According to their site, the National Endowment for the Arts strives toward "supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education."

The most exciting content on the site for educators is definitely the audio & video section. Listen to Ray Bradbury discuss Farenheit 451; interviews and tributes to opera greats Carlisle Floyd, Richard Gaddes, James Levine, and Leontyne Price; videos of jazz masters Joe Wilder, Candido Camero, Quincy Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Tom McIntosh; and Richard Bausch on how to write.

According to the service website, "The USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts hundreds of surveys every year and prepares reports covering virtually every aspect of U.S. agriculture. Production and supplies of food and fiber, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages, farm finances, chemical use, and changes in the demographics of U.S. producers are only a few examples."

Helping students to conceptualize history is a goal (and a difficulty) for many teachers. How can what's past be presented in a manner that feels relevant to students? If you live in a somewhat rural area, NASS's charts and maps may provide a great point of comparison between the local past and the present. Say you are studying cotton production in the south. Why not find information on how much cotton we still produce? If you're from another part of the country, consider seeing how much corn your vicinity harvests today. You can select topics such as specific livestock or crops.

Also, be sure to check out the available multidisciplinary lesson plans. The K-3 option includes a reading on Washington and the first agricultural survey, as well as an activity involving counting, while the 9-12 activities include short excerpts of Washington's words. Subject emphases vary. Don't miss the glossary of terms.

The Supreme Court is an essential body in the teaching of U.S. history and civics. So what does it do, and where did it come from? To begin, the Supreme Court's existence was specified in Article III of the U.S. Constitution. As for its duties, the Supreme Court serves largely to hear appeals from cases which originated at a lower level. However, original cases are heard when they involve ambassadors, public ministers, consuls, and/or when a U.S. state is involved.

The Supreme Court's page may not be the most beautiful website on the block, nor the most technologically up-to-date. However, the navigation is clear; and the site does provide information which could easily be of use to you in the classroom.

Simply click on About the Supreme Court to access a list of the most relevant resources.

Need a quick handout on the Court—current members, origin, jurisdiction, and term, for example? Then A Brief Overview of the Supreme Court is perfect for you. Or maybe, since C-SPAN and other such providers are not permitted to film the Court proceedings, you would like to conjure an image of the courtroom for your students? In that case, try the Visitors' Guide to Oral Argument, which describes the function of the various people in the courtroom and provides a diagram of their general seating arrangement.

Another option is to assign The Court and Constitutional Interpretation, The Court as an Institution, and/or The Court and Its Traditions as short homework or in-class readings. Note that they are not written at a level which will be accessible to early elementary students. That said, you can always read them yourself, and condense the information into a lively presentation for younger students.

Be sure to check out the rest of the list, as well. How much do you know about the history of Supreme Court oath taking?

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services is a subsection of the U.S. Department of Education. OSERS' rather broad mission is to address the difficulties which individuals with disabilities—children and adults— must overcome.

While the page largely lists OSERS' various programs, the section likely to be of the most use to you is the office's publications and products. Several offerings intended for parents may be worth a read for special education teachers and educators in inclusive classrooms. Take a look at "Opening Doors: Technology and Communication Options for Children with Hearing Loss" and "Learning Opportunities for Your Child Through Alternate Assessments".

The piece de resistance of the webpage is the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students with Disabilities. The tool kit offers research and suggestions for assessment, instruction, behavior, and accommodations related to students with disabilities.

In the organization's own words, "The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 as an independent agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation."

The small business association homepage is not going to provide you with lesson plans or anything so directly applicable to the history classroom. However, what it does offer is nothing to scoff at.

Do you teach business history at all during your courses? If so, you might find the site's collection of HTML, text, and PDF files of laws applicable to small business useful in discussing the changes in workplace expectations over time.

If your students find the vocabulary of business daunting, the SBA has developed a handy one-stop resource in the form of a glossary. There's no reason to Wikipedia search confusing acronyms when a reliable .gov site exists to answer your questions.

A final option is to ask your students to write their own business plans based on the SBA's guidelines and sample plans (an external link from the SBA page). The activity may help students to grasp both the difficulties facing small business owners, as well as the personal freedom and expression which has drawn individuals to business ownership throughout time.

Founded in 1853, the United States Secret Service existed solely to prevent the creation of counterfeit money. According to the service website, the organization has currently evolved to handle two purposes—"protection of national and visiting foreign leaders, and criminal investigations."

This site provides very little which is directly applicable to the history classroom. However, the site deserves to be recognized in this listing regardless.

If you're interested in the organization itself, the timeline of Secret Service history is a natural place to start.

The service also offers a short section on monetary history.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a new agency which combined aspects of governmental and private organizations. Over time, the resulting agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA, has researched issues as far-ranging as malaria, reforestation, power, flooding, navigation, and erosion. In their own words, the TVA serves the "valley through energy, environment, and economic development."

Admittedly, the TVA website was not designed for K-12 education. However, as a major initiative of the New Deal, it is an important milestone in U.S. history. For that reason, if you need to teach the New Deal, you may want to read From the New Deal to the a New Century: A Short History of TVA, which includes a link to the original TVA Act. The TVA Heritage archive focuses on more specific snippets of TVA history.

Also worth a look is the TVA kids' site, which includes answers to questions like "Who developed the Cherokee alphabet?" and "In 1930, how many Americans living on farms had electricity?" Resources specifically developed for teachers lean toward the sciences.

According to the USPS website, "The Postal Service’s mission is to provide the nation with reliable, affordable, universal mail service. The basic functions of the Postal Service were established in 39 U.S.C. 101(a): '. . . to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.'"

So, we all use the post office. We all know what basic services it provides. That said, what isn't so apparent is that the Postal Service provides information and tools which may be useful to teachers.

Perhaps the most exciting possibilities can be found via the Postmaster Finder. How can you connect local history to national history? This may just be the answer. Try searching your town and state to find a list of area postmasters, dating back as early as 1639. This can give you insight into older names for your town, as well as providing leads to begin studying national communication by researching local postal history.

From there, you can compare period postal fleets to today's using postal service statistics. How has the nation grown from having one official postal station to over 32,000?

Finally, if you want to brush up on your postal history, the site offers a variety of relatively small sections on key dates; historical statistics; historical photographs; and postal service people, including past female and African American postmasters; and more.

The Voice of America, the United States' first official international radio service, began airing in 1942, during WWII. Since then, the service has provided a global audience with "a consistently reliable and authoritative source of the news," according to the VOA website. Besides news features, VOA also covers cultural, informative, and educational broadcasts; and the service is provided in 45 languages.

If you are interested in U.S. media history, the first place you may want to look is at the VOA organizational history, which is broken down by period, or at the historical highlights timelines.

Maybe you'd like to listen in on some of the archived broadcasts? In actuality, this may be difficult, if your broadcast of interest isn't brand new or at least 12 years old. However, the VOA does provide information on where certain broadcasts can be accessed (the National Archives being key).

The VOA list of programs offers links to many of the organization's programs and radio frequencies, which could be an excellent way to simultaneously teach English as a Second Language and current events, if you yourself are bilingual.

Similarly, you can check out streaming and on demand radio and film webcasts. On the other hand, if you are teaching English as a Second Language, select Learn English, which provides English-language broadcasts specifically designed for English learners.

One of the most unique, and potentially useful, features of the site is a pronunciation guide. Not only does the site write out location, organization, and historical and recent politician's names phonetically, it also provides audio files. So, for example, if you're teaching anything involving China, you can be much more confident discussing Jiangxi, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, or Zhou Enlai in front of your class.

The National Portrait Gallery gathers together artistic depictions of or by ". . . individuals who have left—and are leaving—their mark on our country and our culture," according to the gallery website. If you are looking for art relating to early America or politicians, then the exhibits could prove quite useful. While the temptation is to immediately select the web-only exhibitions, the other sections (current and past) all also have well-developed web components. Examples of exhibits worth a look include "Thomas Paine: The Radical Founding Father," "Presidents in Waiting," and "American Origins, 1600-1900." The museum offers a number of educational resources to accompany their exhibits. These include lesson plans, study guides, and teacher's guides. You can also access short articles on historical figures such as Rosa Parks and Walt Whitman.

If you have something more specific in mind, you can, of course, search the collection. Face-to-Face podcasts offer an in-depth look at artists, major historical figures, and events as interpreted through a particular artwork. Of course, visiting a museum with your class is the best way to introduce them to the stories of famous works of art, so give it some thought if you're in the DC area. The section entitled School Programs offers teacher and student online introductory videos and a list of available on-site student programs (with suggested grade levels), while Teacher Programs covers upcoming professional development opportunities. Think of how frustrating it is to hear stories about friends' co-workers, etc. whom you don't have a face for. If you do nothing else with the collections, consider giving your students the opportunity to visualize the subjects of their studies—the greater the amount of personality apparent in the portraiture, the better. Portraits may just be key to making the past feel real to your students, making the humanity of history readily accessible in their imaginations.