Approximately 75 items that tell the story of pioneering African American flyers, their contributions to the World War II effort, and racial discrimination they suffered. The site is arranged into four sections containing narratives of approximately 350 words each with hyperlinks leading to related images, mostly photographs. The exhibit also includes reproductions of posters, newspaper articles, insignias, advertisements, personal accounts, government documents, and letters. Searchable by keyword, decade, exhibit section, media, or name of plane. The reproduction quality of some of the items is poor; several newspaper articles are so blurred they are virtually unreadable.

Includes two lesson plans for grades 5-12, links to nine related sites, and an 11-title bibliography. The site will provide students with a brief introduction to an often neglected aspect of African American and aviation history.

Provides nearly 12,300 documents pertaining to Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and microbiologist Joshua Lederberg (b. 1925), acclaimed for his work in molecular biology and the genetics of bacteria. Most of the material dates from 1945 to the present. Includes more than 10,300 pieces of correspondence, more than 550 articles, 19 lab notebooks, 228 newspaper columns, 48 speeches, 55 monographs, 28 essays, 32 official reports, 83 photographs, and 9 video clips. An exhibit orients visitors to Lederberg's important work in bacterial and cellular genetics, artificial intelligence and expert systems, exobiology ("the study of life outside the atmosphere"), emerging infectious disease and biological warfare (Lederberg was a critic of biological warfare research), and health and the future. The site is fully searchable. Valuable for those studying the history of science and social policy.

Presents 7,680 scanned pages of 47 notebooks kept by American chemist Linus Pauling (1901-1994) from 1922 to 1994. Pauling won two Nobel Prizes—for Chemistry in 1954 and for Peace in 1962—due to his involvement in campaigns for nuclear disarmament. Each notebook contains a contents index. In addition, the site provides a detailed alphabetical subject index that includes personal names. Notebooks offer many reprints of articles published by Pauling. The site also directs users to 23 selected highlights—pages relevant to Pauling's most significant work and to some autobiographical entries. Includes "An Open Letter to President Bush," dated January 1991, in protest of the Gulf War. Valuable for those studying the history of American science in the 20th century.

The 1,240-page Civil War-era diary of U.S. Patent Office examiner Horatio Nelson Taft is presented in both digitized images and word-searchable transcriptions. Taft's young children were regular playmates of the Lincoln sons until the death of Willie Lincoln. Taft's older son, a physician, attended to the President the night he was shot. The diary—kept daily from January 1861 to April 1862 and irregularly through May 1865—had been in the possession of Taft's descendants since his death and had remained virtually unknown to scholars until it was donated to the Library of Congress in 2000. Taft's perceptions of homefront life in Washington, D.C., as the war progressed, descriptions of White House happenings, and account of the death of the President will add to the historical record. The site includes a 2,000-word biographical essay on Taft and links to 23 related sites.

A selection of 53 items of correspondence between folksinger and songwriter Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) and members of the staff of the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song. Consists mostly of letters from the early 1940s between Guthrie and Alan Lomax, at that time in charge of the Archive and who, like Guthrie, was an important force in the movement to document, record, and publicize vernacular American music. Includes scanned images of documents and transcriptions, allowing keyword searching. Also offers a 2,400-word biographical essay; a timeline of Guthrie's life; 14 photographs; a finding aid for the complete Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection; a 21-title bibliography; and a 15-title discography. Valuable for those studying the histories of American music, radio broadcasting, and government efforts during the Roosevelt era to document American culture.

Furnishes more than 19,000 survey reports, more than 6,200 photographs, and 103 annotated county and city maps that document the history of thousands of structures built in Virginia prior to the Civil War. Original research was gathered in the late 1930s by the Virginia Writers's Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and includes information compiled by field workers through onsite investigations—including interviews with residents—and by using court records and other local resources. Provides descriptions of architectural details, histories of buildings, lists of owners, and in many cases photographs and sketches. The project was "specifically charged with describing the vernacular architecture and history of everyday buildings built before 1860: homes, workplaces, churches, public buildings." Also includes materials on cemeteries, tombstones, antiques, historical events, personages, land grants, wills, deeds, diaries, and correspondence.

Provides a 5,600-word essay on the project's history. Users may search reports, maps, and photographs by keywords; includes specific instructions for genealogical research and for finding documents dealing with the Civil War and African American history. Site creators note that many of the structures documented by the project "no longer exist, and the VHI photographs may be the only extant visual records of them." A valuable resource for those studying the material culture of Virginia's past.

This site offers published books selected from the Library of Congress' general and rare book collections in an "attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century." Contains 139 books, a few by well-known figures, such as Edwin Booth, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, but most by little-known residents and visitors to the region. Includes memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, books of letters, journals, poems, addresses, reports, speeches, travel books, sermons, books of photographs, and promotional brochures. In addition to Washington, D.C., the cities of Baltimore, MD, and Richmond, VA, are featured.

A special presentation entitled "Pictures of People and Places from the Collection" consists of selected illustrations organized in three sections of 10 images each on Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The site includes 10 works dealing with slavery—a number of which were written by former slaves—and approximately 10 works dealing with encounters between whites and Native Americans. Includes links to 22 related sites. A valuable collection for those studying ways that Washington, D.C., and neighboring regions have been described in print over several centuries.

This site exhibits 12 facsimiles and transcriptions of spy letters from the American Revolution housed in the Sir Henry Clinton collection. Three inter-linked sections, "People," "Stories," and "Methods" provide context for each letter. A gallery of 19 men and three women, writers, readers, and subjects of the letters, includes 200-word biographical essays for each person and eight portraits. In "Stories," visitors will find 350-word descriptions of the significance of each letter. Methods of spying are described in six 150-word essays. A timeline coveres 1763 to 1783. The timeline is illustrated with 19 prints of people and places important in the revolution, and the site provides route maps for 11 of the letters.

The site's bibliography lists 25 books and one digital exhibit about the revolution and espionage. A "Teachers' Lounge" provides six assignments, 700 words on use of primary sources, 250 words on curricular themes that may be addressed using the site, and 25 study questions for students. The site is easy to navigate.

This site presents the journals and photographs of two men who surveyed the western states in the second half of the 19th century. William Henry Jackson was a photographer, artist, and writer who traveled along the route of the Union Pacific Railway in 1869. The site provides access to his journal of the expedition, 36 stereoscopic photographs he took along the way, and 13 mammoth prints Jackson made of sites in Colorado and Wyoming. Jackson's diary describes how he took and developed photographs during the expedition. Robert Brewster Stanton was a civil engineer who surveyed canyons in Colorado for the Colorado Canyon and Pacific Railroad Company between 1889 and 1890. Visitors to the site can read a facsimile of his typed field notes in four volumes. The notes and 36 photographs provide geologic information, but also give a sense of the everyday life of the expedition. The site includes a 500-word biographical essay for each man and finding aids for the larger collections of their papers housed at the New York Public Library. This site is easy to navigate and is useful for studying western states, the environment, and photography in the 19th century.

This exhibit presents 60 items from Paul Mellon's private collection of material relating to the history of Virginia. The entire collection, 447 items, is housed at the University of Virginia. A 600-word essay provides biographical information on Mellon and his bequest. The exhibit is arranged in six sections, from "Exploring the New World" through "Slavery and the Civil War" to "Opening New Vistas". "Acquiring Virginia's Legacy" presents six highlights of the collection and a 1,400-word essay explaining its significance. A 150-word explanatory essay accompanies each image. The exhibit includes facsimiles of 11 books, seven prints, seven letters, five objects of ephemera, and five maps. Among the ephemera is a myriopticon, a rolled painting that viewers can "unroll" to view scenes from the Civil War. The site is primarily interesting as an exhibit and may not be particularly useful for researchers except as an introduction to the Mellon collection.