A project of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, PhilaPlace explores the history of two neighborhoods in Philadelphia—Old Southwark and the Greater Northern Liberties—historically home to immigrants and the working class. Using an interactive map and more than 1,240 primary sources and audio and video clips, visitors to the site may navigate the neighborhoods and learn more about their development from 1875 to the present day.

Visitors may navigate the interactive map using filters found under two tabs to the left of the map: "Places" and "Streets."

Under "Places," click on marked points of interest to bring up photographs or audio or video clips describing the history of the location. These points of interest may be filtered by 14 topics (such as "Food & Foodways," "Education & Schools," and "Health") or by contributor (the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, its partners, or visitors to the site). The map may be set to show the city's streets in 1875, 1895, 1934, 1962, or the present day—note that points of interests from all time periods appear on all maps. Two virtual tours through the points of interest are available, one for Greater Northern Liberties/Lower North and South Philadelphia.

Under "Streets," visitors can view demographics for four streets—S. 4th St., S. 9th St., I-95, and Wallace Street—from 1880-1930. Buildings on each street are color-coded to show land use, the number of residents per building, and the ethnicity and occupation of each building's residents.

Collections allows visitors to search the more than 1,240 primary sources and audio and video clips available on the site. Filter them by topic, neighborhood, type, or contributor.

The site's blog presents mini-features on certain locations, notifications of updates, and information on professional development and other PhilaPlace-related events. Educators provides a timeline for each of the neighborhoods and four suggested lesson plan/activities, while My PhilaPlace lets visitors create free accounts and save favorite materials to them—or create their own up-to-25-stop city tour. The Add a Story feature allows visitors to tag locations on the maps with their own short descriptions or memories (up to 600 words long), and accompany them with an image or audio or video clip.

Attractive, interactive, and accessible, PhilaPlace may appeal to Pennsylvania educators looking for a tool to help students explore urban history.

The 580 maps of more than 80 South Carolina towns and cities in this archive reveal urban landscapes and the locations of businesses, mills, colleges, depots, and other buildings between 1884 and 1923. The collection includes 232 unpublished, hand-drafted maps from the years 1899 to 1937. All maps are displayed with original color coding. Users can zoom in and out of maps and can pan right, left, up, or down to examine details. Every map is accompanied by bibliographic data. The full collection can be browsed or the user can choose to browse just the unpublished maps. The collection can be searched by city, year of publication, and county. The maps provide many details about mills and are particularly useful in revealing spatial relationships and location of railroad lines. There is also a link to the Union List of Sanborn and other fire insurance maps. An extremely useful resource for those researching the business or urban history of South Carolina in the decades around 1900.

Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.

In 1996, eight historians of religion and three advisors embarked on a five-year project to illuminate ways that material culture and economic history can be used in the study of American religion, a discipline traditionally dominated by ideas. The site presents annotated photographs of 39 objects, including an evangelical coffee bar, chewing gum packed with biblical verses, artwork in a family Bible, and a church stick used to awaken sleeping congregants. Thirty-eight documents from the 1850s to the 1960s, range from an 1854 book steward report for the African Methodist Episcopal Church to a chain e-mail from the 1990s. The site also includes 23 essays and interviews by the project's participants on such eclectic subjects as "Material Christianity," religious architecture, how Catholic practice has shaped children's experiences, the role of costume in the Salvation Army, how to practice economic history of religion, and "what makes a Jewish home Jewish." Includes eight issues of the project's newsletter; a bibliography of 22 titles; and links to 18 related sites. This site will be especially valuable to university students interested in evaluating the value of material culture scholarship in religious studies, students of economic history curious about applying their discipline to non-traditional fields of inquiry, and scholars within the field of material culture and the broad discipline of American cultural history.

With a focus on business history and its connections to larger cultural, social, and political trends, the Hagley archive presents digital images on a range of topics, including "industrial processes; commercial landscapes; marketing and advertising; transportation facilities and methods; development of information technology; and, the social and cultural aspects of work and leisure." Pictured are bridges, dams, coalmines, and the testing and manufacturing of gunpowder and explosives, nylon, steel, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes. Also included are images of historic buildings, homes, and gardens in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

There are some images of advertisements, packaging, company brochures, trade catalogs, pamphlets, internal documents, letters, and other ephemera from various industrial enterprises. It includes, for example—under "nylon"—not only shots of machinery, product samples and images of the stages of melting and forming polymers, but also such treasures as ads and publicity shots of women modeling nylon stockings and swimsuits (including "Miss Chemistry" at the 1939 New York World's Fair), and news photos of the riotous early sales of nylon stockings.

Other topics include the early development and use of computers by Univac, IBM, and Remington Rand, aerial photos of the Mid-Atlantic seaboard; automobiles; Lukens Steel Company; ship building; and coal mining.

This site, part of the larger TeacherServe offers an interactive curriculum enrichment service providing teachers with creative lesson plans and access to materials for the secondary school classroom. To help teachers convey the importance of religion in the development of the United States, this site highlights the intersections between American history and religion at key points like the Puritan migration to New England, abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement. The site offers essays on 24 topics grouped into 17th- and 18th- century, 19th- century, and 20th-century categories. Subjects covered include Native American religion in Early America, witchcraft in Salem village, African American religion in the 19th century, the Scopes trial, and the American Jewish experience.

Each of the 2,000-word essays includes background to the topic, tips on guiding student discussion, a bibliography of approximately five related scholarly works, a discussion of historians' debates over the issue, and links to related resources. Teachers can submit questions and comments on teaching about religion in the classroom to the Center and its consulting scholars, and a discussion link posts these questions and answers. The site also offers links to three websites that offer additional advice on teaching about religion in public schools. This is an excellent site for high school history teachers and it also provides a useful framework for college survey courses.

This archive contains the transcribed public papers of Albert and Vera Weisbord, American Communists active from the 1920s to the 1970s. As yet, no personal papers have been transcribed. The site contains a 500-word biographical introduction and seven volumes of Class Struggle, 1931-37, a journal that the Weisbords edited and to which Albert was the main contributor. In addition, visitors may read the preface, introduction, and a review of Albert's book, The Conquest of Power. The bulk of the material contains transcriptions of approximately 75 articles by Albert and/or Vera on topics such as "Moscow's Betrayal of the Cuban Revolution," "Feminism and Family Names," "The Struggle for Negro Emancipation," and "Unique Problems of the Spanish Revolution." Material is indexed by title within subject categories, but visitors cannot perform subject searches. This site will be useful for research on American radicalism.

From 1937 to 1942, members of the Florida Writers Project, the Florida Music Project, and the Joint Center on Folk Arts of the Works Project Administration documented the wide variety of cultures throughout Florida through the folk songs and folk tales of the African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic peoples living in Florida. The American Memory Project at the Library of Congress now offers a selection of the multiformat ethnographic field collection that represents these diverse cultures. The online exhibit includes 376 sound recordings of folk songs such as blues, fishing boat and railroad gang work songs, children's songs, dance music, and religious music. Each recording includes descriptive information on the duration of the sound clip, where the piece was performed and the performers involved, brief (10-15 words) special notes about the piece, ethnic group(s) represented, language(s) in which the piece was performed, instrumentation, and when and where the piece was created.

The collection also includes 24 "life history" interviews of Floridians from specific ethnic backgrounds, 65 images and transcripts of correspondence, two recording logs, and 25 transcriptions of song texts. Two 2000-word essays on Florida folklife and the Works Project Administration in Florida help to contextualize the online exhibit. Also included are a bibliography of over 120 scholarly works, a list of 18 related websites, and a 1000-word guide to the ethnic and language groups of Florida. Visitors can browse this site by performer, audio or manuscript title, and geographic location. For those interested in folk life and culture, Florida history, and the variety of WPA projects during the New Deal, this easily navigable site is a good resource.

This site complements the 16-part PBS television series of the same name. Based on Joy Hakim's award-winning U.S. history textbook series, the site explores the theme of freedom chronologically from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights movement and concluding with the inauguration of George W. Bush. Designed to help teachers find lesson plans or design their own curriculum, the site includes sample activities and historical primers, each based on one of the 16 "Webisodes," such as "Liberty for all?" or "Whose land is this?" Teachers can search for lesson plans by Webisode or by multiple subject matters, from mathematics to physical education. There is also an interactive timeline that links to photographs, paintings, biographies, and quizzes. The site is visually and textually rich, but most valuable for K-12 teachers and students.

This tribute to Bob Hope examines his contributions to American culture and entertainment. The site includes a short (1,000 words with 150 photographs) history of vaudeville in the United States and four essays (1,000 words each) examining vaudeville's legacy. There is a 3,000-word biography of Hope, covering most of his 70-year career, and sections that deal with each of his many careers specifically. His early radio work, his long movie career, and his many television appearances are all documented.

Of particular interest are the 26 Bob Hope caricatures in photograph, cartoon, and sculpture. The Joke File includes six pages (out of a massive collection that exceeds 85,000 pages) of Hope's seasonal material. On the Road: USO Shows documents Hope's commitment to America's armed forces by highlighting his many trips overseas to entertain American troops. Although the essays are useful in explaining the relationship of vaudeville to American culture, the strength of the site is its approximately 250 primary sources (mostly photographs and documents).