Offering a new way of looking at the history of American culture and society, Race and Ethnicity in Advertising is a database of advertisements from across the United States throughout the 20th century.  This site offers a fresh lense for students to explore the changes in how Americans view themselves and each other in the world through the familiar medium of commercials and advertisements. 

Visitors to the site can explore the posters, videos, and images in three different ways.  With over 100 hundred pages of materials, every page offers diverse ads to analyze from the late 19th century through the early 21st century.  The option to browse by collection focuses on specific topics for analysis, such as Asian American representation and celebrity endorsement advertisements.  Browsing by essay is a function that highlights themes such as gender, stereotypes, and cultural transformation using adverts from different periods to demonstrate continuing trends.

The site is friendly to students of all ages with the background and contextual information provided for every advertisement.  Each item offers key information for students to place the ad within its historical context by providing the title, date, racial/ ethnic markers, and primary time period.  The Keywords and Context section also provides clarifying information that would assist students while evaluating sources or be a great way to introduce a new topic in the classroom.  

This website explores "girls' history" with 40 oral history interviews conducted by women's studies students at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Each interviewee was asked extensively about her girlhood. Questions focused on adolescence and growing up as well as the social, cultural, and physical implications of girlhood and personal experiences. Topics include family, race, sexuality, education, and women's issues. The archive includes brief biographies, video clips, and transcripts of interviews (arranged thematically), photographs, and reflections of the interview process. Most of the women interviewed were born and raised in Minnesota, although a few came from other states with a smaller number immigrating from other countries. The site is not searchable, and the video clips are not high quality.

In October 2015, the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation launched the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) Online Reading Room, providing streaming access to nearly 10,000 public television and radio programs from the past 60 years. The entire AAPB collection of more than 68,000 files – approximately 40,000 hours of programming – is available for viewing and listening on-site at the Library of Congress and WGBH.

The collection contains thousands of nationally-oriented programs. The vast majority of this initial content, however, consists of regional, state, and local programs selected by more than 100 stations and archives across the U.S. that document American communities during the last half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. The collection includes news and public affairs programs, local history productions, and programs dealing with education, science, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, environmental issues, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level.

The site also provides three curated exhibits of broadcasts pertaining to the southern civil rights movement, climate change, and individual station histories.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) serves as a portal to the digital collections of more then 40 state, regional, and online-only libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. Created to strengthen access to public resources and to "create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps," the DPLA is an invaluable first stop for teachers and students looking for primary sources, particularly regional history sources.

Visitors to the website can search the more than 4,500,000 objects in the collections of participating institutions using keywords, returning results they can filter by format, owning institution, partner, date, language, location, and subject. Clicking on an object brings up detailed metadata, including creator, date of creation, and a description of the object, as well as a link to its original location online. Visitors who create a free account can save their search results, make them private or public, and share them via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Visitors can also browse objects on a map or timeline—a fantastic way to prompt thinking about how primary sources are located in time and space. The timeline stretches from 1000 BCE to the present. (Note that zooming into the map returns finer results.) In addition, more than eight virtual exhibits demonstrate how DPLA sources can be curated to tell stories about themes and events.

The DPLA's API (application programming interface) allows visitors with the know-how to create apps drawing on the DPLA's collections. An eclectic set of more than 10 apps lets visitors browse DPLA's search results as a "river of images," discover primary sources related to their Zotero bibliographies, and more.

A fantastic starting point for anyone looking for primary sources, teachers can feel confident pointing students towards the DPLA to begin research projects or turning to the DPLA themselves to find resources to support lesson plans.

This website is a detailed look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 as covered in the Montgomery Advertiser. It includes more than 20 oral histories, more than 40 archival news stories, and more than 20 images of the event. A 3,000-word overview section provides details regarding the boycott, the people involved, why it occurred, and the outcome. A biography section includes more details regarding the individuals involved with the boycott. A memorial page for Rosa Parks, one of the most visible figures of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, includes photos, videos, and news articles from the Montgomery Advertiser regarding her death. "Voices of the Boycott" includes oral histories from the participants of the boycott.

The site also includes an archive of stories from the Montgomery Advertiser and the Associated Press regarding the boycott. This includes front page stories, as well as smaller news stories from within the newspaper. Finally a photo gallery contains booking photos, images of speeches, and photos of the events. None of the images in the gallery are graphic in nature.

Though the site is very user-friendly and all information easily accessible, it is somewhat limited in its focus on primary sources directly tied to the Montgomery Advertiser. Still, this website could potentially be useful for educators and students looking to supplement their studies on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, especially due to the inclusion of the oral histories.

This website features 85 selections from the "Golden Age of Radio," which lasted from the early 1920s until television replaced radio in many homes in the United States in the 1950s. Shows include original dramatic favorites such as Dragnet, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Sherlock Holmes, and the Radio Detective Story Hour, and adventure and western shows such as The Adventures of Superman, The Lone Ranger, and Batman Adventures. Other selections include shows discussing aspects of radio's Golden Age, and presenting clips from shows, such as Theater of the Mind and Yesterday's Radio, as well as shows devoted to music and radio soap operas. There are at least 10 episodes of each show available, and often more than 70. All shows can be streamed online, and many can be downloaded via an iTunes podcast. This website is now part of a larger website devoted to presenting more contemporary radio shows, some of which may not be appropriate for young audiences.

In 1863, 97 Orchard Street, a tenement in New York City's Lower East Side, opened its doors to the growing population of recent immigrants to that city, housing more than 7,000 people before it closed in 1935. The museum that now occupies that building has restored six families' apartments with careful attention to historical detail. This website, while primarily intended as a guide for those intending to visit the physical museum, provides several tantalizing glimpses at tenement life, as well as information on historical restoration.

The History section presents 15 photographs and etchings explaining the evolution of bathrooms, light, water, and heat in the building, as well as examples of primary source documents and interviews available in the museum's collections. Additionally, a small exhibit of five photographs reconstructs how the museum's curators interpreted a 1918 apartment in the tenement—showing the use of crime scene photographs to determine how the family would have decorated the walls.

The Play section contains a narrated virtual tour of the museum, and five well-designed interactive experiences on immigration and immigrant life geared towards younger learners. Highlights from these sections are repeated in the Education section, which also includes three lesson plans each for elementary, middle, and high school levels focused on teaching with objects, oral histories, and other primary sources.

More than 137,000 photographs of Florida, many focusing on specific localities from the mid-19th century to the present, are available on this website. The collection, including 15 online exhibits, is searchable by subject, photographer, keyword, and date.

Materials include 35 collections on agriculture, the Seminole Indians, state political leaders, Jewish life, family life, postcards, and tourism among other things. Educational units address 17 topics, including the Seminoles, the Civil War in Florida, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, pioneer feminist Roxcy Bolton, the civil rights movement in Florida, and school busing during the 1970s.

"Writing Around Florida" includes ideas to foster appreciation of Florida's heritage. "Highlights of Florida History" presents 46 documents, images, and photographs from Florida's first Spanish period to the present. An interactive timeline presents materials—including audio and video files—on Florida at war, economics and agriculture, geography and the environment, government and politics, and state culture and history.

The stated purpose of this website is to provide an overview of World War I. This it does effectively through hundreds of essays, 3,100 encyclopedic entries, 618 biographies, 318 resources on the war's major diplomatic and military events, and a timeline. Primary documents include over 100 diaries and firsthand accounts of soldiers and politicians, 3,900 photographs, 651 propaganda posters, and 155 audio files of songs and speeches. Documents include treaties, reports, correspondence, memoirs, speeches, dispatches, and accounts of battles and sieges.

The site also provides 95 essays on literary figures who wrote about the war. While admittedly a work-in-progress, the site offers much material on the leaders who engaged their countries in war and on the experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought the battles.

On June 15, 1920, a white mob broke into a jail in Duluth, Minnesota, and lynched three black men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—accused of raping a white woman. This website tells the story of that attack and its aftermath through more than 700 primary source documents and photographs relating to the lynchings, legal proceedings against members of the lynch mob and several other black men accused of rape, and the incarceration of three white mob members for rioting and one black man for rape. It ends with the aftermath of the incident, including a drop in the black population of Duluth by 16 percent, the formation of an active NAACP chapter in the city, and a campaign for anti-lynching legislation. A Background section sets the scene in 1920s Duluth alongside information on rising racial tensions across the country and lynchings in northern states. An interactive timeline of events surrounding the lynchings, accompanied by an audio narrative, is a good place to begin. All documents are keyword searchable and browseable by document type (government document, newspaper, correspondence) and by date.