With full-text versions of seven books and essays in addition to five 19th- and early 20th-century biographies, this website presents the life and works of Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Materials include Common Sense, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, The Crisis Papers, "African Slavery in America," "Agrarian Justice," and "An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex." These texts are reproduced from The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, a 1945 publication edited and annotated by historian Philip S. Foner. The site also includes Foner's section introductions and his "Chronological Table of Thomas Paine's Writings." Unfortunately, the site also includes hundreds of broken links to additional essays and letters by Paine. The biographies presented provide works published from 1819 to 1925. The site also reprints Thomas Edison's 1925 essay, "The Philosophy of Thomas Paine," in which he attempted to reawaken interest in Paine.

The Detroit Publishing Company mass produced photographic images—especially color postcards, prints, and albums—for the American market from the late 1890s to 1924. This collection offers more than 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies and about 300 color photolithographs from this company. It also includes images taken prior to the company's formation by landscape photographer William Henry Jackson, who became the company's president in 1898. Jackson's work documenting western sites influenced the conservation movement. Although many images were taken in eastern locations, other areas of the U.S., the Americas, and Europe are represented. The collection specializes in views of buildings, streets, colleges, universities, natural landmarks, and resorts, as well as copies of paintings. Nearly 300 photographs were taken in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. About 900 Mammoth Plate Photographs include views of Hopi peoples and their crafts and landscapes along several railroad lines in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Naval History and Heritage Command collects, preserves, and presents the history of the U.S. Navy in physical locations throughout the U.S. and online. Teachers will be most interested in "Resources & Research," a rich collection of primary and secondary sources related to naval history, including photographs, paintings, documents, oral histories, historical overviews, chronologies, and bibliographies. Teachers may want to start with "Photograpy," "Web Exhibits," or "Commemorations," some of the richer and more navigable sections. "Photography" features an online library of selected images on subjects including recruiting posters, albums and scrapbooks, women in the U.S. Navy, aircraft, naval insignia, individual ships, and more. "Web Exhibits" gathers together more than 20 curated collections of resources on topics from the Civil War to Japan/U.S. Navy relations; resources vary by exhibit but include documents, photographs, videos, related articles, oral histories, and links to off-site resources. "Commemorations" features collections of resources related to specific events, including the bicentennial of the War of 1812, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the Battle of Midway, and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Teachers may also find unique primary sources in "Art." The Naval Art Gallery offers more than 25 galleries including "Women in Uniform" and "The Invasion of Normandy." Additionally, the "Archives" section provides downloadable Commander Naval Forces Vietnam (COMNAVFORV) monthly summaries from 1966 to 1973 and links to other archives holding material on the U.S. Navy. "Navy Department Library" makes available naval documents from 1775 to the present day (note that the documents are presented chronologically by topic, with no distinction between primary and secondary sources). "Diversity" directs visitors to collections on women, African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans in the U.S. Navy. "Videos" indexes more than 90 video clips, some primary sources and some secondary. "Ships Histories" provides brief histories of specific ships, indexed by name, and "Aviation" provides data on different types of aircraft and aircraft carriers. "Bios" features more than 100 essays with images on naval figures. Teachers will need patience to navigate the site and uncover the primary sources available.

These varied collections document the history of Los Angeles and southern California. "Digital Archives" offer more than 126,000 photographs, maps, manuscripts, texts, and sound recordings in addition to exhibits. Nearly 1,200 images of artifacts from early Chinese American settlements in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara are available, as is the entire run of El Clamor Publico, the city's main Spanish-language newspaper from the 1850s. Photographs document Japanese American relocation during World War II and photographs, documents, and oral history audio files record Korean-American history. The archive also includes Works Projects Administration Land Use survey maps and Auto Club materials. A related exhibit, "Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future", offers collections on additional topics, including discovery and settlement, California missions, electric power, "murders, crimes, and scandals," city neighborhoods, cemeteries, Disneyland, African American gangs, and the Red Car lines.

This annotated collection of more than 30 letters addresses the personal and political costs of war. Letters cover conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Iraq and are divided thematically into five sections: "Enlisting," "Comforts of Home," "Love," "Combat," and "The End of the War." Letters come from well-known military figures, such as Douglas MacArthur and Robert E. Lee, as well as ordinary veterans, such as Peter Kiterage, one of the 5,000 African Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War. The thematic organization allows users to chart changes and continuities over 200 years of American history. Each letter is read aloud so students can listen as well as read. In addition, a "magic lens" feature provides transcriptions over the original handwriting to help students decode the letters.

This collection of oral history interviews centers on men and women who served overseas and on the home front during World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold War. The project was started to learn more about the war from ordinary people. The archive contains 444 full-text interviews, primarily of Rutgers College and Douglass College (formerly New Jersey College for Women) alumni and many of these interviews were conducted by Rutgers undergraduate students. Interviewees were selected to investigate the effects of the G.I. Bill on American society. The easily navigable site provides an alphabetical interview list with the name of each interviewee, date and place of interview, college of affiliation and class year, theater in which the interviewee served, and branch of service, if applicable. The list also provides "Description" codes, including military occupations such as infantry and artillery members, nurses, and civilian occupations.

A memorial to Roland Marchand, the late historian of popular culture and advertising, this website presents a slide library with more than 6,100 images, including more than 2,000 advertisements, drawn from Marchand's collection. The images are organized into more than 40 major categories and close to 200 subcategories.

The site also offers 48 lesson plans designed by Marchand, each with an introduction, an essay assignment, and 10 to 40 primary source documents. The lessons cover a diverse range of controversial topics, including the Antinomian Controversy, the reactions against Chinese immigrants, the Pullman Strike, the Women's Suffrage Movement, and Watergate. The site will be useful for researching popular culture and advertising, as well as numerous other topics in American history, such as women, wars, immigration, labor, and African Americans.

This massive website furnishes several large collections. The Oral History Project presents full transcriptions of more than 475 audio oral histories conducted with U.S. men and women who served in Vietnam. The Virtual Vietnam Archive offers more than 408,000 pages from over 270,000 documents regarding the Vietnam War in addition to a number of video interviews.

The site focuses on military and diplomatic history, but aims to record the experiences of ordinary individuals involved in Vietnam and on the home front. Additional items address Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as Americans and Vietnamese. Secondary and reference resources are also available, including conferences papers, and video versions of a 1996 address by former ambassador William Colby on "Turning Points in the Vietnam War."

This website provides access to facsimiles of 100 declassified documents relating to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Documents include reports from Signal and Communications Intelligence and NSA memos, 20 written by the Director of National Security. For example, the first document from 1960 is entitled, "Indications of Soviet arms shipments to Cuba, weekly COMINT Economic Briefing."

Documents are indexed by date and include brief descriptions. The documents describe Soviet involvement in Cuba and Cuban military activities by year, focusing on 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1969. This site also provides a synopsis of the crisis, emphasizing the Cuban arms buildup, the growing crisis, and the moments of crisis.

More than 2,500 hours of White House recordings by six American presidents between 1940 and 1973 are available on this website. Presidents include Franklin Roosevelt (eight hours), Harry Truman (10 hours), Dwight Eisenhower (four and a half hours), John Kennedy (193 hours), Lyndon Johnson (550 hours), and Richard Nixon (2,019 hours). A substantial introduction to each set of recordings is provided and edited transcriptions of the Kennedy tapes are available. "From the Headlines" relates current events to the recordings. Eight exhibits with short scholarly essays feature such topics as the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Johnson's "War on Poverty," and the Space Race. Additionally, the site presents 16 preselected multimedia clips that include recordings of Kennedy discussing withdrawal from Vietnam, Johnson talking to McNamara about leaks, Johnson discussing women in politics, and Nixon discussing Mark Felt during the Watergate cover-up. The site provides links to more than 40 related articles and links to related presidential libraries, document collections, websites, and articles.