In 1863, 97 Orchard Street, a tenement in New York City's Lower East Side, opened its doors to the growing population of recent immigrants to that city, housing more than 7,000 people before it closed in 1935. The museum that now occupies that building has restored six families' apartments with careful attention to historical detail. This website, while primarily intended as a guide for those intending to visit the physical museum, provides several tantalizing glimpses at tenement life, as well as information on historical restoration.

The History section presents 15 photographs and etchings explaining the evolution of bathrooms, light, water, and heat in the building, as well as examples of primary source documents and interviews available in the museum's collections. Additionally, a small exhibit of five photographs reconstructs how the museum's curators interpreted a 1918 apartment in the tenement—showing the use of crime scene photographs to determine how the family would have decorated the walls.

The Play section contains a narrated virtual tour of the museum, and five well-designed interactive experiences on immigration and immigrant life geared towards younger learners. Highlights from these sections are repeated in the Education section, which also includes three lesson plans each for elementary, middle, and high school levels focused on teaching with objects, oral histories, and other primary sources.

Post-Civil-War industrialization and urbanization put new stresses on American law and society. Criminal records reveal the circumstances where social strain boiled over into violence and unrest. Using this website, visitors can search the complete Chicago Police Department Homicide Record Index from 1870 to 1930, detailing more than 11,000 homicides, and read and watch accompanying contextual material that explores tensions between laborers, industry leaders, political ideologies, social reformers, organized crime, and more.

The core of the site is the "Interactive Database." Here, visitors can search cases using keyword, case number, date, circumstances (accident, manslaughter, homicide, number of victims, number of defendants, method of killing, involvement of alcohol), details about the victim and defendant (age, gender, race, occupation), victim/defendant relationship, and legal outcome. Searches return one-line case summaries including the date, names of people involved, case number, a description of the crime, and legal outcome. Clicking on a result brings up details on the particular crime: time, location, type of death/homicide and details of homicide, details on the victim(s) and defendant(s), police involvement, and legal outcome.

Contextualizing primary and secondary sources frame this bare-bones information. A timeline features a summary of one major event and up to five photographs for every year. "Historical Context" currently offers a second timeline highlighting links to up to 17 notable cases for each year and a section on children's lives in the city, with nine newspaper articles on child labor and obituaries for activist Florence Kelley and lawyer Levy Mayer. (Sections on labor and reform movements and people and events did not work at the time of this review.) In "Legal Content," visitors can read short essays on topics related to Chicago criminal and social history, including capital punishment, anti-corruption campaigns, the Chicago Police Department, judges, lawyers, criminology, prostitution, gambling, murder-suicides, and accidents. Each essay links to related cases and onsite and off-site documents. "Legal Content" also hosts 16 downloadable acts and statutes under "The Laws."

"Crimes of the Century" organizes links to related cases under 23 topics, including the 1919 Chicago race riot and the Haymarket Affair. "Publications," the most valuable part of the site for teachers looking for primary sources, archives the full text of 15 primary and secondary documents related to Chicago crime and social change. Here users can download in PDF form modern studies on the death penalty, crime and policing in Chicago, and the Haymarket Affair, or download primary sources such as law codes and crime reports, the Hull House Maps and Papers, Chicago Daily News articles exposing graft and corruption, 19th-century studies of Chicago's homeless, and contemporary commentary on the Haymarket Affair. Finally, visitors can watch 18 interviews with present-day professors, judges, and lawyers in "Videos."

Though difficult to navigate, this site has rich resources to help students and teachers explore the challenges of change at the turn of the century.

Take some time on this guide to all things West Virginia. This website offers a plethora of articles from "Abolitionism" to "John Zontini." To aid your search, you can sort through articles by topical category, alphabetical order, selecting "random article," or running a keyword search for specific interests. Your search will return media as well as text results, nicely sorted into separate categories. Articles are brief, but cross-referenced; and they also include citations and images, when available and appropriate.

The encyclopedia also includes larger sets of information and images referred to as exhibits. Topics include steamboats, John Henry, the Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, the Hatfield-McCoy Feud, coal mining, historic preservation, the Swiss community of Helvetia, the Greenbrier resort, and labor. A similar feature offers a handful of historical West Virginia maps.

Want something more interactive? Try the thematic 10-question quizzes, forums, or interactive maps and timelines.

The 190 works presented on this site—approximately 40,000 written pages and more than 3,000 illustrations—provide eyewitness accounts covering California history from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. Most authors represented are white, educated, male Americans, including reporters detailing Gold Rush incidents and visitors from the 1880s attracted to a highly-publicized romantic vision of California life.

The narratives, in the form of diaries, descriptions, guidebooks, and subsequent reminiscences, portray encounters with those living in California as well as the impact of mining, ranching, and agriculture. Additional topics include urban development, the growth of cities, and California's unique place in American culture. A special presentation recounts early California history, and a discussion of the collection's strengths and weaknesses provides useful context for the first-person accounts.

This small website uses essays and images to explain the life, art, and engineering of the Native American moundbuilders who inhabited the lower Mississippi River region from c. 8,000 BC to c. 1500 AD.

The main feature is the exhibits. Three exhibits, each centered on a short essay, focus on different aspects of the moundbuilders' life and culture. "Life Along the River" also has six captioned artist's renderings of life in the moundbuilders' cities. "The Moundbuilders" features a detailed description of Emerald Mound. And "Traders and Travelers" also has four images of the moundbuilders' art work, with explanatory text.

In addition to these three descriptive exhibits, "Delta Voices" offers 16 selected quotes about the mounds from both historical and contemporary persons. Additionally, there is a timeline and a short "context" section, with a map, that helps to locate the moundbuilders in place and history.

Search is limited to a search of all National Park Service websites. This website is a useful starting point for those interested in the history and culture of the Native American moundbuilders.

These eight databases present more than 176,000 articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states.

Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1880), one of the most popular 19th-century publications, furnished middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion illustrations, and editorials. The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728–1800), a Philadelphia newspaper, is described as the New York Times of the 18th century. The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective includes major articles from the Charleston Mercury, the New York Herald, and the Richmond Enquirer. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes runs from six newspapers published in New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto between 1827 and 1876. American County Histories to 1900 provides 60 volumes covering the local history of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809–1870 has been partially digitized, with 25,000 records available. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819–1870 addresses industrialization in a rural area settled by Quaker farmers.

Wilshire Boulevard runs for 16 miles in Los Angeles, from Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica to Grand Avenue in Downtown. This website offers an interactive journey down the length of this historic street, with more than 100 stops at parks, buildings, and historic landmarks in Westwood/Brentwood, Beverley Hills, Miracle Mile/Carthay Circle, Windsor Square/Hancock Park, Wilshire Center, and the Parks District.

Virtual visitors to Palisades Park in Santa Monica, for example, can see 14 photographs and drawings of the park, spanning from the early 1900s, through the 1940s, and to contemporary photographs, and read a brief description of the park's history. Those interested in the history of architecture will find useful a website feature that allows users to filter all monuments by architect, style, and function. The website also includes a "Memory Book," allowing users to contribute their stories about Wilshire Boulevard and read the stories of others, as they talk about their favorite pizza restaurant in Westwood or their childhood in Beverly Hills in the early 1960s.

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.

The nearly 1,000 maps available on this site document the conflict between Great Britain and America for ownership of the region. They also illustrate the transformation of the physical boundaries of the Pacific region and the efforts of its inhabitants to control the land. The site includes a valuable interactive timeline that presents the maps in historical perspective. The collection contains large-scale geographic maps of the land and sea and small hand-drawn sketches of settlements. The maps are very detailed and most were created in the late-19th- and early-20th-century. Maps are primarily concerned with geography, transportation, climate, population, culture, politics, and tourism and there is a searchable index that is organized according to 21 themes, such as forests, Puget Sound, railroads, Seattle, Washington State University, and Native American reservations.

A drop-down menu allows users to examine and enlarge thumbnail images of each map. Biographical and detailed descriptive text (most between 20 and 500 words) is presented with each image, and the text is searchable by keyword. Created as a resource to help students, teachers and researchers understand the history and development of the state of Washington, this site will appeal to those interested in Washington, historical geography, and the development of cartography.