University of California History Digital Archives

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Still under construction, this site is dedicated to the history of the University of California, from its beginning as a land-grant university in 1868 to it current position as a multi-campus institution. It includes a 6,000-word essay on the founding and development of the college, as well as an interview with David Gardner, a former president of the university. The site also features several online exhibits, including The University at the Turn of the Century: 1899-2000. The strength of the site, though, is its collection of primary sources. Included are more than 70 oral histories by former administrators, politicians, students, and faculty, discussing their recollections. The site presents approximately 50 primary documents, including the 1868 act that established the school, and about 12 secondary sources. A detailed bibliography lists more than 100 books about the University of California. Students and teachers, as well as researchers, will find these resources invaluable, especially once when completed.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia

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A web-based reference work, this site provides authoritative and accurate information on people, places, institutions, and events for many aspects of Georgia's life, history, and culture. The encyclopedia offers close to 2,000 articles and 8,000 multimedia files on a range of categories, including art, business, education, politics, history, religion, and sports with specific articles on topics such as architecture: building types (houses, public schools, roadside, and vernacular), military bases, folklife projects, and gymnastics at the University of Georgia.

Within the essays, there are links to related essays and external websites. There are also video and audio clips as well as images and some maps. New material is added regularly and the site also offers basic stats on the state, features and destinations, and galleries.

American Memory Learning Page

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Designed to provide support for elementary, middle, and high school history teachers, this site makes the entire American Memory collection at the Library of Congress available for classroom learning. Using the more than 7 million digital sources available through American Memory's 100 collections, the creators have written and collected 140 lesson plans for teaching American history. Organized chronologically and thematically, the lesson plans are detailed suggestions for classroom activities. Each has a recommended age group and uses primary sources collected by students or teachers from American Memory.

Especially useful are the included guides on using primary sources, using American Memory resources, and using digital or Internet sources in the classroom. A "Professional Development" section offers online workshops and tutorials to improve teachers' digital literacy. An excellent resource for the classroom, this site would be useful to both student and teacher.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

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In the past decade new media and new technologies have begun to transform even the ancient discipline of history. CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web challenge historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) was established in the fall of 1994 to contribute to and reflect upon this transformation and challenge. The Center produces historical works in new media, tests the effectiveness of these products in the classroom, and reflects critically on the promises and pitfalls of new media in historical practice. The Center's resources are designed to benefit professional historians, high school teachers, and students of history.

Includes links to more than 1,000 history departments around the world; and a wide variety of teaching, scholarly, and exhibition resources—online databases, informative sites, and software. For example, Declaration: Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation provides translations of the American Declaration of Independence into French, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, along with commentaries on the practice and problems of translating documents.

With the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York (ASHP/CML), CHNM produces History Matters, a resource site for teachers and students of American history.

Investigating the Vietnam War

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This site was designed to help students research projects about the Vietnam War. It is one of the 20 sections on Spartacus Educational, an encyclopedia of English and U.S. History created by John Simkin, a history teacher. The Vietnam site links to more than 100 sites, including timelines, personal accounts, statistics, visual images, and biographies of figures such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Ho Chi Minh. A smaller, annotated list links to 22 recommended sites.

The site provides students with approximately one hundred 1000 word biographies and email addresses of 11 people willing to be interviewed about their involvement in the war.

The site currently offers two collections of study questions, one produced at the University of California, Berkeley, and one produced by Simkin. Two professional historians host a discussion about the history of the war and help students explore the topic.

The site is slightly difficult to use; however, it is still an excellent resource for understanding the connections between personal experience and public narratives of war.

Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research

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This gateway website was created by English professor Alan Liu. It contains over 70 pages of links to humanities-related resources on the internet and provides a guide to online resources in 26 subject categories, including anthropology, legal studies, history, women and gender, and minority studies.

Each link is subdivided. For example, the Minority Studies link is divided into 11 subcategories, including African American, Chicano Latino Hispanic, and Native American history. The History category is subdivided into 19 sections, such as Family History, Military History, and national and regional categories like North America, with subheadings for Canada and United States. The United States history subheading contains over 500 links to primary documents from all periods of American history.

This site contains both primary and secondary resources, and there is a History Teaching Resources link that provides resources for teachers of World History, syllabi for women and gender-related courses, and a guide to using historical places as teaching tools. The site is easy to navigate and contains a keyword search engine.

Scout Report Archives

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This extensive gateway offers a full-text search of almost 12,000 annotated websites. More than 6,500 are searchable by field (e.g., title, location, resource type) or can be browsed by Library of Congress subject headings or classifications. There are only about 150 records under the U.S. History heading, ranging from speeches and archives to gateways and resources.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the project was designed to "assist in the advancement of resource discovery on the Internet" and to "provide timely information to the education community about valuable Internet resources." Sites are selected, researched, and annotated by librarians, educators, and "content specialists" and the summaries are thorough and concise.

The site is updated weekly.

The Digital Classroom

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A series of activities, primary documents, lesson plans, links, and worksheets designed to encourage "teachers of students at all levels to use archival documents in the classroom."

Includes tasks to help students understand how to use National Archives materials; 20 thematically-oriented teaching activities covering the period from the Constitutional Convention to Watergate; detailed information about National History Day, an annual educational program and competition; and 35 lessons and activities organized around constitutional issues ranging from well-known patent cases to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Many of the activities correlate to specific sections of the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Government. Also contains a handful of links and material about books, workshops, and summer institutes for teachers.

A well-organized introduction to the practice of historical research.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine

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An indispensable resource for teachers and scholars in a wide variety of fields, but especially for historians. H-Net—an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers—contains sections on H-Net Reviews, which publishes and disseminates reviews of books, films, museums, software, sound recordings, and websites; Discussion Networks, a gateway to more than 130 academic discussion networks administered by H-Net via email; "H-Net Papers on Teaching and Technology," presenting 10 discussion panels on multimedia teaching; academic announcements of professional organizations, conference programs, fellowships, and prizes; employment listings; and additional websites from various H-Net special projects.

U.S. Census Bureau

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The United States Census Bureau's mission is to collect and provide data on the economy and people of the United States.

The bureau's website is definitely worth an educator's time. Several sections are designed specifically for students of different ages, and the overall navigation is relatively simple and effective.

To start, perhaps you need current statistics to compare to historical data? In that case, the best recommendation would be QuickFacts, which offers data on the population of the states, individual counties, and all towns and cities with more than 25,000 inhabitants. State Facts offers similar data for states, presented in a more colorful, engaging, child-friendly manner. More detailed data can be found by choosing your area of interest from the navigation bar on the left of the American FactFinder page.

The bureau also offers a teacher and children's page. Highlights include lesson plans; warm-up activities; facts pre-selected for holidays and observances; and maps depicting city growth and distribution between 1790 and 2000.

A page for younger children provides counting, coloring, word, trivia, and memory games. Be aware that the site has a rather peppy little song clip, which may delight students or annoy them, depending on their ages and personalities.

Finally, if you're having a difficult time convincing individual teenage students that formal education is worthwhile, money is always a fantastic incentive. Consider showing them the financial payoffs of advanced education. The data also covers the earning differences among ethnicities in the U.S.