This is a selection of some of the more than 4,300 items in the papers of conductor and composer Irving Fine (1900-1962). Material includes a 700-word biographical sketch and illustrated timeline of Fine's life. There are 57 photographs of Fine, including six with Aaron Copland, and six of Fine conducting at Tanglewood. Visitors may listen to the first and second movements of Fine's 1952 String Quartet, about eight minutes each, and may observe the composer at work by looking at five facsimiles of sketches for the score. These include a full 53-page score, a 43-page sketchbook, a 41-page pencil sketch, a 3-page draft of an incomplete and abandoned third movement, and a one-page row chart. A finding aid describes the rest of the collection, which includes personal and business correspondence, additional sketchbooks, press clippings, programs, and recordings. Visitors may search by keyword, browse photographs, or browse the five musical sketches. A bibliography lists seven articles by Fine, as well as two books, six articles, and seven dissertations about him. Useful for researchers interested in American classical music and cultural history.

This site considers which "of the more than 110 million items in the Library of Congress" are considered "treasures." The items in the exhibit are organized into the categories of Memory (History), Reason (Philosophy), and Imagination (Fine Arts), as was the personal library of Thomas Jefferson, which became the core of the Library of Congress.

The exhibit, which offers images of original documents as well as explanatory essays, contains such items as Jefferson's "original rough draft" of the Declaration of Independence, Jedediah Hotchkiss's Civil War maps, Edison's Kinetoscopic record of a sneeze, and Earl Warren's handwritten notes concerning the Miranda decision.

Visitors can explore family life in Illinois from 1700 to the present in this site based on a 1992 museum exhibit. The site is divided into six time periods, each featuring biographical sketches providing "glimpses into the lifestyles and domestic situations of real people" at critical moments in Illinois and American history.

In addition, each period contains audio components; timelines; maps; examples of material culture; exercises comparing the lifestyles and experiences of various racial, ethnic, and economic groups; methodological explanations; and teaching aides such as grade-specific lesson plans, discussion ideas, classroom activities, and links to related sites.

Activities can be accessed at three levels of difficulty: Level I (grades 3-5), Level II (grades 6-9), and Level III (grades 10-12). A valuable resource for teachers interested in exposing students social history.

These full-text first-person narratives present the voices of more than 2,000 people from northeast Ohio discussing issues significant to the state and the nation. These oral histories, collected since 1974, focus on a range of topics such as ethnic culture, including African American, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Romanian, and Russian, and industry, such as steel, pottery, brick, coal, and railroads.

Others discuss labor relations, including women in labor unions, wars (World War II, Vietnam, Gulf War), college life (including the shootings by National Guard troops at Kent State in 1970), the Holocaust, and religion. Subject access is available through more than 200 topics listed alphabetically.

Scholarship on the Cold War has been written primarily by Westerners with little access to sources in Soviet archives. This extensive collection seeks to remedy this gap in Cold War historiography by presenting sources from the former Communist bloc. Thousands of documents in the diplomatic history of the Cold War are currently available, stretching in time from the 1945–46 Soviet occupation of northern Iran through the late 1990s.

The annotated sources are divided into 50 collections and by geographic region. Collections cover a wide range of topics, including specific events (1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina, 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 1980–81 Polish Crisis) and broader topics stretching over longer periods of time (Economic Cold War, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, The Cold War in Africa). Collections vary widely in size, between three and several hundred documents, and include primarily official documents and communication—meeting minutes, memoranda, transcribed conversations between leaders, reports, and several personal letters and diary entries.

This educational resource complements an eight-part PBS documentary series by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, The West. The site is organized into several sections: a guided tour of the West, an interactive timeline to 1917, a hypertext map which includes migration and commerce routes, games and puzzles, and, most importantly, archival materials collected during the making of the series.

Primary sources, organized in chronological order, include memoirs, letters, government reports, and photographs. Visitors should not expect to encounter new perspectives on the American West offered by such historians as Patricia Limerick or William Cronon, or in-depth discussion of such important historiographical issues as gender or the environment. Political and military history, and to a lesser extent social and ethnic history of the West, however, are well represented in this account.

These 181 firsthand accounts of North American and Canadian exploration range from Viking stories such as The Saga of Eric the Red from circa 1,000 CE to journal entries written in the early 19th century on a trapping expedition in the Southwest. Documents include the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Materials include rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives.

Users can browse the full archive or by expedition, settlement, geographic region, and U.S. state or Canadian province. Each document is individually searchable and accompanied by a short background essay and a reference map. There are also 150 images available, including woodcuts, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Highlights follows the collection chronologically and connects moments in American history with eyewitness accounts.

Providing a host of resources on U.S. history survey, the three main features are: WWW.History, Many Pasts, and Making Sense of Evidence.

WWW.History provides an annotated guide to more than 1,000 high-quality websites covering all of U.S. history. Users can browse websites by time period or topic and can search by keyword.

Many Pasts offers more than 1,000 primary sources in text, image, and audio, from an exchange between Powhatan and Captain John Smith to comments by the director of the Arab American Family Support Center in Brooklyn after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Making Sense of Evidence offers eight guides with interactive exercises designed to help students learn to analyze various kinds of primary sources, including maps, early film, oral history, and popular song. These guides offer questions to ask and provide examples of how to analyze kinds of evidence. There are also eight multimedia modules that model strategies for analyzing primary sources, including political cartoons, blues, and abolitionist speeches.

Provides links to approximately 390 documents, most of which are related to the nation's political, diplomatic, military, and legal history. Arranged chronologically, the site begins with excerpts of Christopher Columbus' journal of 1492 and ends, at present, with President George W. Bush's May 1, 2003 address announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq [update: documents reach from around 800 to 2007]. Includes speeches, statutes, treaties, court decisions, memoirs, diaries, letters, published books, and even a few songs. The site, created by Lynn Nelson, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Kansas, is valuable especially for high school and college students who need easy access to many of the canonical documents in American history.

The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project represents the "shortly after" reaction of U.S. citizens and others regarding the World Trade Center, Flight 93, and Pentagon attacks of the 11th of September 2001, as gathered by ethnographers at the request of the American Folklife Center. The collection of responses started the 12th of September and continued for several months.

Here, you can listen to and/or watch nearly 200 audio and visual oral histories, access 21 written narratives—such as that of one woman who missed her train the morning of the attack and, as a result, was not in the WTC as she normally would have been—and view 45 photographs and drawings, many of the latter of which display children's perspectives. The videos are all from Naples, Italy, providing a look at 9/11 from outside of the country.

Sources can be browsed by type, title, or subject, as well as keyword searched.

Classroom Connection offers a list of Library of Congress and external related resources, as well as a grade level, state, and subject search which can show you how the collection relates to your particular curriculum standards.