This collection includes primary documents about the food conservation program that took place in the United States during World War I. During this time there was great need for food in Europe for both the military as well as civilians. The U.S. Food Administration created programs to conserve food. “Meatless Tuesdays” encouraged Americans to limit their consumption. Other programs promoted the establishment of “war gardens,” small backyard kitchen gardens in which people grew their own vegetables. The collection also includes books that describe these programs and explain how to preserve and cook food.

Although the 45 sources are listed without annotations and in no particular order, the website has a solid search feature. Teachers could introduce this website by searching the word “poster” and using the images of government-created posters to start a classroom discussion on limited resources during World War I. In addition, students should be shown the use of the “display gallery view” feature when looking at their search results. This feature makes it much easier to find relevant information at a glance.

Teachinghistory.org Teacher Representative Todd Beuke wrote this Website Review. Learn more about our Teacher Representatives.

This collection features images of dams, hydroelectric power plants, and water supply facilities built in Washington State from the late 1890s to the 1950s. The archive contains 695 items, primarily photographs but also some maps, diagrams, and other documents. A book excerpt on Washington's public water projects from Building Washington: A History of Washington State Public Works (Seattle, WA: Tartu Publications, 1998) by historians Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy provides perspective on the photographs. The collection is notable because "many of these dams, power plants and reservoirs were built in some of Washington's most rugged terrain and had features that represented significant engineering feats of their time." Each image is accompanied by full descriptive and bibliographic data.

The site offers three ways to search the archive of photographs: keyword search, search by collection, or an advanced search option by selected fields and subjects. Or the visitor can browse all the items by selecting "view all items" in the search drop-down menu. This website is a useful resource for those interested in the history of Western hydroelectric dams and other water projects in the first half of the 20th century.

This site, by the Women's Studies group at the University of Maryland, presents primary materials relating to women's history. Offers the texts of the 1848 "Declaration of Sentiments," and Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech, "Ain't I A Woman?" Additionally, the site furnishes essays and timelines concerning the 19th amendment, a newsletter entitled Women of Achievement and Herstory, and 39 biographical sketches, which range from approximately 75 to 150 words each. The presentation is haphazard, and the search engine is cumbersome. The site is perhaps most valuable for its examination of the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment.

Selected materials by and about the "birth control pioneer" Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) are provided here. A link to a companion site offers approximately 200 documents dealing with The Woman Rebel, Sanger's 1914 radical feminist monthly, for which she was indicted and tried for violation of federal obscenity laws.

The project plans to digitize more than 600 of Sanger's speeches and articles. At present, there are 25 transcribed speeches, 182 newspaper articles from 1911–1921, four public statements, a letter written by Sanger in 1915, and more than 50 articles from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, some of which contain primary source materials. There are plans to add to items regularly. Materials also include 27 links to sites offering Sanger writings, a biographical essay, and a bibliography. Links to collections of images and an MP3 file of Margaret Sanger's 1953 "This I Believe" speech are also available.

The life and work of black activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) are presented on this website. Garvey was the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and "champion of the back-to-Africa movement." Materials include 40 documents, such as correspondence, editorials, reports of U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation agents, articles from African American newspapers, and a chapter from Garvey's autobiography. Primary documents are accompanied by 15 background essays.

The website also provides four audio clips from recordings of speeches Garvey made in 1921 and 24 images, including photos of Garvey, his wife, and colleagues, and facsimiles of UNIA documents. Particularly valuable as a condensed history of Garvey's movement and also useful for those studying African American political and cultural movements in general.

This website offers an archive of more than 35,000 items from 75 individual collections at nearly 30 institutions in Illinois. Items include black-and-white and color photographs, post cards, audio recordings, maps, books, newspaper articles, newsletters and bulletins, handbills, and film clips. The focus of all the collections is the history of Illinois, its places, and people. A strength of the collections is the large number of photographs of residential and commercial buildings from cities and towns throughout Illinois.

Visitors can browse the contents of all collections by city, organization, or proper name. Once in a collection, other collections can be individually browsed by selecting from the collections dropdown menu. All collections are searchable by such fields as subject, description, creator, publisher, contributors, date, type, or format. Clicking on the thumbnail image brings up a new window with a large image and descriptive data. There are also 14 exhibits on various topics such as "History of Park Ridge, 1841-1926" and "Brides of Yesteryear." This is a useful collection of primary source material on the social and cultural history of Illinois.

Dedicated to recording the maritime history of Wisconsin (especially Lake Michigan and Lake Superior), this site features more than 7,000 documents, advertisements, and photographs of ships associated with Wisconsin waters since 1679. Geared toward the specialist as well as the beginner, the site contains a list of the more than 400 ships registered in Wisconsin over the years, as well as useful descriptions of the types of ships.

The collection is searchable by keyword and browsable. The quality of the photographs varies; some are small files, while others are quite large. The site recommends six related outside resources. This site would be very useful to anyone interested in the history of Wisconsin maritime shipping, passenger cruises, or naval history.

This collection of 20 essays on African American history and literature, commissioned from leading scholars and written for secondary teachers, is part of the larger TeacherServe site. The essays are designed to deepen content knowledge and provide new ideas for teaching. These 3,000-7,000-word essays cover three time periods: 1609-1865, 1865-1917, and 1917 and Beyond.

Essays begin with an overview of the topic. A “Guiding Discussion” section offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay. Each essay includes links to primary source texts in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library.

Essays in "1609-1865" focus on topics related to slavery, including families under the slavery system, slave resistance, types of slave labor, the end of slavery, analyzing slave narratives, and the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Essays also look at African American arts and crafts and African influence on African American culture.

Essays in "1865-1917" focus on topics that fall between the eras of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, including Reconstruction, segregation, trickster figures in African American literature, and issues of class and social division.

Essays in "1917 and Beyond" focus on literature and the Civil Rights Movement, including protest poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz in literature.

This website features digital scans of 75 cookbooks published in the United States between 1798 and 1922, providing a unique window into 19th century social history, and especially the history of immigration and the introduction of new foods into "American" cuisine. Each book can be browsed by date, author, or interest (including military cooking, quantity cooking, regional cooking, and ethnic influences), is available in downloadable PDF format, and is accompanied by a brief annotation providing useful information about the book's author, intended audience, and place of publication. All recipes also can be searched by name and ingredient. A search for "turkey," for example, reveals it to be a common ingredient in chicken salad—because, as Carrie Shuman writes in her 1893 Favorite Dishes, "the Irishman would say, turkey makes the best chicken salad." To accompany these recipes, the website includes images and explanations of close to 100 kitchen items found in the cookbooks, such as a piggin (small wooden bucked used for dipping liquids), a firkin (water-tight barrel often used for pickling), and a jelly press (used for rendering lard or pressing fruit).