The election of 1896 was one of the most contentious in U.S. history. When Republican William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan on November 3rd, there were no fewer than six candidates on the ballot and the country was in the throes of an economic depression. This website provides close to 100 political cartoons surrounding the election campaigns.

The website acts like a virtual web of knowledge, with linked words in almost every sentence leading to helpful chunks of information on key themes, political parties and their leaders, print culture, and popular culture. Together, this information sheds light not only on the political situation in the 1890s, but also on the social, economic, and cultural contexts of the era. Special sections are devoted to, among many other topics, the bicycle craze, antisemitism, popular amusements, the Supreme Court, and women's suffrage. An extensive bibliography and a section devoted to teaching suggestions are also included.

These 59 sound recordings document speeches by American leaders produced from 1918 to 1920 on the Nation's Forum record label. The speeches—by such prominent public figures as Warren G. Harding, James M. Cox, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Henry Cabot Lodge, John J. Pershing, Will H. Hays, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise—deal for the most part with issues and events related to World War I and the 1920 presidential election. Additional topics include social unrest, Americanism, bolshevism, taxes, and business practices.

Speeches range from one to five minutes in length. A special presentation, "From War to Normalcy," introduces the collection with representative recordings, including Harding's famous pronouncement that Americans need "not nostrums but normalcy." This site includes photographs of speakers and of the actual recording disk labels, as well as text versions of the speeches.

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering roughly 6,300 publications. The archive provides access to every Congressional and Executive document of the first 14 U.S. Congresses, and additional coverage through the 25th Congress, as well as tables, maps, charts, and other illustrations. The collection is particularly strong in military history, with 205 documents about military bases and posts and 134 on military construction. Other documents address topics such as westward expansion, Native American affairs, and issues surrounding slavery. This collection also includes numerous speeches and messages by Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

Users can browse the archive by category: Subjects, Publication Category, Standing-Committee Author, Document Class, and Congress. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site is a valuable resource for researching the government and military in the early United States.

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of documents relevant to early U.S. history, offering full-color facsimile images of approximately 30,000 broadsides and ephemera. Advertisements, campaign literature, poems, juvenile literature, and Civil War envelopes comprise the bulk of the collection, making the archive especially valuable for those interested in early American consumer culture, political campaigns, and literary life. The collection also contains rich information on slavery, Native American relations, and local events—plays, gatherings, and religious events.

Users can browse the archive by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching 18th- and 19th-century North America.

Presenting 325 probate inventories, this website provides a unique window into daily life in Virginia and Maryland between 1740 and 1810. In this time period, county courts appointed appraisers, local men, to visit an estate after its owner died, list what was there, and estimate its value. These listings, called probate records or inventories, can be analyzed to illuminate a family's routines, rituals, and social relations, as well as a region's economy and connection to larger markets. These inventories are a sample from the region at this time, picked to be representative of the furnishings in George Mason's Gunston Hall. They are all digitized, transcribed, and searchable.

For a general overview, the inventories can be browsed by decade and county—including York, Norfolk, Richmond, and Fairfax counties in Virginia. For more detailed information on the role of material culture in colonial life, the site's Interpreting section presents interviews with two scholars who use probate records to discuss topics such as slavery and slave life, credit and debt, and women and property ownership. Three detailed lesson plans, written by Virginia teachers, are also available, providing suggestions for incorporating these rich sources into classroom learning.

This collection features images of dams, hydroelectric power plants, and water supply facilities built in Washington State from the late 1890s to the 1950s. The archive contains 695 items, primarily photographs but also some maps, diagrams, and other documents. A book excerpt on Washington's public water projects from Building Washington: A History of Washington State Public Works (Seattle, WA: Tartu Publications, 1998) by historians Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy provides perspective on the photographs. The collection is notable because "many of these dams, power plants and reservoirs were built in some of Washington's most rugged terrain and had features that represented significant engineering feats of their time." Each image is accompanied by full descriptive and bibliographic data.

The site offers three ways to search the archive of photographs: keyword search, search by collection, or an advanced search option by selected fields and subjects. Or the visitor can browse all the items by selecting "view all items" in the search drop-down menu. This website is a useful resource for those interested in the history of Western hydroelectric dams and other water projects in the first half of the 20th century.

This website is the result of a collaboration among Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), the Springfield Armory, and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). The site provides a narrative of Shays’ Rebellion told through images, summaries, and primary sources—a wealth of materials for classroom teachers.

The Shays’ Rebellion website is designed to be navigated through a series of six historic scenes. Framed on either end by a prologue and epilogue, the scenes present the perspectives of key groups involved in the run-up to rebellion, as well as its aftermath. In “A Bloody Encounter,” for instance, the assault by Shays and his men on the Springfield arsenal is represented in pictures. By rolling a cursor over the image, users can learn more about the scene—the great strength of this approach is that information is contextualized and given greater meaning.

One of the most unique features on the site is that each scene is accompanied by the commentary of eyewitnesses and other figures from the time period. With background knowledge acquired from the scene and brief synopses of events, users are well prepared to understand these commentaries—an excellent use of primary sources.

The site can also be navigated by people, by artifacts and documents, or by themes and essays. Exploring it in any of these ways, however, can be a chaotic experience. The site also includes resources for extension activities like songs and music, a timeline, and a series of historic maps.