This educational resource complements an eight-part PBS documentary series by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, The West. The site is organized into several sections: a guided tour of the West, an interactive timeline to 1917, a hypertext map which includes migration and commerce routes, games and puzzles, and, most importantly, archival materials collected during the making of the series.

Primary sources, organized in chronological order, include memoirs, letters, government reports, and photographs. Visitors should not expect to encounter new perspectives on the American West offered by such historians as Patricia Limerick or William Cronon, or in-depth discussion of such important historiographical issues as gender or the environment. Political and military history, and to a lesser extent social and ethnic history of the West, however, are well represented in this account.

This site, maintained by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell University Law School, is a database containing synopses of cases sent to the United States Supreme Court from 1990 to the present. The site is also linked to more than 600 of the Supreme Court's most historically important decisions, from Marbury v. Madison (1803) to Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). Four "Focused Collections" of cases deal with the Amistad case of 1998 in which movie director Stephen Spielberg was accused of plagiarizing portions of his movie script; 13 of the most important administrative law cases from 1947 to 1984; seven copyright law decisions from 1952 to 1994; and 12 patent law decisions from 1950 to 1995. The database is searchable by the names of the involved parties, the dates on which the case came before the Supreme Court, or the docket number. There is a link to general information about the court, including a Supreme Court case calendar, schedule of oral arguments, a biography and decision list for each current justice, a text of the rules of the Supreme Court, information about the Court's authority and jurisdiction, and a glossary of terms encountered in the Court's written opinions. The site also contains ideas for using the website for teaching, but these ideas, and the site itself, are geared more toward law students, and perhaps undergraduate upper-division legal history classes, than college survey or high school teaching. The site is somewhat difficult to understand and, despite the keyword searchable database, a bit confusing to navigate. Nevertheless, it is a good site for advanced research on Supreme Court cases.

Published annually by the State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States is the official record of major declassified U.S. foreign policy decisions and diplomatic activity, with material culled from Presidential libraries--including transcripts of tape recordings--and executive departments and agencies. Digitized material does not reflect the full range of published volumes. For the Truman Administration, the site provides "1945-50, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment." Three volumes are available for the Eisenhower years, on American republics, Guatemala, and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Cyprus. The Kennedy Administration is represented by 25 volumes that cover, among other areas, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin crisis, and exchanges with Premier Khrushchev. A complete set of 34 volumes is available on the Johnson Administration, and 19 volumes currently are furnished from the Nixon Administration. Fifty-four volumes will eventually be available on the Nixon and Ford administrations. Useful volume summaries provide historical context. FRUS volumes for 1900-1918 (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/FRUS/) are described in a separate entry.

Published annually by the State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) is the official record of major declassified U.S. foreign policy decisions and diplomatic activity. Material, including transcripts of tape recordings, comes from Presidential libraries and executive departments and agencies. Digitized material does not reflect the full range of the published volumes. Documents included have been selected for their ability to illuminate "policy formulation and major aspects and repercussions of its execution."

The first website covers the years from 1861 to 1960. Each volume of more than 500 pages contains an annual message from the President, a list of papers with subjects of correspondence, circulars on subjects such as sanitation and conservation, and chapters dedicated to individual nations. Decisions involve a wide range of topics, including international arbitration and the protection of migratory birds. Visitors may search volumes individually or the whole set by keyword, subject, and date.

The second website offers materials from 1945–1972. Materials come from the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Additional volumes will be added on the Nixon and Ford administrations.

These 181 firsthand accounts of North American and Canadian exploration range from Viking stories such as The Saga of Eric the Red from circa 1,000 CE to journal entries written in the early 19th century on a trapping expedition in the Southwest. Documents include the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Materials include rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives.

Users can browse the full archive or by expedition, settlement, geographic region, and U.S. state or Canadian province. Each document is individually searchable and accompanied by a short background essay and a reference map. There are also 150 images available, including woodcuts, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Highlights follows the collection chronologically and connects moments in American history with eyewitness accounts.

Provides links to approximately 390 documents, most of which are related to the nation's political, diplomatic, military, and legal history. Arranged chronologically, the site begins with excerpts of Christopher Columbus' journal of 1492 and ends, at present, with President George W. Bush's May 1, 2003 address announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq [update: documents reach from around 800 to 2007]. Includes speeches, statutes, treaties, court decisions, memoirs, diaries, letters, published books, and even a few songs. The site, created by Lynn Nelson, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Kansas, is valuable especially for high school and college students who need easy access to many of the canonical documents in American history.

This archival site makes available public papers and government investigative and research reports concerning the history of transportation in the U.S. It contains Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Department of Transportation railroad accident investigation reports from 1911 to 1994, with more than 4,000 reports, as well as aircraft accident reports from 1934 to 1965, with more than 790 reports. "Turner, Fairbank, and MacDonald" papers contains more than 540 public papers of Thomas H. MacDonald, H.S. Fairbank, and F.C. Turner of the Bureau of Public Roads and later the Federal Highway Administration. These include reports, speeches, development plans, and memoranda. Fairbank's papers cover the period 1920 to 1954, MacDonald's from 1919 to 1952, and Turner's from 1947 to 1971. Other documents include civil aeronautics manuals; Federal Aviation Administration research reports; historical Department of Transportation orders; U.S. Coast Guard navigation and inspection circulars from the 1960s to the present; and reports from the 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1934 National Conferences on Street and Highway Safety. Each collection of materials can be searched individually.

Texts of about 300 international multilateral treaties, agreements, and conventions are available on this website, from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to the International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides (November 2002). Originally designed to provide environmental agreements, this website now offers additional agreements, including drafts of many documents.

Materials are arranged in 10 categories: atmosphere and space; flora and fauna, biodiversity; cultural protection; diplomatic relations; general; human rights; marine and coastal; other environmental; trade and commercial relations; and rules of warfare and arms control. Most of the texts date from the post-World War II period to the present. Listings are also arranged in chronological order and users may search by keyword. There are links to approximately 120 additional sources on treaties and conventions.

Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska tackles the issue of urban development through the lens of a nationally-followed murder case.

A document archive provides a rich variety of related primary sources—39 legal documents, 225 newspaper articles, 39 newspaper illustrations, 129 photographs, and 42 postcards. Documents range from items directly related to the Sheedy murder trial to sources depicting parts of the city or describing Lincoln culture and society.

One practice worth applauding on this site is it's loyalty to the concept of scaffolding. The first page offers links to vocabulary, an extensive list of Lincoln personages, and a similarly detailed timeline.

Selecting "Explore the City" brings up an introductory essay on Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1890s, as well as an interactive map. The map shows many buildings in red or yellow. Yellow buildings offer period images of the structure, as well as a description of its purpose. Red buildings only have the explanation. The most fascinating feature of the map is that it allows you to select a subsection of the city, such as "demimonde," "physician," "boosters," or "transportation." Each of these options alters the map so that only buildings within that particular subcategory are shown in red or yellow. This lets you see how food distribution and transportation, for example, are grouped in different parts of the city. Each subcategory also has an accompanying essay offering more on the social clime of 1890s Lincoln, Nebraska.

"Spatial Narratives" offers a series of texts on the location and nature of various city subcultures—practitioners of law, boosters, men, African Americans, women, the working class, and university students. Obviously, these subcultures overlapped both in body and in spatial terms within the city.

At this point, one might wonder where the Sheedy case comes into the picture. The third major site section "Interpretation and Narrative" introduces the murder. The narrative includes links to relevant newspaper articles.

Taken as a whole, the site is likely not particularly useful in the K-12 classroom. However, when used in pieces, it can be seen as an example of the ways in which cities develop, racial and moral tensions of the 1890s, or media "spin" of the period versus that of today.

This archive collects U.S. official documents concerning the national stance toward terrorism. Documents are sorted into several "volumes," which cover topics such as policy, the last war in Afghanistan, Nixon and the end of biowarfare programs, the reign of King Zahir (1970-1973), the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax controversy, the U.S. Special Force's search for bin Laden, U.S.-Taliban policy, and the air-ground transcripts of the planes lost during the 9/11 crisis.

Expect to find reports, memorandum, instructions, statements, transcripts, minutes, and more. The site and its content can be fairly dense, so it may be best to use the site to find one or two documents which are suitable for your classroom rather than having students explore it on their own.