Understanding the significance of the U.S. Constitution requires more than simply reading its text. This website provides context and tools designed to historically contextualize the U.S. Constitution and help users assess its lasting impact. An interactive Constitution lies at the heart of the website, providing line-by-line commentary by current scholars alongside excerpts from contemporary primary sources. Users can also search the Constitution in connection with specific court cases, topics, and keywords.

An interactive timeline in the exhibit "Centuries of Citizenship" provides useful background information. Additional contextual information is available in the form of a set of "fast facts"; descriptions of "basic governing principles," such as the rule of law, Federalism, and judicial review; detailed biographical information on all delegates to the Constitutional Convention; and audio discussions with scholars and pundits on topics ranging from voting to prominent court cases to women in the Early Republic. Three scholarly essays provide different "perspectives on the Constitution," reminding users that the success of the Constitution in uniting a group of diverse territories was far from assured in the late 1700s. Related primary sources in the "Founding Documents" section allow users to trace the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

New editions include the interactive experience "Lincoln's Crossroads," in which students face some of the choices Lincoln faced during his presidency; "A More Perfect Union," an exhibit on Barack Obama's 2008 speech on race at the Constitution Center; " and "Seize the Vote," a 4-player game testing voting rights' knowledge.

The Center for History and New Media and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History created this website to model both historical thinking about artifacts as primary sources and possible best practices for sharing museum collections online. With the site, students can curate their own virtual history exhibits, using documents and expert interviews related to six core artifacts from different time periods. The "Guide" section introduces users to how and why artifacts are important to historians. Seven 300- to 600-word essays argue that artifacts tell stories, create connections between people, hold many different meanings, capture moments, and reflect changes. After learning how historians relate to artifacts, users can tour model exhibits in "Objects," focusing on six Smithsonian-held artifacts: Thomas Jefferson's lapdesk, the gold nugget that started the California Gold Rush, a dress that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, an 1898 voting machine, the Woolworth counter where a sit-in took place in 1960, and a short-handled hoe used by farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s.

An "Introduction" for each artifact includes a short introductory video placing it in its historical context and a virtual version of the artifact. Users can zoom in and out on the virtual artifact, rotate it, or click to discover interactive hot spots. Clicking "Explore" in each exhibit provides further information on the object, its place in history, and its history as a museum artifact. Interviews with Smithsonian experts and related primary sources enrich "Explore" sections. "Tour" demonstrates how the interviews and sources in "Explore" can be pulled together into exhibits: either a short 4- to 5-piece "Brief Tour" or a 5- to 13-piece "Extended Tour." "Resources" rounds up annotated links to websites with more information on topics related to each artifact. "Activity" is the heart of the site. Using the more than 220 expert interviews and primary sources from the "Object" model exhibits, students can create their own six-item exhibit. After selecting the objects that reveal the perspective or tell the story they wish to convey and labeling the objects with interpretative text, students can email their finished exhibits to their teacher (or to themselves). For even more information on the six core artifacts, users can listen to experts' recorded answers to questions about the artifacts in "Forums." The 16 recordings run from 13 minutes to an hour. The site may take time to learn to navigate and use, and sorting through the many interviews and primary sources to curate an exhibit can be frustrating (interviews and sources can be displayed by collection, but not searched). However, the site can still provide an introduction to what makes artifacts unique as primary sources, and the skills historians use to interpret artifacts and create museum exhibits.

Created by the nonprofit organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project works to bring resources exploring the “role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history” into the classroom. Inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular A People's History of the United States, the website provides teachers with materials for expanding on these historical narratives.

“Teaching Materials” contains the bulk of the site's content, including more than 100 teaching activities. These can be downloaded in PDF form following free registration, and include essays, articles, interviews, and full lesson plans on topics related to marginalized groups and labor history. Titles range from “Exploring Women's Rights: The 1908 Textile Strike in a 1st-grade Class” to “What the Tour Guide Didn’t Tell Me: Tourism, Colonialism, and Resistance in Hawai'i”.

“Teaching Materials” also contains more than 300 annotations on audio resources, fiction and nonfiction books, films, posters, commercial teaching guides, websites, and Spanish/bilingual resources. Annotations consist of 2–3 sentences describing the resource and its relevance to Zinn's focus and classroom use.

“Teaching Materials” can be browsed by date (either selected on a timeline, or chosen from 16 time periods, ranging from “Colonialism” to “20th Century” ) or searched by one of 29 themes, five reading levels, or by type of material (teaching activity .pdfs, audio, books: fiction, books: nonfiction, films, posters, teaching guides, websites, or Spanish/bilingual).

Useful to teachers wanting to expand on the traditional textbook narratives on marginalized groups and labor history.

These three collections of essays, commissioned from distinguished scholars are designed to deepen content knowledge in American history and offer fresh ideas for teaching. Essays include many links to primary source texts in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library. Divining America: Religion in American History features 36 essays, divided into three subcategories: "The 17th and 18th Centuries," "The 19th Century," and "The 20th Century." Topics range from "Native American Religion in Early America" to "The Christian Right," and include Puritanism, the First and Second Great Awakenings, abolitionism, Islam in the U.S., African American Christianity, American Jewish experience, U.S. Roman Catholicism, and Mormonism. Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History features 17 essays, divided into "Native Americans and the Land," "Wilderness and the American Identity," and "The Use of the Land." These focus on the changing ways in which North Americans have related to the natural world and its resources. Topics include, “The Columbian Exchange,” “The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes,” “Cities and Suburbs,” and “Environmental Justice for All.” Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History addresses topics ranging from the early 1600s through to contemporary times. These 20 essays include, “How to Read a Slave Narrative,” “Segregation,” “The Trickster in African American Literature,” “Jazz in African American Literature,” and “The Civil Rights Movement: 1968-2008.” Essays provide an overview of the topic. “Guiding Discussion” 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.