Digital Vaults

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The National Archives and Records Administration holds more than 10 billion items addressing the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the U.S. This interactive website makes more than 1,200 of those items available, including official documents, personal accounts, images, maps, and ephemera. Browsing is easy from the main page which presents a rotating cast of eight archival items—from an early engraving of the Declaration of Independence, to a top secret document on dropping the atomic bomb, to an image of Navajo code talkers.

More than 550 tags and a keyword search render the items accessible to those interested in specific topics, such as "Abraham Lincoln" (20 items), NASA (19 items), and "Yellowstone National Park" (three items). Each item is accompanied by a brief annotation providing historical context and related tags, further facilitating browsing. All items can be zoomed for highly detailed viewing and rendered printer-friendly for classrooms without computer access.

The website also provides a variety of tools allowing users to collect and manipulate items. "Create" presents the opportunity to make individualized posters and movies out of any item or group of items from the website. After a free login, users can save and email these creations for future use.

Marchand Archive

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A memorial to Roland Marchand, the late historian of popular culture and advertising, this website presents a slide library with more than 6,100 images, including more than 2,000 advertisements, drawn from Marchand's collection. The images are organized into more than 40 major categories and close to 200 subcategories.

The site also offers 48 lesson plans designed by Marchand, each with an introduction, an essay assignment, and 10 to 40 primary source documents. The lessons cover a diverse range of controversial topics, including the Antinomian Controversy, the reactions against Chinese immigrants, the Pullman Strike, the Women's Suffrage Movement, and Watergate. The site will be useful for researching popular culture and advertising, as well as numerous other topics in American history, such as women, wars, immigration, labor, and African Americans.

Tangled Roots

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These more than 200 documents explore cultural connections between the experiences of African Americans and Irish immigrants in America. Materials relate to individual leaders, historical events, economic, political, and social factors, and cultural achievements. A section entitled "Making Connections" offers 15 questions about historical events and people that represent the intertwined histories of Africans and Irish in America.

Other topics include the end of English participation in the slave trade, the emergence of the nativist Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s, and Ku Klux Klan activities against Catholics and blacks after the Civil War. A section on "Acceptance" explores perceptions of individual and group identities and four timelines focus on displacement, oppression, discrimination, and acceptance in America. "Voices" provides a sample of 13 public statements and interviews on ethnicity and race from ordinary modern Americans. The site also provides a bibliography; an essay by writer James McGowan, a black American with an Irish paternal grandfather; and links to related websites.

The Presidents

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All 42 of the nation's completed presidencies are profiled in detail on this website geared towards teaching the history of the American Presidency. In-depth biographies include information on childhood, education, career, elections, family life, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. Many biographies include links to numerous primary sources—speeches, writings, letters, and diplomatic documents—and to lesson plans. As a companion website to the PBS American Experience documentaries, these resources are hooked into a larger "Archives" section available at the top of the screen. Here, users will find thousands of resources, including maps, movies, and QuickTime Virtual Reality, on many topics in American history divided by theme and chronology, such as technology, popular culture, war, and urban and rural environments.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

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Created by two history professors, this site was designed to provide "a resource and a model for teachers of U.S. women's history." It currently offers 45 mini-monographs, each comprised of a background essay and relevant primary source documents, organized around an analytical question concerning a social movement. Projects are organized into five subject categories: peace and international; politics and public life; sexuality, reproduction, and women's health; work and production; and race and gender. The site includes more than 1,050 documents and 400 photographs. Keyword searching, links to more than 400 sites, and more than 24 lesson plans are also provided. The site has expanded to include thousands of new documents starting in 1600 in a joint project with Alexander Street Press. The joint site requires subscription.

Famous Trials

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This exceptional legal history site presents balanced treatments of over 50 prominent court trials. Trials include: Salem witchcraft (1692); Burr conspiracy (1807); Amistad (1839–1840); Dakota conflict (1862); Lincoln conspiracy (1865); Johnson impeachment (1868); and Susan B. Anthony (1873). 20th-century trials include: Bill Haywood (1907); Sacco and Vanzetti (1921); Scopes (1925); Scottsboro Boys (1931–1937); Rosenbergs (1951); Lenny Bruce (1964); "Mississippi Burning" (1967); Chicago Seven (1969–70); My Lai courts martial (1970); LAPD officers (1992); O. J. Simpson (1995); Clinton impeachment (1999); and Moussaoui's 9/11 trial (2006).

Each trial website includes a chronology, maps, and court documents, including transcripts of testimony, media coverage, depositions, and government documents. Most cases also contain images, links to related websites, and a bibliography. Biographies center on five "trial heroes," including trial lawyer Clarence Darrow. "Exploring Constitutional Law" offers 83 important constitutional topics for class discussion.

Digital Scriptorium

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Embracing 12 digitized collections, five exhibits, and six student projects, this website contains a wealth of primary documents. Collections include two websites related to advertising—Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850–1920 and Ad*Access—in addition to a collection of health-related ads from 1911 to 1958 in Medicine and Madison Avenue.

George Percival Scriven: An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899–1901 presents a firsthand account by a U.S. officer of life during the occupation. Civil War Women offers correspondence and a diary relating to three American women of diverse backgrounds. African-American Women presents letters by three slaves and a memoir by the daughter of slaves. The Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters presents 10 revealing letters written in 1873 by Mrs. Bryant to her husband concerning medical and private matters.

Historic American Sheet Music includes more than 3,000 pieces published between 1850 and 1920. Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement offers more than 40 documents from 1969 to 1974. William Gedney Photographs and Writings provides close to 5,000 prints, work prints, and contact sheets from the 1950s to the 1980s. Urban Landscapes present more than 1,000 images depicting urban areas.

Museum of the City of San Francisco

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These 11 exhibits address the history of California and San Francisco. Topics include the Gold Rush of 1849; earthquakes of 1906 and 1989; the history of the city's fire department; construction of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges; and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. These exhibits provide timelines and links to more than 200 primary documents and images, including newspaper articles, diary entries, oral histories, photographs, political cartoons, and engravings. Two exhibits are hyperlinked chronologies pertaining to San Francisco during World War II and the rock music scene in the city from 1965 to 1969.

Documents can be accessed according to subject, with more than 25 documents listed on the Chinese-American community, fairs and expositions, and labor issues. The site also contains more than 150 biographies of prominent San Franciscans.

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library

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This expansive archive of American history and culture features more than nine million items dating from 1490 to the present. Currently this site includes material from 120 collections, some from libraries and archives around the world.

Strengths include the early republic, with documents and papers on the Continental Congress, U.S. Congress, early Virginia religious petitions, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln's papers and Mathew Brady photographs; and exploration and settlement of the West. Collections offer papers of inventors, such as Alexander Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Samuel F. B. Morse, and the Wright Brothers; and composers, such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.

The site also features New Deal-era documentation projects, such as Farm Security Administration photographs, Federal Writers' Project life histories, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the Library's own "Man on the Street" interviews following the Pearl Harbor attack. Entertainment history is amply represented with collections on the American Variety Stage, Federal Theatre Project, early cinema, and early sound recordings. African American history, ethnic history, women's history, folk music, sheet music, maps, and photography also are well documented.

Digitized images from materials not included in specific American Memory sites may be searched using the Library's Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, where users can browse images by topic or search the Library's holdings.