Advertised as "the world's largest collection of gay advertising," this site provides video clips, still photo storyboards, descriptive critiques, and indexing to more than 600 television and print media ad representations of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Users can access ads by year; brand; company; business category; themes; region; agency; target group (gays or mainstream); and portrayals ("what the imagery/narrative conveys about gayness") categorized as vague, neutral, positive, or negative. Although the earliest ad is from 1958, the majority are drawn from the past 10 years. The creator, a business journalist, notes that "the project is also creating a historic document that charts the burlesquing of the gay community, and the move toward more positive and inclusive portrayals." Visitors with an interest in gay history, popular culture, consumer culture, and advertising can do their own charting with the materials provided.

An exhibit of 60 images, mostly photographs, and a 2,500-word essay that presents a social history of deaf community life in the U.S. from the early 19th century to the present. Covers education, the development of American Sign Language, the "silent press," deaf people in the workplace, media portrayals, deaf clubs, activism, and technological developments. Also includes material on a few historical figures such as the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell. Hosted by the National Deaf Life Museum, the website also has links to educational resources and the Through Deaf Eyes documentary film produced by Florentine Films/Hott Productions and WETA, Washington, DC, in association with Gallaudet University. A solid introduction to the history of deaf people in America.

Offers more than 40 multimedia presentations featuring oral history excerpts and photographs that document aspects of life in the Colorado Plateau--encompassing parts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado--during the past half century. Also presents audio files of 10 complete oral histories and transcripts of the interviews ranging from 2,200 to 19,000 words in length. A joint project of eight libraries and museums in the four Colorado Plateau states and Nevada, the site is organized into three sections--People, Places, and Topics--with subheadings that allow visitors to access the audio excerpts, many of which are accompanied by slide shows of photographs. The people interviewed include a Navajo language interpreter, the son of homesteaders, a schoolteacher, a pioneer in commercial river running, and an administrative officer for a town built for dam workers. Topics range from sociocultural concerns, such as growing up, education, families, food, and leisure, to work- and environment-related subjects, including ranching, timber, and tourism. Valuable for those studying the American West and the use of oral history for exhibit presentations.

Adflip is an archive of more than 6,000 print advertisements published from 1940 to the present. The site is privately financed and was created by two individuals who felt that "print advertising captures the essence of society at any given time." Products advertised include everything from dog food to DeSotos. The site may be searched by year, product type, and brand name. Many ads may be sent as electronic post-cards for free. For each ad, the site tells when and in what publication it appeared. A 170-word introduction describes the site. There are 17 search categories, from automotive to travel, and eight themed categories such as comic books and obsolete products.

A top ten collection changes daily and features ads that the site creators find funny. Visitors may also search a collection of ads indexed by publication. This collection includes 65 magazines and comic books, from Archie to Wired. The site does not give information about advertising agencies. This site will be useful as primary source material for research on advertising, consumer culture, and material culture, but note that the pages of this site download very slowly.

Trading posts, small businesses that sold American Indian arts and crafts, were a colorful part of the culture of the American West. When the United Indian Traders Association (UITA), an organization of trading post owners and operators, disbanded in 1997, they directed some of their financial reserves toward this oral history project, capturing the history of these posts through the reminiscences of traders and their families. The 44 interviews offered on this site were conducted from 1998 to 2000 by Karen Underhill and Brad Cole of Northern Arizona University. Each interview is accompanied by a photograph and a brief (approximately 50 words) biography of the interviewee. The site offers edited excerpts, full-text transcriptions, and selected audio clips of each interview. There is no search engine and the interviews are arranged only by name, not by geographical location, so the site is somewhat difficult to navigate. But for those interested in the recent history of the American West, Native Americans, and the intermediary functions of the trading posts, this is a unique source.

In spring term 2001, Yale University celebrated their tercentennial by assembling 15 distinguished professors representing 11 departments to lecture on and discuss "the conditions and prospects of democracy" in America from myriad perspectives. The complete lectures and discussion sessions are now available on this site in text, audio, and video. The series includes a number of lecturers well-known to students of American history, including Nancy F. Cott, Michael Denning, Richard Brodhead, John Lewis Gaddis, and David Gelernter. Many of the lectures relate American democracy to a variety of historical subjects: the market, the family, religion, foreign policy, education, social movements, computers and other technology, and the biomedical revolution. Other topics include the widening income gap between rich and poor, the relation of Plato's Republic to the American Republic, Lincoln and Whitman as representative Americans, and whether citizenship is now dead. The site, which includes reading lists for each lecture, provides a rich collection of texts that will prove stimulating to students of American political, social, and cultural history.

ROHO preserves the history of the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, and the Western United States. It covers a wide range of topics, including politics and government, law and jurisprudence, arts and letters, business and labor, social and community history, University of California history, natural resources and the environment, and science and technology. ROHO has full-text transcripts of more than 270 interviews online (some with audio recordings). Offerings include the "Free Speech Movement Digital Archive," that documents the role of participants in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, in the fall of 1964 as well as its origins and legacy; "Exploring Diversity and Access at the University of California," examining the experiences of African American faculty and senior staff at UC Berkeley with six interviews available and an additional 10 interviews planned; "Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front" project, exploring the wartime experiences of Bay Area residents, with 23 oral history interviews; and "Suffragists," featuring eight interviews with major figures in 20th-century suffragist history.

There are two searchable databases, divided chronologically from 1954-1979 and 1980-1997, of abstracts from the more than 1,250 interviews in the offline collection. The site also contains an essay on "Oral History Tips" and two "One-Minute Guides" to "Conducting an Oral History" and "Oral History Interviewing." A useful resource for researching the cultural or social history of California and the West in the 20th century.

This National Archives and Records Administration site features 196 photographs that document westward migration and the development of America's western frontier. These photographs were drawn from the records of federal bureaus and offices, such as the Bureau of Land Management, Indian Affairs, Weather, Fish and Wildlife Service, Corps of Engineers, and the Forest Service. Featured images, taken between 1861 and 1912, capture special events and everyday life on the frontier, from Native American peoples and villages, to military maneuvers, to laborers and businessmen at work. A 15-25 word caption, the name of the photographer, and date (if available) accompany each photograph. Listings are arranged by subject and chronologically under each subject. An index lists the photographs by state. For those exploring the history of the American West, this is an ideal resource for illustrations.

Focusing on 19th-century American maritime history and westward expansion, this collection of more than 160 documents from the Mystic Seaport Museum and Library provides diverse materials to explore themes such as the California Gold Rush, whaling, maritime business, migration and immigration, women's role in the West, and interactions between European migrants and native inhabitants. This Ameritech Award-winning site includes more than 25 photographs, more than 20 letters, logbooks from ships, published travel narratives, paintings, maps, and nautical charts. Provides four essays published previously in a Mystic Seaport publication, including an 1866 newspaper essay assessing Honolulu as a whaling port by youthful journalist Mark Twain.

The site is searchable by subject, name, title, and keyword, and includes an annotated bibliography of hundreds of documents in the Seaport's collections, and of 65 secondary sources. Valuable for those studying the American West, maritime history, business history, and the history of coastal and island localities.

A collection of 18 essays and 90 photographs on the history of Old West Durham—one of the oldest neighborhoods within Durham, NC—which began as a traveler's rest stop prior to the city's establishment in the 1850s as a railroad town. Traces the neighborhood's numerous incarnations as a hangout for "the shiftless of society" in the mid-19th century to a factory town following the establishment of Erwin Mills in 1892 to the site for Duke University's west campus in the 1920s. A period of rapid decline occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by its present-day renaissance as a neighborhood community.

The site includes seven Works Progress Administration oral histories from 1938, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 words each, of people living in the mill village; seven newspaper articles from 1913 about the growing "suburb"; a 3,400-word essay on the history of the cotton mill and mill village; a 4,000-word reminiscence of a child growing up in the neighborhood during the 1950s and 1960s; and a 550-word essay on "Preservation North Carolina," an organization interested in preserving industrial heritage sites. The Old West Durham Neighborhood Association was formed in 1995 with the credo "Diversity, Harmony, Community." A well-designed local history presentation useful to those studying urban history and labor history.