This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering roughly 6,300 publications. The archive provides access to every Congressional and Executive document of the first 14 U.S. Congresses, and additional coverage through the 25th Congress, as well as tables, maps, charts, and other illustrations. The collection is particularly strong in military history, with 205 documents about military bases and posts and 134 on military construction. Other documents address topics such as westward expansion, Native American affairs, and issues surrounding slavery. This collection also includes numerous speeches and messages by Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

Users can browse the archive by category: Subjects, Publication Category, Standing-Committee Author, Document Class, and Congress. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site is a valuable resource for researching the government and military in the early United States.

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of documents relevant to early U.S. history, offering full-color facsimile images of approximately 30,000 broadsides and ephemera. Advertisements, campaign literature, poems, juvenile literature, and Civil War envelopes comprise the bulk of the collection, making the archive especially valuable for those interested in early American consumer culture, political campaigns, and literary life. The collection also contains rich information on slavery, Native American relations, and local events—plays, gatherings, and religious events.

Users can browse the archive by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching 18th- and 19th-century North America.

The USS Constitution Museum developed All Hands on Deck as a means of introducing K–12 educational elements across subjects (math, art, and more) using the history of one of the United States' most renowned military vessels, the USS Constitution.

The website itself is somewhat disorganized. However, there are a plethora of lesson plans embedded within it for students of any grade level.

The available lessons are divided into five sections—preview activities (to determine pre-existing knowledge), the building of early U.S. military frigates, the War of 1812 and the Barbary Wars, 1800s life aboard a warship, and the lasting legacy of the USS Constitution. These sections have subsections, within which you can find individual lessons intended for grades K–4, 5–8, and 9–12. Alternatively, visiting "How to Use This Online Curriculum" includes a linked list of states. Clicking on any of the available states—IL, MD, WA, SC, TN, MO, TX, NM, CO, MT, and VA—offers a list of the activities available on the website which correlate with state standards. The individual subsections also include recommended field trip sites, films, books, games, music, and more; as well as anecdotes, literature, and other "grab bag" additional items of interest.

The Image Gallery offers a smattering of paintings, illustrations, and photographs of the vessel and its officers. The gallery also contains a single newspaper recruitment ad dating to 1798.

Educators who would prefer a tangible copy of the curriculum can send an electronic request.

Alternatively, you may want to brush up on your USS Constitution history yourself. In that case, the website offers a 19-minute video in which a young girl meets a variety of figures aboard the ship—a captain's wife, a powder monkey, and an African American sailor among them.

These 52 published works by black women writers are from the late 18th century through the early 20th. The full-text database offers works by late 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, late 19th-century essayist and novelist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Harriet Jacobs, a woman born into slavery who published her memoirs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in the late 19th century.

Users can browse by title, author, or type of work (fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essays). Each browse category also contains a keyword search for subjects such as religion, family, and slavery. Brief biographies of the 37 featured writers are available. This site is easy to use and is ideal for learning about African American history, women's history, and 19th-century American literature.

These eight databases present more than 176,000 articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states.

Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1880), one of the most popular 19th-century publications, furnished middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion illustrations, and editorials. The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728–1800), a Philadelphia newspaper, is described as the New York Times of the 18th century. The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective includes major articles from the Charleston Mercury, the New York Herald, and the Richmond Enquirer. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes runs from six newspapers published in New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto between 1827 and 1876. American County Histories to 1900 provides 60 volumes covering the local history of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809–1870 has been partially digitized, with 25,000 records available. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819–1870 addresses industrialization in a rural area settled by Quaker farmers.

Images of more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in newspapers and magazines in the United States from 1911 to 1955 appear on this well-developed site. The material is drawn from a collection of one of the oldest and largest advertising agencies, the J. Walter Thompson Company.

Advertisements are divided into five main subjects areas: Radio (including radios, radio parts, and programs); television (including television sets and programs); transportation (including airlines, rental cars, buses, trains, and ships); beauty and hygiene (including cosmetics, soaps, and shaving supplies); and World War II (U.S. Government-related, such as V-mail and bond drives). Ads are searchable by keyword, type of illustration, and special features. A timeline from 1915 to 1955 provides general context. "About Ad Access" furnishes an overview of advertising history, as well as a bibliography and list of advertising repositories.

A Sailor's Life for Me! is a superb example of how the web can bring history alive for young students.

The website presents an idea of what daily life would have been like aboard the famed USS Constitution, which actively fought in the Quasi War with France, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812. Its ability to withstand enemy fire eventually gained it the moniker of "Old Ironsides."

There are three main sections to the site, as well as supplementary materials. The primary sections are a "life of" game, an exploration of the areas aboard the vessel, and an introduction to the men who would have sailed aboard her.

Explore Old Ironsides is perhaps the most informative section. Here, the ship is divided into 24 interactive scenes which introduce shipboard activities—from battle roles, flogging, and burial to the more common activities of dining, holystoning (deck maintenance), and what sailors did with their moments of free time. Each section can be explored clicking on people and items. Clicking provides commentary from fictional sailors (complete with highlighted vocabulary terms), actions and sound effects that bring the scene to life, short biographies of historical USS Constitution sailors, and information on tasks and objects in the scenes. Life stories of the real sailors range from fairly typical naval experiences to an unfortunate sailor who wounded himself by rolling out of his hammock and down a hatch. Two remaining scenes give an idea of where and why people would sign up for voyages and the triumphant return of Old Ironsides.

These scenes provide a strong introduction to shipboard life, covering the basics in an approachable picture-book-like format. The downside is that there is enough information and detail that this portion of the site takes some time to cover in its entirety. Educators may wish to peruse the vessel sections, and select a few scenes that they feel are most important to the topic at hand. There is a seek-and-find incentive for students interested in exploring the entire ship, however, as the ship's dog, Guerriere (also the name of the most famed enemy vessel confronted by the USS Constitution) is located in 11 of the scenes.

Meet Your Shipmates introduces the crew by job and number. For example, the page shows the rank system aboard the vessel as well as how many individuals fit within each rank—from the one captain to the 276 able seamen, 55 ordinary seamen, and 12 boys. Additional roles include quartermasters, boatswain's mates, gunner's mates, the carpenter's mate, the carpenter's yeoman, the sailmaker's mate, the coxwain, the cook, the midshipmen, master's mates, the sailmaker, the carpenter, the gunner, surgeon's maters, the sailing-master, the surgeon, the chaplain, the purser, and lieutenants. Each of these sections can be clicked on for a brief description of the role of the individual(s) in question. Some roles even include a short "diary" of someone known to have served aboard the vessel—including David Debias, a free-born African American ship's boy who tragically crossed into Mississippi and was mistaken for an escaped slave.

The final main section of the site is the interactive game—the site's centerpiece. You begin the game preparing for life as a ship's boy. If students are interested in rising in the ranks, they will want to login to save their progress. Otherwise, the game can be played without registering. As a boy, you engage in tasks such as holystoning the deck, carrying powder for gun drill, and carrying slops without tripping. You are periodically confronted by superiors who ask questions that will increase and decrease your likelihood of promotion, health and happiness, spending money, and popularity with the crew. The game can be repetitive (not unlike life at sea), but may engage students who would otherwise be uninterested in the topic.

If all of the above isn't impressive enough, the site also offers family activities such as baking ship's biscuits, learning about signal flags, and testing buoyancy, as well as educator's resources. Annotated Scenes takes each of the interactive scenes discussed earlier; and provides related primary sources, artifacts, activities, videos, interactive games, and lesson plans. Classroom integration discusses how best teachers may be able to include the website content in their classroom, and explains its correlation to national standards. Lesson Plans let you search activities, lesson plans, artifacts, primary sources, games, and sailors' stories by grade level, content area, and type of resource. Selecting "Social Studies" alone provides 269 options. War of 1812 Resources discusses how to teach the war in different classroom time allotments, an overview, a timeline, a brief section on African Americans aboard the USS Constitution, and related links and suggested reading.

The only fault of this website is that its content may be a bit overwhelming. However, educators can select what is most appropriate for their students from a wealth of knowledge which often goes uncovered in history classrooms.

Furnishes 15 partially-annotated links to political theory resources arranged in four categories: "Idealism and the Ancient World"; "Realism"; "Liberalism"; and "History as Progress." Also includes nine "short pieces that raise questions of contemporary significance, inspired by the classics" on political thinkers from Plato to Marx; a recent newspaper article relating Machiavelli to contemporary times; and a link to the transcript of a 1992 interview with Francis Fukuyama, along with accompanying audio and video clips. A site useful as an introduction to western philosophical writings on political theory and for its attempt to relate classical theory to contemporary issues.

Presenting 325 probate inventories, this website provides a unique window into daily life in Virginia and Maryland between 1740 and 1810. In this time period, county courts appointed appraisers, local men, to visit an estate after its owner died, list what was there, and estimate its value. These listings, called probate records or inventories, can be analyzed to illuminate a family's routines, rituals, and social relations, as well as a region's economy and connection to larger markets. These inventories are a sample from the region at this time, picked to be representative of the furnishings in George Mason's Gunston Hall. They are all digitized, transcribed, and searchable.

For a general overview, the inventories can be browsed by decade and county—including York, Norfolk, Richmond, and Fairfax counties in Virginia. For more detailed information on the role of material culture in colonial life, the site's Interpreting section presents interviews with two scholars who use probate records to discuss topics such as slavery and slave life, credit and debt, and women and property ownership. Three detailed lesson plans, written by Virginia teachers, are also available, providing suggestions for incorporating these rich sources into classroom learning.