This site displays approximately 90 primary documents from the 15th century to the mid 20th century. Features eight subjects: the presidency; Congress, law, and politics; military affairs; diplomacy and foreign policy; arts and literature; science, medicine, exploration, and invention; African-American history and culture; and women's history. The collection emphasizes "prominent Americans whose lives reflect our country's evolution," including 23 presidents and figures such as Carter Woodson, Thurgood Marshall, pioneer physician Elizabeth Blackwell, Wilbur Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell.

Each subject is accompanied by a useful 100- to 400-word background essay and a link to the document's host collection. Also includes a 2,000-word essay entitled "Collecting, Preserving, and Researching History: A Peek into the Library of Congress Manuscript Division." Although limited in size, this site provides an eclectic group of documents of national interest.

Offers more than 13,000 images of items relating to the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal program designed to provide work for unemployed theater professionals. The collection contains 71 playscripts and 168 documents from the FTP's Administration Records. Extensive materials, including photographs, scripts, posters, and set and costume designs, have been selected from three significant productions: Macbeth and The Tragic History of Dr. Faustus, directed by Orson Welles, and Arthur Arent's Power, an example of the Project's innovative "Living Newspaper" series of topical plays. The site includes a 3,500-word background essay, as well as four illustrated articles about the Project. A FTP Collection finding aid describing more than 525,000 offline items may be downloaded, but is not currently searchable.

Features more than 200 "social dance manuals" and related materials in western dance history, from Burgundian dances of the Late Middle Ages to Ragtime dances in vogue between 1890 and World War I. The site offers a rich selection of manuals--including the rare document, Les basses danses de Marguerite d'Autriche, published around 490--as well as histories, theoretical studies, treatises on etiquette, antidance literature, and other items. Designed to "illuminate the manner in which people have joyfully expressed themselves as they dance for and with one another," the site also provides a 13,000-word introductory essay, "Western Social Dance: An Overview of the Collection," which is illustrated with 44 images, 75 video clips demonstrating selected dances from the manuals, and a bibliography of 77 titles. A well-organized presentation that will interest students of dance and of the cultural history of Europe and the U.S.

This exhibit, divided into five sections, presents artifacts from New Deal art programs, introduced by a 250-word essay. "Rediscovering America" discusses "artistic nationalism" and provides five photographs and five paintings of American scenes. "Celebrating the People" exhibits five paintings and one photo of people at work and two photos and three programs of celebrations of folk culture. In "Work Pays America," five posters, two paintings, and two photos document and celebrate New Deal programs.

The 11 works exhibited in "Activist Arts" make more and less subtle political arguments, including Dorothea Lange's "Children in a Democracy" and a flier for a Workers' Alliance meeting. A section on "Useful Arts" exhibits 15 pieces, including informational posters, photos of quilting lessons, and a WPA handcraft wall hanging. The exhibit is easy to navigate, although visitors must return to the home page between each section. Useful for those studying the politics, social messages, and images of the New Deal.

This exhibition presents 14 of the " most significant and compelling documents from the National Archives holdings." The site furnishes, in whole or part, facsimiles and in some cases transcriptions of the following documents: the July 2, 1776, resolution by the Continental Congress proclaiming independence from Great Britain; George Washington's first inaugural address; the Louisiana Purchase agreements; a casualty list of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of African-American soldiers who fought in the Civil War; a police blotter that reports the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; an 1868 treaty with the Sioux Indians; a U.S. Navy memorandum reporting the Titanic disaster of 1912; a court verdict concerning gangster Al Capone; Eleanor Roosevelt's 1939 resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution in protest of the group's refusal to allow singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race; President Franklin Roosevelt's speech to the Congress requesting a declaration of war against Japan; a draft press release announcing the United States's recognition of Israel in 1948, signed by President Harry S. Truman; speech cards used by Presidents John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Ronald Reagan in 1987 for their historic visits to Berlin; President Richard Nixon's 1969 diary entry relating to his telephone conversation with Apollo 11 astronauts; and Nixon's resignation letter of 1974. The materials are accompanied by brief descriptions of 100-200 words, photographs, audio files, and links to related National Archives documents. This site exhibits national relics well, but does not investigate their historical significance and meanings.

Presents 29 photographs and five documents relating to Elvis Presley's bizarre December 1970 visit with Richard Nixon in the White House. Features a well-known photograph of the meeting and a five-page letter written from Presley to Nixon requesting an appointment as a federal agent "to be of any service that I can to help The Country out." "I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal Agent," wrote Presley. "I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good." Also includes background information about Presley's visit and official White House notes of the encounter. A revealing snapshot into the perceptions of these two public figures concerning the youth culture of their day.

Images and articles on the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1851, including some pre-famine material on related events. Taken primarily from newspapers in London and Ireland, the site includes 74 images and 16 articles from the Illustrated London News; short reports and articles from the Cork Examiner, September 1846 to December 1847; 17 illustrations and two articles from the Pictorial Times of 1846 and 1847; 30 cartoons and four articles from London's Punch; and the contents of an 1847 pamphlet, Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the Year of the Irish Famine by Lord Dufferin and G. G. Boyle.

Provides a master picture list of 99 illustrations and cartoons from the materials, arranged by depicted subjects such as cabins, landlords and ejections, begging, food riots and attacks, relief, workhouse, funerals, voyage, and life in America. Also presents a list of 44 links to related resources. Although the site lacks contextual material, other than sentence-long biographical data on some of the cartoonists, it offers visitors visual and textual material that was available to contemporary Irish and English readers of popular print forms to make sense of the Famine.

Sponsored by the Viet Nam Generation, Inc., and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, this site is a resource for teaching and researching America in the 1960s and during the Viet Nam War. The site contains links to 17 primary documents, including materials from the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and GI's United Against War in Viet Nam. There are more than 100 images of political buttons and posters from the era and a full-text version of Vietnam: An Antiwar Comic Book, written by civil rights activist Julian Bond after he was expelled from the Georgia legislature for protesting the Vietnam War. Additional items on the site include five keyword searchable, full-text back issues of Viet Nam Generation, a journal of recent history and Viet Nam War studies published between 1988 and 1996. The site also contains ten syllabi for courses on the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Visitors may contribute their own personal narratives about the 1960s (the quality and accuracy of these personal narratives are not controlled and should be used with caution).

Created by historian Paul Halsall, this site explores through links to hundreds of primary and secondary documents the history of homosexuals and "transgendered people" from classical antiquity to the present day. Arranged into 11 sections--each with their own table of contents--the site treats a strikingly wide range of themes, regions, and time periods. For example, section two, "Medieval Worlds," is comprised of five "chapters" that cover early Christianity, Byzantium, the Latin Christian Middle Ages, Islam, and Ancient and Medieval Jews, respectively, and includes poems, literature, essays, and historical scholarship. Another section, "History and Theory," offers links to interviews with prominent scholars, reviews of recent books, discussions of queer theory, and ruminations on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault.

Partially annotated, the links are accompanied by background essays. The site also presents an incredibly thorough bibliography--perhaps "the most up-to-date and complete bibliography of [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] history available." Regularly updated, this is an impressive collection of links which promises to expand.

Created by a weekly newspaper based in Flemington, New Jersey, this site is devoted the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the subsequent trial of a 35-year-old Bronx carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Among the few primary materials included are approximately 35 photographs related to the trial and six episodes from a 1934-35 comic strip about the crime. The site offers a summary of events and biographies of the leading characters, theories about Hauptmann's innocence, a timeline, nine recent articles from the newspaper on the case and about several "Lindbergh baby claimants." Of limited value due to the site's reliance on only one newspaper for most of its documentation.

The "Inside Lindbergh Trial" menu is defunct. Use the links located throughout the page.