Who is William Steinway, and what makes his diary so noteworthy? From some perspectives, Steinway is a perfectly average person, giving readers a view into daily life in the 1800s. However, he also happened to be a partner in the newly formed (and later famed) family business Steinway and Sons, a name likely familiar to readers who have played the piano. Another point in the favor of the importance of the diary is that its 2,500 pages begin just eight days after the beginning of the Civil War and three days before William's wedding—a time of personal and national change. While William was not a soldier, his younger brother Albert was, giving the diary a perspective on both home and military life in the Civil War. The diary continues until November 8, 1896, within a month of William's death.

The website offers a digitized and fully transcribed version of William's diary. For any page, you can view both the original and the transcribed text. It's also possible to enter any date of your choosing, and go straight to that page. Users can also find a family tree with short biographies of William and Albert Steinway, as well as William's first wife Elizabeth Roos Steinway; more than 50 photos of the family, useful for putting faces to William's story; and Resources such as scholarly articles on the piano industry of the day and lists of abbreviations and German words and phrases found within the diary.

Eventually, users will be able to search the diary by topic as well.

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.

This website is a companion to the one-hour Public Broadcasting System documentary Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland, produced by Chuck Olsen of Twin Cities Public Television. The film and website were inspired by photographer and essayist William Gabler's book of the same title, and depict the first settlements, rise, flourishing, and decline of the farm houses of the midwestern prairie. The Homes on the Prairie section includes a lengthy (roughly 1500-word) narrative about the history of the settlement and rural culture that developed in the midwest, along with descriptions and 15 images of the different kinds of architecture found on the prairie. The Literary Collection category provides 13 links to poems, essays, and excerpts from novels that capture the character of the midwest farm life. Another section offers a virtual tour of a classic "L" shaped farmhouse, from the porch to the kitchen, parlor, and bedrooms. The site also contains a bibliography of five scholarly books on the midwest and rural farm life, links to seven websites on similar topics, and a bibliography of ten essays and photographic essay works about rural midwestern life. Though this site provides no primary documents, it is a good site for gathering general information on the midwest, rural life, and vernacular architecture.

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.

Provides nearly 1,500 images of 280 architecturally significant American buildings from the colonial era to the present, compiled by Professor Jeffery Howe for classroom use. Images are arranged according to period, location, architect, building type, and style. The site offers examples of houses, churches, public buildings, commercial buildings, and skyscrapers. It includes images from three World's Fairs, as well as sections on urban planning and comparative materials. Professor Howe also has digitized images and text from two mid-19th century books on design and ornament. Although image annotations are minimal, in conjunction with other materials, the images in this site will be useful to those studying American architectural history and urban history.

A sample of 13 audio files of radio commercials from the late 1950s through the early 1960s—part of the Radio Advertising Bureau Collection. This is part of the larger collection of 850 discs, containing approximately 70 hours of material, that have been remastered. The Bureau, a national trade organization, was formed in 1950 (as the Broadcast Advertisers Bureau) to promote radio as a medium for advertisers. The samples—available in two formats, .WAV and .AIFF—include ads for toothpaste, cold medicine, soft drinks, gasoline, beer, cigarettes, cookies, automobiles, dog food, deodorant, and pimple cream. Useful for those studying consumer culture and the use of pop music and radio in advertising.

An experimental presentation of 450 items in the Smithsonian Institution's American History collections, many of which are not on public display. Visitors to this virtual tour will find a map divided into regions representing broad subject categories that contain smaller rectangles standing for individual objects. Moving a mouse to a particular square results in the appearance of the name of the object, a thumbnail image, a date projected onto a timeline, and lines emanating out to relevant subject areas. Users can then click to learn more, finding a 100-200 word description, an option to zoom in closer, and often links to further information in other Smithsonian sites. Also searchable by keyword and category. Objects selected by curators "include famous, unusual, and everyday items with interesting stories to tell. They are not intended to be representative of the Museum's entire collection."

Categories reflect the wide range of the Institution's holdings, including clothing, arts/entertainment, business, science/medicine, photography, home, print/communications, transportation, military, computers, and sports. Includes audio and video items. Users can submit ratings for each object that will affect the future relative size of each square. Although innovative in design, the site may be disappointing to those searching for in-depth information about American history and culture; this is history-lite, with bells and whistles given more prominence than context and meaning.

Through a series of maps of the world, continents, and specific countries, users can trace large-scale demographic, economic, and political trends and developments covering the twentieth century. Topics charted on these maps include changes in agricultural workforce, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, literacy, persons with telephones, systems of government, alliances, borders between countries, and political violence, including wars. While examining any one map, click on buttons to find contextual information from additional maps. The site also includes informative timelines. Created by a librarian, the atlas provides a quick and easy way to see comparative change over time on a worldwide basis. Users should be aware, however, that the categorization scheme does not necessarily reflect the views of professional historians.

Designed to document the presence of Belgian immigrants in three Wisconsin counties, this site contains a variety of primary and secondary sources. Legal documents, diaries, letters, photographs, and oral histories are included, totaling some 1,500 resources. The site includes 400 architectural surveys, 54 oral histories (many given in Walloon, a primarily oral French patois spoken by generations of Belgian immigrants to Wisconsin), and approximately 500 pages of Immigration Histories.

The entire collection (with the exception of a few documents that have defied OCR translation) is searchable by keyword and can be browsed. This is a unique collection of primary sources, easily accessed, and usable by students, teachers, or researchers.