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.

Created by the National Park Service and associated with Gettysburg National Military Park, this exhibit recreates Union and Confederate camp life. Short 200-300-word essays in two sections, "Living in Camp" and "Existing Day to Day," describe how camp life differed for officers and enlisted men, what daily routines were like, and what personal effects soldiers might carry. Seven subsections make up a third, larger section, "Battling Boredom," on ways soldiers passed time in camp, including "Playing Games," "Writing," "Drinking & Smoking," "Taking Pictures," "Whittling," "Making Music," and "Praying."

Sound sparse? The explanatory text isn't the strong point of this site—it's the 90 annotated photographs of artifacts from Civil War camp life, including board games, uniforms, musical instruments, prayerbooks, cooking tools, and more. Visitors can either explore the three main sections of the site and click on the artifacts as they read the related essays, or click on "All Image Gallery" to see all 90 primary sources gathered on one page.

An easy-to-navigate bare-bones introduction to the hurry-up-and-wait side of war, the exhibit could draw students in with its personal, everyday artifacts.

DocsTeach, a National Archives and Records Administration project, recognizes the need to bring primary sources into your classroom. To assist in the effort, NARA has pulled together thousands of primary sources, as well as a selection of pre-made activities and tools for building your own primary-source-centric activities.

Documents offers exactly what it sounds like it would—primary sources. The sources are divided into chronological categories—Revolution and the New Nation, Expansion and Reform, Civil War and Reconstruction, Development of the Industrial United States, Emergence of Modern America, Great Depression and World War II, Postwar United States, and Contemporary United States. Results can then be narrowed further by selecting audio/visual, charts/graphics/data, image, map, or written document. If you prefer, you can use a keyword search. All search results are shown with thumbnails to give you a small preview of the sources for your consideration.

Activities provides pre-made classroom activities. These require access to a computer, and are based on the same tools which the site provides for making your own activities. You can also sort them by historical thinking skill—chronological thinking, comprehension, analysis and interpretation, research capabilities, and issues-analysis and decision-making. Registering gives you access to a much larger collection, many of which are created by other educators. There is no registration cost.

If you're registered, consider making your own activity for use by yourself and others. There are tools which help students to create sequences, participate in analytical discussion, connect documents, geographically map documents, use documents to gain an understanding of the bigger picture, weigh evidence, and examine source context.

Take a moment to peruse the Teacher Resources as well. Here, you can find information on national history standards, using DocsTeach activities in the classroom, Bloom's taxonomy, and the National Council of Social Studies.

Read our Digital Classroom article on DocsTeach for more detailed information on using the site.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has digitized thousands of formerly secret documents declassified to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Keyword search capabilities are provided for the complete site. In addition, there are eight collections designated as "frequently requested records" that total nearly 8,000 documents. These collections cover a number of Cold War topics: CIA involvement in the 1954 coup in Guatemala; convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; the 1961 Bay of Pigs affair; and two well-known espionage incidents.

Additional topics include POW MIAs in Vietnam, human rights abuses in Latin America, and UFOs. A disclaimer notes that some material cannot be disclosed due to national security laws, and released pages often have material deleted or blacked out. Still, the material offered is voluminous and useful for studying Cold War foreign policy and military history.

Yale University has made a sampling of their courses available for listeners, viewers, and readers.

As of writing, the history subsection contains six courses—two of which relate directly to U.S. history ("The American Revolution" and "The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877") and one which touches on relevant issues, "Epidemics and Western Society Since 1600." Each of these courses offers links to individual pages for each lecture. Lecture pages contain short text overviews of the topic at hand; a list of any reading which was required for the day; and links to lecture audio, video, and transcriptions.

Our site links you directly to the Yale's history courses. However, consider exploring other topics as well. Maybe a lecture on Roman architecture will give you background for discussing monuments in Washington, DC, or an economics course will give you a new way of thinking about the American Revolution. Interdisciplinary possibilities are endless.

Throughout the Ages was created to meet the primary source needs of New York state K-6 history teachers. The site collection includes more than 500 photographs, letters, paintings, advertisements, and maps.

To navigate the site, choose an area of interest and subtopic (for example "leisure" under the heading "community"), and scroll to a source of interest. The source will offer a caption. In some cases, historical context, focus questions, and the correlating New York state standards will also be listed. Be sure to click on each of these section titles, as items such as resources and historical background only display once selected.

One feature to look into is the automatic handout maker. For each image, you can automatically generate a handout by selecting any or all of the following categories: caption, historical background, standards/key ideas, historical challenge, interdisciplinary connections, and resources. For some images, these will already be filled out. For others, you can type anything you want for all, some, or one of those categories. Don't worry about deleting existing text if you don't want it on your handout. It will be back the next time you load your page.

This extensive collection includes 22,000 pages of sheet music. The site features collections of war songs and minstrel songs, including scanned manuscripts of 18 war songs (primarily from World Wars I and II) and 24 scanned minstrel song manuscripts. In addition, the site includes collections of showtunes and Irving Berlin compositions. The collection is divided into 14 categories, including "Showtunes," "Foxtrots," and "Movie Tunes." All music is searchable by several fields, such as copyright holder, date of publication, and composer. While the music itself is an important primary source, there is little background or contextual material available.

The New York Philharmonic Digital Archive contains materials dating back to 1842 and the original concert of New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S.

Sources available include business papers, images, programs, and scores. Other source types are in planning. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to browse the collection. You can either search for specific keywords, or leave the keyword box empty and select a source type—for example "Images." This will give you a list of all of the archive images to sift through. There are then menus on the left to help you pare the search down. However, the array of choices in the menus themselves is so extensive that patience is required to navigate the collection effectively.

That said, if you have anything specific that you are looking for, or you have time to explore, this website is potentially an invaluable source for music history. Scores may be the most use in the classroom, as they essentially give you an interactive (if you're willing to teach a song) form of period text.