Tennessee teachers, looking for a state-specific overview of U.S. history? Three years in the making, this project of the Tennessee State Museum outlines Tennessee state history from pre-history to the present day. Each of nine chronological sections—"First Tennesseans," "Indians & Cultural Encounters," "Frontier," "Age of Jackson," "Civil War & Reconstruction," "Confronting the Modern Era," "Depression & WWII," "Civil Rights/Cold War," and "Information Revolution"—begins with an introductory essay on the time period. Two to three subsections per time period offer essays on daily life and work, military and political history, civil rights issues, and other topics; users can click down from each subsection to further
essays on even more specific topics.

Links within the essays lead to extracts from primary sources (such as the journal of early explorer Casper Mansker or a recipe for soap), answers to "Dig Deeper" historical questions, interactive activities (including a Chart of Traditional Cherokee Kinships), and related articles and sources on other websites. A slideshow of enlargeable images of primary sources (artifacts and documents) accompanies most essays, and several essays include embedded audio clips.

Each time period includes a "Teacher's Page" (linked from the bottom of the section's top essay), with lessons and extension activities. Thirty-seven lessons and three extension activities are currently live on the site; broken links may be repaired in future.

"Site Search," in the left-hand sidebar by each essay, allows full searching of the site's content.

This website provides access to more than 5,700 documents surrounding Wilson and Wilson's family's personal life and work, including letters, speeches, notes, political cartoons, newspaper articles, and personal papers. All documents are keyword searchable and browseable by several topics, including debate, health, League of Nations, Paris Peace Conference, sport, and World War I. Much of Wilson's personal correspondence is included here, documenting his discussions with correspondents such as his wives Ellen Axson Wilson and Edith Bolling Wilson, and personal aide Cary Grayson. Featured documents include several of Wilson's most famous speeches: "Peace Without Victory" on the eve of World War I, "Fourteen Points for Peace," and "Women's Suffrage Amendment" in 1918. Useful both for those interested in Wilson's life and work, as well as those interested in early 20th-century U.S. political and social history, and foreign policy.

While many are familiar with the 1957 Little Rock High School integration crisis, far fewer students of U.S. civil rights history may be aware of the longer history of that struggle in Arkansas. This website includes more than 460 documents and images, including cartoons, court decisions, photographs, newspaper articles, letters, and essays related to that history. For example, an essay on the meaning of relocation written by a high school student at Arkansas's Jerome Relocation Center in 1943 brings a more personal perspective to the story of internment, as the student describes the ways in which members of her community have struggled between the "fighting spirit" and the "giving up spirit." Users new to civil rights history in Arkansas may want to begin with the extensive timeline that describes events from the arrival of slaves in Arkansas in the 1720s to a 2006 State Supreme Court ruling that struck down a ban on gays serving as foster parents. The website also includes 10 lesson plans geared for middle school students that make use of the website's resources—such as a speech given by Governor Oral Fabus in 1958. An extensive bibliography of secondary sources related to many aspects of civil rights, including African American, gay and lesbian, and women's issues, Japanese relocation, religious intolerance, political rights, and anti-civil liberties groups and issues, is also available.

Selected material from the papers of the great American composer, conductor, and music educator Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), including 85 photographs, 177 scripts from Bernstein's Young People's Concerts television programs, 74 scripts from Thursday Evening Previews, and more than 1,100 pieces of correspondence, with an emphasis on letters between Bernstein and his mentors Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, his family, and his teacher, assistant, and longtime friend Helen Coates. Users interested in Bernstein's renowned musicals can locate 27 letters on West Side Story, 12 on Candide, and nine pertaining to Trouble in Tahiti. Provides a finding aid for the complete collection, housed in the Library of Congress's Music Division; the 6,000-word essay, "Professor Lenny" by Joseph Horowitz, originally published in the New York Review of Books; a chronology of Bernstein's life; and a 27-title bibliography. With formerly obscure material concerning Bernstein's social activism, this collection will be of primary interest to those studying his musical works, ideas, and influences, and more generally 20th-century American music and musical theater.

This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act (1867), which prohibited a president from unilaterally removing any officials for whom Senate approval was required for appointment. Part of Professor Douglas Linder's Famous American Trials website, this exhibit examines Johnson's impeachment trial and his narrow escape from conviction and removal from office. Linder provides a 1500-word account of the trial and includes a chronology of events in Johnson's presidency, from his election as Abraham Lincoln's vice president in 1864 to his death in 1875. The site includes background information on the process of impeachment, such as the relevant articles of the United States Constitution and James Madison's notes on the framers' Constitutional Convention debates over the impeachment process.

The site also includes full-text verions of the Articles of Impeachment against Johnson, the Senate's rules of procedure for the impeachment trial, and the Senate trial record, including all arguments, documentary evidence, testimony, and the final vote. There are also excerpts from the Congressional Globe of the opinions of six senators, both for and against impeachment, and a map that shows the regional splits in the votes for and against impeachment. The site also provides links to the Harper's Weekly account of the trial, including biographies of 28 key figures in the trial, 90 editorials, 47 news articles and briefs, 47 illustrations, 27 political cartoons, and one illustrated satire. A brief bibliography includes six scholarly books, one video, and two internet sites with information on the Johnson impeachment trial. The Harper's Weekly section also provides a link to a "Teaching Impeachment" exercise in which students can simulate an impeachment trial. This rather complicated role play exercise requires considerable research and strong analytical skills, but would be accessible for very advanced high school and survey classes. This is an ideal site for researching constitutional history, Reconstruction, and the presidency.

Since 1831, the Virginia Historical Society has been collecting materials documenting the lives of Virginians. This website provides information for researchers and the broader public interested in visiting the Society's headquarters in Richmond, including a collections catalog, finding guides to specific collections, and information about physical exhibitions. The website also includes significant digital holdings. While only five percent of the collection has been digitized, this represents more than 5,000 items, grouped into 14 digital collections. These collections include maps, drawings, paintings, postcards, prints and engravings, 19th century photography, as well as topical collections on African Americans, the Civil War, the Retreat Hospital in Richmond, Virginia's manufacturing of arms, the 1852 Virginia General Assembly Composite Portrait, the Reynolds Metal Company (forthcoming), the Garden Club of Virginia (forthcoming), and selections from the Society's ongoing exhibition, The Story of Virginia. The entire collections catalog is keyword searchable, and includes an option to limit the search to digitized materials.

This site exhibits a selection of material relating to Gerald Ford's presidency. The site provides a 2,500-word biography of the former president and 800 words on his wife, Betty, as well as 230 photographs of their pre-presidential lives. More than 120 photographs of Ford in office range in subject from family pets to the Nixon pardon. A sample of 15 facsimile documents about Vietnam represents a larger collection that has recently been declassified.

Other documents about Vietnam include General Fred C. Weyland's Vietnam assessment memo of April 1975, eight memoranda (4-7 pages) on conversations about the War, nine National Security Council meeting minutes (7-30 pages), and 14 photos of Ford and others in meetings about Vietnam. There are 41 National Security Study memos and 83 National Security Decision memos available on topics such as Israeli military requirements, the classification of nuclear safeguards, and U.S. policy for Antarctica. A collection of 20 items from Ford's 1976 campaign for president includes sheet music for his campaign theme song. Of the 40 Ford speeches and writings from 1970-2000 collected here, three are available as audio.

The site is searchable by subject and easy to navigate. It is a useful resource for research on Ford, the Vietnam War, and the presidency.

Sponsored by the Papers of George Washington, housed at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, this is a companion site to the ambitious project of collecting, editing, and publishing Washington's papers. Begun in 1969, the project has completed 44 of a projected 90 volumes of papers. The site gives information on the letterpress editions of Washington's papers and provides some online excerpts from the volumes. The "Maps and Images" section offers ten of Washington's maps and sketches and nine images of George and Martha Washington, family members, and Mt. Vernon, their home. The "Documents and Articles" section features 31 primary documents, including Washington's 1796 Farewell Address and his last will and testament. It also provides links to 21 full-text scholarly articles on Washington's life and political and military careers. An index of names of persons identified in the papers, along with the volume and page numbers on which the names appear is uesful for researchers. As a special feature, the site also provides full-text images of Washington's handwritten notations to the Constitutional Convention's draft of the Constitution. This site provides a good introduction into the papers of one of the United States' Founders.

In April 2000, the Gerald R. Ford Library released approximately 40,000 pages of classified documents concerning the Vietnam War. Many are from National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft and their staffs and deal with the decision to evacuate U.S. forces from Vietnam in April 1975. This site provides 15 samples of the newly declassified material, 27 additional documents related to the war already available, 17 photographs of Ford and his advisors during meetings, and finding aids for those planning to travel to the Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sample documents include important memos, letters, and cables regarding corruption in South Vietnam; "ominous developments" by the North Vietnamese reported to Kissinger in March 1975; the evacuation decision and its execution; the seizure of the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez by a Cambodian gunboat crew in May 1975; the plight of Vietnamese refugees; "lessons of the war" imparted to Ford by Kissinger; and notes from Scowcroft to Ford on the then-ongoing reconstruction of Cambodian society by the Khmer Rouge. This site will be valuable for those teaching courses on the Vietnam War and its aftermath and the internal workings of the Ford Administration.