Created by the Library of Virginia as part of its Virginia Memory project, this website lets visitors explore the events leading up to and immediately following Virginia's secession from the Union on April 17, 1861. Short essays and more than 200 primary sources, including newspaper articles, speeches, letters, prints and drawings, official documents, maps, and other materials, present the story from a variety of perspectives, including those of women, African Americans, and people both pro- and anti-secession.

The website is divided into six different sections, each providing a different way of approaching the content. “Virginians Decide” divides Virginian history from the beginning of 1860 to July 1861 into 12 chronological sections, covering events including the 1860 presidential election, the meeting of the Virginia Convention of 1861, the formation of West Virginia, and the entrance of Virginia into the Civil War. Each section features a 300–500-word essay introducing the topic, accompanied by 5–45 related primary sources, links to the biographies of related historical figures, and 1–3 more short essays looking at aspects of the topic in greater detail. “Explore” lets visitors search all of the site's primary sources by 11 themes (Business and Economics, Convention of 1861, Elections and Politics, Journalism, Making West Virginia, Military, Restored and Loyal Government, Secessionism, Slavery, Unionism, Women) and seven geographical regions.

Visitors can get to know more about the people in the sources in “People.” Forty 400–2,500-word biographies give overviews of the lives of journalists, members of the Convention of 1850–1851 and of 1861, members of the Wheeling Convention, politicians, ministers, escaped slaves, free black businessmen, writers, army officers, slave traders, and others. Each biography includes related primary sources and links to related biographies. “Timeline” lets visitors browse sources arranged on an interactive timeline covering 1849 to 1862, and “For Educators” includes four downloadable lesson plans (on John Brown and the Fugitive Slave Law).

Of special interest to educators is “Callie's Mailbag.” This section gathers together 22 letters sent to a young educated Virginian woman, daughter of a secession-sympathetic Campbell County family. Callie Anthony was in her early 20s when she received these letters, which date from Dec. 1859 to Jul. 1861 and come from relatives and friends, expressing a wide range of pro- and anti-secession views.

Scanned documents and images can be downloaded in high resolution, and transcripts of written and printed documents are also downloadable. A valuable site for anyone teaching Virginian Civil War history, or wanting to give students a closer look at tensions in a seceding state.

A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.

"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.

Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.

Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."

"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.

An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.

The Presidential Timeline curates and presents primary sources drawn from twelve Presidential Libraries and Museums, institutions housing and presenting archival materials for the presidents from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. Under "Interactive Timeline," you can choose any of the 12 presidents—Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or William Jefferson Clinton—and explore his life.

Timelines consist of at least two sections: "Early Life and Career" and "Presidency." All timelines except Roosevelt's, Kennedy's, and Clinton's also include a "Post-Presidency" section. Marks on the timeline indicate events of interest in the president's life and career; click on a mark to read a brief summary of the event, and to view primary sources (a + sign in the mark indicates primary sources are available).

Browse "Exhibits," also under "Interactive Timeline," for more than 30 collections of short essays, accompanied by 2–6 primary sources per essay, covering major events and topics related to the presidents' lives and careers. Topics covered stretch from "The Stock Market Crash, October 1929" to "William J. Clinton and the Supreme Court, 1993-2001."

Try the "Gallery" to search more than 1,500 primary sources (including artifacts, maps and charts, video, photographs, sounds recordings, and documents) by keyword, library of origin, date, or source type.

The "Educators" section includes 14 ready-to-go activities, on topics ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Iran Hostage Crisis to Bill Clinton's visit to Little Rock Central High School. Students and teachers can view pre-selected primary sources online in each activity, with suggested rubrics, applicable standards, and links to related sources also included. "Resources" links out to 16 websites recommended for history and primary sources, education, and technology, while "Multimedia" rounds up more than 50 audio and video primary source clips for download.

If you can't access the interactive Flash version of the timeline, try the HTML "Text Version" that includes the same primary sources.

Established by Ronald Reagan, the Reagan Foundation preserves Presidential history and is "dedicated to the promotion of individual liberty, economic opportunity, global democracy, and national pride." Its online presence provides both primary and secondary sources on the life and presidency of Reagan.

Visitors can follow a timeline of Reagan's life in Life and Times, and read five short essays (800–1,000 words) on his domestic, foreign, and economic polices, Mikhail Gorbachev, and "Reagan the Man" in The Presidency. Search or browse Reagan's speeches, with both transcripts and video recordings and search or browse quotes drawn from his speaking in Reagan Quotes and Speeches. The entries of his White House Diary from 1981–1989 may also be browsed, and a separate subsection on Nancy Reagan provides a timeline of her life and brief essays on her relationship with Ronald Reagan and her political causes.

The Reagan Foundation's Archives make only a fraction of their holdings available online. However, visitors can access fast facts on Reagan and his presidency; browse a selection of photos of the President and the First Lady, organized by topic; or search or browse (by month) the Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, which includes statements, speeches, and papers released by the Office of the Press from 1981–1989.

The Archives' For Educators section includes several document-based lesson plans, as well as curriculum based on current museum exhibits.

Useful for educators looking for both introductory material to Reagan and his presidency and more specific primary sources.

On November 10, 1898, Wilmington, NC, experienced what has come to be known as the only coup d'etat in United States history, when white supremacist members of the Democratic Party overthrew the municipal government and killed anywhere between six and 100 African Americans in the city, which at that time had a large, thriving African American population supported by the biracial Republican Party.

This website narrates the history of this event, from the rising racial tensions surrounding the passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments and court disputes over miscegenation and interracial marriage, through the contentious election politics of 1898 that pitted the Democratic Party, supported by white supremacists, against the Republican and Populist Parties that represented African American interests at the local level, and the riot on November 10, through the legacy of the riot in the months and years to come, including the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws.

Each section is illustrated with links to primary sources, including political cartoons, newspaper clippings, laws, court cases, and photographs of prominent Wilmington African Americans.

The website also includes the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Report published in 2006 by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources' Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which includes maps, photographs, and other primary source materials, and a link to an interactive map allowing visitors to visualize the events of November 10, 1898.

This massive archive contains more than 84.5 million documents, more than 26 million of which are fully keyword searchable, from Washington State and local agencies. These documents include contracts, birth, marriage, military, naturalization, death, cemetery, and census records, land records and surveys, oaths of office, maps, photographs, power of attorney records, and date from the late 19th century to the present.

A detailed list of collections is available through the Collections section. Here, users will find detailed information on all record collections, including dates and counties available, and options to search by county or within sub-collections.

The casual user may want to begin with several browsable featured collections, which contain photographs from the Spokane city planning department, audio recordings of the Washington House of Representatives Committee Meetings, and 200 photographs of daily life in the Big Bend region of the Columbia Basin.

Useful for teachers and historical researchers interested in many aspects of life in the West, and those interested in genealogy with connections to Washington State.

The largest public archive of Ulysses S. Grant correspondence to date, the collection includes letters, research notes, artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia. Topics cover Grant's childhood, military career, and experiences in the Civil War through his presidency and post-White House years.

The bulk of the collection is made up of 31 full-text searchable, digitized volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John Y. Simon, these volumes comprise thousands of letters spanning from 1837, just before Grant left for the Military Academy at West Point, to his death in 1885. The volumes also contain photographs, a chronology of the correspondence, and annotations.

In addition to the extensive Papers, the collection provides a sampling of digitized material from the U.S. Grant Association, including 14 multi-page compilations and 11 political cartoons from sources such as Harper's Weekly and Puck. Items include detailed, linked metadata to assist in tracking source provenance and connecting to related sources. Additionally, all items are keyword searchable and can be browsed by format, date, or title.

While many are familiar with the 1957 Little Rock High School integration crisis, far fewer students of U.S. civil rights history may be aware of the longer history of that struggle in Arkansas. This website includes more than 460 documents and images, including cartoons, court decisions, photographs, newspaper articles, letters, and essays related to that history. For example, an essay on the meaning of relocation written by a high school student at Arkansas's Jerome Relocation Center in 1943 brings a more personal perspective to the story of internment, as the student describes the ways in which members of her community have struggled between the "fighting spirit" and the "giving up spirit." Users new to civil rights history in Arkansas may want to begin with the extensive timeline that describes events from the arrival of slaves in Arkansas in the 1720s to a 2006 State Supreme Court ruling that struck down a ban on gays serving as foster parents. The website also includes 10 lesson plans geared for middle school students that make use of the website's resources—such as a speech given by Governor Oral Fabus in 1958. An extensive bibliography of secondary sources related to many aspects of civil rights, including African American, gay and lesbian, and women's issues, Japanese relocation, religious intolerance, political rights, and anti-civil liberties groups and issues, is also available.

[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This vast archive includes many documents and reports produced by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and published between 1817 and 1980, for a total of more than 355,000 items. These items include 48,000 maps, 9,000 illustrations, thousands of reports, and numerous records of committee hearings and floor proceedings. All items are full-text searchable and can be browsed by subject, such as education, economics, food and agriculture, health, Indian affairs, armed forces and conflicts, environment and natural resources, and social issues. Within each of these broad categories, there are hundreds of subject headings, such as "animal welfare" (83 items), "alien labor" (306 items), and "ordnance testing" (353 items). The "Indian Affairs" category, for example, presents thousands of items on agencies and organizations relating to Indian affairs, Indian reservations, treaties, names of Indian tribes, as well as documents relating to hundreds of laws and supreme court cases. There is also a bill number search, an alphabetical list of names of all acts of Congress, and a listing of all documents by U.S. Congress session. All documents can be downloaded in PDF format. In addition, a separate browse feature entitled "Serial Set Maps" facilitates access to thousands of maps from counties and cities across the country. Many of these date to the Civil War-era or later and include images of forts and depictions of field operations. Readex plans to expand coverage through 1994.

The Platte River begins in the Rocky Mountains and flows the length of central Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri River to the east. This website provides 40 diverse documents about the history, geology, and hydrology of the Platte River, ranging in date from an 1843 report by the U.S. Secretary of War entitled "An Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains," to a 302-page report published in 1993 by the Nebraska Geological Survey entitled, "Flat Water: A History of Nebraska and Its Water." The majority of documents date to the 1970s, many of which were published by government agencies such as the Missouri River Basin Commission or the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, detailing investigations into ground water usage and water resources management. There are also several documents on legal issues surrounding water rights and outdoor recreation. These materials are accompanied by 13 links to websites offering information about water resources, including the University of Nebraska's Water Center and Water Sciences Laboratory, as well as the Missouri River Basin Project, created to plan for the conservation and use of Missouri River water resources. Especially useful for those interested in the history of development projects surrounding water resources.