Over more than 15 years, Rocky Gap High School of Rocky Gap, VA, has offered students the opportunity to participate in a history and technology project. While working on the project, students conduct oral history interviews, and archive these interviews and related photographs in a database and, in many cases, online.

The main page can be somewhat difficult to navigate. However, the largest portion of content can be found under Stories of the People. This section contains roughly 90 oral history transcripts on the lives of Bland County residents. Topics range from train rides and farm life to working in a World War II aircraft factory and religious practices. Some of the transcripts are also accompanied by photographs of the interviewee throughout his or her life.

Yet other transcripts link to collection pages which bring together related oral histories, as well as narration written by students. In some cases, video and audio versions are available in addition to the text transcripts. Topics include the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), church, death practices, farming, logging, the railroad, school life, tunnel building, and Bland County residents at war.

For more information on the project and its facilities, try the links under "Mountain Home Project."

This website is excellent as inspiration for beginning your own local history projects, as well as a fantastic resource for anyone looking for information on life in rural Virginia.

Note: The site is frequently unavailable for short bursts of time. Try again later if you reach a 404 error page.

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.

This website presents historical sources and teaching materials that address notions of childhood and the experiences of children and youth throughout history and around the world. Primary sources can be found in a database of 200 annotated primary sources, including objects, photographs and paintings, quantitative evidence, and texts, as well as through 50 website reviews covering all regions of the world. More than 20 reviews and more than 70 primary sources relate to North American history.

The website also includes 20 teaching case studies written by experienced educators that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth, as well as 10 teaching modules that provide historical context, strategies for teaching with sets of roughly 10 primary sources, and a lesson plan and document-based question. These teaching resources cover topics ranging from the transatlantic slave trade, to girlhood as portrayed in the novel Little Women, to children and human rights. Eight case studies relate to North American history, as do two teaching modules.

The website also includes a useful introductory essay outlining major themes in the history of childhood and youth and addressing the use of primary sources for understanding this 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.

Allows genealogical searching of a number of indexes—with listings of names numbering in the hundreds of millions—created by the Mormon church to assist their members with family history research. Offers guidance and forms useful for conducting genealogical research in many places in the world and census worksheets for the U.S. covering the years 1790–1920, Canada for 1851–1901, and Ireland for 1901–1911.

Also includes links to hundreds of related sites accessible according to category. A good introduction to family history research.

A companion to the series Frontier House, this site documents the five months that 26 American volunteers spent in a Maine wilderness recreating life in 1628 New England. The site provides short biographies of all 26 participants, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show, and a series of short activities designed to highlight colonial American history. Teachers will find most useful the four lesson plans (for grades five to eight) that discuss the settling of America.

In addition, an online scavenger hunt allows students to learn about day-to-day colonial life (teachers may tape broadcasts and show them in class for 12 months after airing). The site also includes 14 video clips, 12 audio clips, and more than 90 photographs of the cast and village.

Visitors should not miss the Myth-Conceptions quiz, or the language tutorial, where they can test their knowledge of colonial America and compare 17th-century English to 20th-century English.

Visitors will not find document collections or historical maps; the site's primary value is in the anecdotes that reveal little bits of information about 17th-century life in New England.

Images and articles on the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1851, including some pre-famine material on related events. Taken primarily from newspapers in London and Ireland, the site includes 74 images and 16 articles from the Illustrated London News; short reports and articles from the Cork Examiner, September 1846 to December 1847; 17 illustrations and two articles from the Pictorial Times of 1846 and 1847; 30 cartoons and four articles from London's Punch; and the contents of an 1847 pamphlet, Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the Year of the Irish Famine by Lord Dufferin and G. G. Boyle.

Provides a master picture list of 99 illustrations and cartoons from the materials, arranged by depicted subjects such as cabins, landlords and ejections, begging, food riots and attacks, relief, workhouse, funerals, voyage, and life in America. Also presents a list of 44 links to related resources. Although the site lacks contextual material, other than sentence-long biographical data on some of the cartoonists, it offers visitors visual and textual material that was available to contemporary Irish and English readers of popular print forms to make sense of the Famine.