is available on the Johnson Administration, and 19 volumes currently are furnished from the Nixon Administration. Fifty-four volumes will eventually be available on the Nixon and Ford administrations. Useful volume summaries provide historical context. FRUS volumes for 1900-1918 (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/) are described in a separate entry.

Provides links to approximately 390 documents, most of which are related to the nation's political, diplomatic, military, and legal history. Arranged chronologically, the site begins with excerpts of Christopher Columbus' journal of 1492 and ends, at present, with President George W. Bush's May 1, 2003 address announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq [update: documents reach from around 800 to 2007]. Includes speeches, statutes, treaties, court decisions, memoirs, diaries, letters, published books, and even a few songs. The site, created by Lynn Nelson, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Kansas, is valuable especially for high school and college students who need easy access to many of the canonical documents in American history.