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.  

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 explores the vaccination process from 900 CE to the present day. Tracing humanity's earliest known observations about disease transmission and immunity up to modern vaccination programs, the website includes articles, primary sources, and interactive activities.

Most attractive to educators will be the "Gallery" section. Browse more than 550 primary sources related to disease and vaccination, including pamphlets, photographs, artifacts, and more, as well as 90 videos. For easier browsing, filter the sources by topic, media type, or time period.

History teachers will also appreciate the "Activities" section. Seven interactive diagrams illustrate scientific and historical concepts, including herd immunity, how vaccinations work and how they are made, and changes in required vaccines over time. "Pioneer Breakthroughs," an interactive quiz, tests players' knowledge of vaccine-related discoveries, and "The Scientific Method" walks players through the steps in identifying the source of a disease outbreak and containing it. "Illsville," an online game, challenges players to keep the population of a town healthy from 1600 through the present day.

The site also includes an interactive timeline featuring images and short synopses of events from 900 CE to the present. View all of the events, or filter them by topic.

A database of essays in "Articles" covers more than 50 topics in the categories "Vaccine Science," "History and Society," "Vaccine Information," "Vaccine-preventable Diseases," and "Common Questions."

Note the four lesson plans in the "Educators" section. Spanish-language versions of site content are available as well.

This massive mega-website presents thousands of documents and images related to Missouri's social, political, and economic history, linking to collections housed at universities, libraries, and heritage sites across the state. These resources are organized both into archival collections (by topic and source type) and virtual exhibits.

Archival collections include maps, municipal records, government and political records, newspapers, photographs and images, books and diaries, as well as topical collections on agriculture, medicine, women, business, exploration and settlement, art and popular culture, and family, rendering the website's resources as useful for genealogists as for those interested in history.

Exhibits encompass a diverse range of subjects, and include topics of relevance to Missouri history (Miss Carrie Watkins's cookbook from the mid-19th century, several exhibits on life at the University of Missouri and Washington University, Truman's Whistle Stop campaign), and topics outside of Missouri (the body in Medieval manuscripts, Roman imperial coins, propaganda posters from World War II, and drawings documenting dinosaur discovery before the mid-20th century).

Teachers will be especially interested in the large Education section, which includes curricular resources on topics such as African Americans in Missouri, Lewis and Clark's Expedition, Missouri State Fairs, and the history of dueling.

The Milwaukee Art Museum's collection includes more than 20,000 works of art ranging in date from antiquity to the present, and specializing in American decorative arts, German Expressionism, Haitian art, and American art after 1960. This website presents more than 200 pieces from the museum's collection. These works include paintings and sculptures, including several 20th-century works from Haiti; photographs, including Civil War-era portraits and masterpieces from the Great Depression era; prints and drawings primarily from French, Italian, German, and Flemish artists in the 17th-19th centuries; and a small collection of decorative arts, primarily furniture pieces from the early United States.

Beyond the website's Collection section, more artwork is on display in the Exhibitions section, which includes a selection of images from more than 25 current and past exhibitions. A highlight is the exhibit dedicated to the groundbreaking work of Milwaukee industrial designer Brooks Stevens. Here, visitors can view detailed images of some of his most famous designs, which include the Miller Brewing Company logo, the Evinrude outboard motor, and the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.

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.

Take some time on this guide to all things West Virginia. This website offers a plethora of articles from "Abolitionism" to "John Zontini." To aid your search, you can sort through articles by topical category, alphabetical order, selecting "random article," or running a keyword search for specific interests. Your search will return media as well as text results, nicely sorted into separate categories. Articles are brief, but cross-referenced; and they also include citations and images, when available and appropriate.

The encyclopedia also includes larger sets of information and images referred to as exhibits. Topics include steamboats, John Henry, the Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, the Hatfield-McCoy Feud, coal mining, historic preservation, the Swiss community of Helvetia, the Greenbrier resort, and labor. A similar feature offers a handful of historical West Virginia maps.

Want something more interactive? Try the thematic 10-question quizzes, forums, or interactive maps and timelines.

This collection of materials (more than 80 items) comes from rare books, pamphlets, journals, pulp magazines, newspapers, and original photographs. The illustrations reflect European interpretations of Native Americans, images of popular culture, literary and political observations, and artistic representations. The three main sections are "Portrayals of Native Americans," "The Nine Millionth Volume," and a timeline.

"Portrayals" is divided into four online galleries: Color Plate Books, Foreign Views, Mass Market Appeal, and Early Ethnography. The galleries incorporate the renowned works of George Catlin and Edward S. Curtis, and the lesser-known works of early 19th-century Russian artist-explorer Louis Choris. "Mass market" features 32 illustrations, including colorful images of western novel covers and portraits of southwestern Indians. "Early ethnography" contains a newspaper article about a Native American family, five photographs, and 15 illustrations of Indians at play and at war. "The Nine Millionth Volume" is devoted to James Otto Lewis's historic volume, The Aboriginal Port Folio, a series of hand-colored lithographic portraits of American Indian chiefs.

This website presents more than 250 commercials that appeared on American television sets beginning in 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the public. Advertisements from each election, including the 2008 campaigns, are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over time, such as Commander in Chief, Fear, Children, and Real People. Advertisements are also browsable by issue, such as civil rights, corruption, war, taxes, and welfare.

This collection includes well-known ads such as the Daisy Ad and well-known public figures, such as Harry Belafonte's advertisement in support of Kennedy, as well as many others that may be less familiar in the 21st century. Essays focus on analyzing advertising strategies of major party candidates and a program guide presents a history of the usage of television commercials in campaigns.

Provides statistics on all U.S. presidential elections. For each election year, the site presents graphs showing popular and electoral votes, maps of states won by each candidate, vote count and voter turnout statistics, and a sketchy essay of approximately 100 words in length on campaign issues. Offers more extensive information on the 2000 election: official certified results; polling data by five organizations from August through October 2000; biographical statements of 300-600 words each on candidates George W. Bush,Al Gore, and Ralph Nader (the Bush bio, almost twice the length of the others, reads as if it was written by his campaign organization); a chronology of events following the election until Gore's concession; and the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, concurrence by Chief Justice Rehnquist, dissents by Justices Breyer, Souter, and Stevens, and oral arguments. Also includes an essay of 900 words on close and disputed elections, with links to "quick facts" about the candidates involved; an essay of 600 words about the reasons that the electoral college was created, with a link to Federalist Paper No. 68 by Alexander Hamilton, which offers a rationale for the institution; and a 15-minute multimedia history of the Supreme Court. MultiEducators of New Rochelle, NY produces multimedia software on historical subjects; graphs and texts in this site have been taken from their American History CD-Rom. A useful source for statistics on presidential elections, but marred by intrusive flashing ads.