Lower East Side Tenement Museum

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Photo, New York, New York, January 23, 2010, flickr4jazz, Flickr
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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.

Jonathan Edwards Online

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Portrait, Jonathan Edwards
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This website will eventually offer the comprehensive writings and publications of American theologian John Edwards, including correspondence, miscellanies, and sermons. Currently, scholarly resources on Edwards's writings are limited to PDF files of the Center's master sermon index, miscellanies index, and indices of Edwards's correspondence. A bibliography lists 183 secondary and published primary resources on Edwards and a chronological bibliography lists 106 key articles and essays about Edwards.

There are also nine essays on Edwards, including a biography, examinations of his legacy and family life, and essays on Edwards as a man of letters, a missionary, a philosopher, a preacher, and a theologian. The website also offers 16 short descriptions of his major works, a chronology of Edwards's life with dates of his major works, and an exhibit on the difficulties of transcribing Edwards's manuscripts. This website is a useful starting point for researching Edwards, with the promise of becoming an important resource for research on his writings.

Florida State Archives Photographic Collection

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Image, Conch Town, WPA, C. Foster, 1939, Florida State Archives Photo Collection
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More than 137,000 photographs of Florida, many focusing on specific localities from the mid-19th century to the present, are available on this website. The collection, including 15 online exhibits, is searchable by subject, photographer, keyword, and date.

Materials include 35 collections on agriculture, the Seminole Indians, state political leaders, Jewish life, family life, postcards, and tourism among other things. Educational units address 17 topics, including the Seminoles, the Civil War in Florida, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, pioneer feminist Roxcy Bolton, the civil rights movement in Florida, and school busing during the 1970s.

"Writing Around Florida" includes ideas to foster appreciation of Florida's heritage. "Highlights of Florida History" presents 46 documents, images, and photographs from Florida's first Spanish period to the present. An interactive timeline presents materials—including audio and video files—on Florida at war, economics and agriculture, geography and the environment, government and politics, and state culture and history.

e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia

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Photo, Deck of playing cards from the S.S. Avalon, Michael Keller, e-WV
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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.

Do History: Martha Ballard's Diary Online

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This interactive case study explores the 18th-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard and the construction of two late 20th-century historical studies based on the diary: historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's PBS film by the same name.

The site provides facsimile and transcribed full-text versions of the 1,400-page diary. An archive offers images of more than 50 documents on such topics as Ballard's life, domestic life, law and justice, finance and commerce, geography and surveying, midwifery and birth, medical information, religion, and Maine history. Also included are five maps, present-day images of Augusta and Hallowell, ME, and a timeline tracing Maine's history, the history of science and medicine, and a history of Ballard and Hallowell. The site offers suggestions on using primary sources to conduct research, including essays on reading 18th-century writing and probate records, searching for deeds, and exploring graveyards. A bibliography offers nearly 150 scholarly works and nearly 50 websites.

Probing the Past

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Logo, Probing the Past
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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.

The Jewish Americans

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women on strike
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This PBS documentary provides many useful resources for teaching the long and influential history of Jewish Americans. At the heart of this video production is the struggle between identity and assimilation. While Jews in America often faced struggles integrating into new communities, their story is common to other immigrant groups and at the same time a "quintessentially American story."

The site is divided into six main sections. Educators will be particularly interested in the historical background offered in Jewish Life in America (which is divided into eleven subsections), the 30 video segments from the documentary, four lesson plans in For Educators, and links to online resources for teaching Jewish American history.

One noteworthy section of the site is Share Your Story. By allowing Jewish American viewers to submit recipes, immigration stories, or family traditions, this site provides an interactive platform that could enhance any classroom. Students can investigate, research, and conduct interviews with family or friends of Jewish heritage and submit their investigations online. Teachers will also find that the video segments, textual information, and online submission tool can work well together to compliment thematic units on immigration, ethnic identity, and moments in history specific to the Jewish experience.

Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson

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Photo, Monticello's West Front with Fish Pond, Thomas Jefferson Foundation
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Designed to promote Monticello as a historical site, this exhibit offers a variety of educational and practical information. Materials allow viewers to explore Jefferson's life at Monticello. Particularly interesting are the Day in the Life of Thomas Jefferson, where visitors can learn about a typical day's activities for the 3rd president, and the Ask Thomas Jefferson features, where schoolchildren may submit questions to Mr. Jefferson. Researchers respond to questions in Jefferson's voice, using his writings. By browsing the Day in the Life section, viewers can investigate 11 activities that Jefferson participated in nearly every day, from writing letters to farming. In addition, links within each activity provide further background on Jefferson's family, his personality, and Monticello.

Visitors may also take a virtual tour of Monticello, "visiting" up to 12 rooms in the mansion. The dimensions of the rooms are provided, as well as architectural information, color and design explanations, and a Quicktime panoramic movie. An image gallery contains 65 images, ranging from portraits of Jefferson to photographs of the mansion and grounds at Monticello to depictions of his inventions. Listen to the audio review:

Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History

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Photo, Frederick Douglass, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right, LoC
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This collection of 20 essays on African American history and literature, commissioned from leading scholars and written for secondary teachers, is part of the larger TeacherServe site. The essays are designed to deepen content knowledge and provide new ideas for teaching. These 3,000-7,000-word essays cover three time periods: 1609-1865, 1865-1917, and 1917 and Beyond.

Essays begin with an overview of the topic. A “Guiding Discussion” section offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay. Each essay includes links to primary source texts in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library.

Essays in "1609-1865" focus on topics related to slavery, including families under the slavery system, slave resistance, types of slave labor, the end of slavery, analyzing slave narratives, and the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Essays also look at African American arts and crafts and African influence on African American culture.

Essays in "1865-1917" focus on topics that fall between the eras of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, including Reconstruction, segregation, trickster figures in African American literature, and issues of class and social division.

Essays in "1917 and Beyond" focus on literature and the Civil Rights Movement, including protest poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz in literature.

Resources for Hispanic Heritage Month

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Photo, IMCOM HQ Hispanic American Heritage Observance, Oct. 13, 2011, Flickr
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Established in 1988, Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the history of Americans with family roots in Spanish-speaking countries. Unlike other heritage months, which begin at the beginning of a month and end at the end, Hispanic American Heritage Month begins on September 15 and ends on October 15. Why? Use this question to kick off your exploration of the month, and deepen it with resources from Teachinghistory.org and elsewhere!

Begin tracing back the rich strands of Hispanic American history with Teachinghistory.org's materials, including a roundup of resources across the Web, a lesson plan on civil rights and agricultural workers in the U.S., and reviews of websites preserving the experiences of Hispanic Americans. Take a quiz that "zooms in" on primary sources, or read what historians have to say about historical U.S.-Mexico relations in Ask a Historian.

Go further afield with materials from across the web. Check out these dedicated Hispanic Heritage Month pages:

  • Smithsonian Education rounds up more than 20 educator resources and Smithsonian Magazine articles.
  • The Library of Congress guides visitors to relevant exhibits, collections, images, and audiovisual materials.
  • The U.S. Army chronicles the service of Hispanic Americans with an interactive timeline and biographical profiles.
  • The White House archives Hispanic Heritage Month presidential proclamations.
  • The National Park System catalogs details on more than 40 historical sites, monuments, and memorials related to Hispanic American history and features nine related Teaching with Historic Places lesson plans.
  • EDSITEment pulls together five lesson plans, 10 featured websites, recommendations for bilingual resources, and a virtual field trip.
  • Publisher Scholastic invites students to explore their own heritage, meet famous present-day and historical Latinos, and more with its interactive "Celebrate Hispanic Heritage" feature.
  • The U.S. Census Bureau displays statistics related to Hispanic American heritage.
  • Biography.com gives you a peek into the lives of Hispanic American artists, political figures, and more.

(So why does Hispanic Heritage Month start on September 15? The day marks the anniversary of the independence of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Once part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, these nations formed the United Provinces of Central America after becoming independent from both Mexico and Spain in 1821.)