The Maryland Historical Society owns millions of objects which could be key to bringing history to life for your class. A growing number of these items can be found in their digital collections.

The collections can be searched by title, creator, individual collection, or subject. At the time of writing, there are nine collections—the American Civil War; War of 1812; Paintings; African American History; Women's History; Mining the Museum (items on exhibit); Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an architect known for design the U.S. Capitol and the Baltimore Basilica; and works on paper. Artifacts include photographic images, engravings, broadsides, handwritten documents, a flag, a shadowbox, a knife, sketches, clothing, paintings, swords, a shield, a canteen, and more.

The original handwritten version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" may be of particular interest.

As men flocked to join the Union and Confederate armies, so, too, many women left their homes to serve as nurses in the war effort. This website presents the story of one such woman, Amanda Akin, who at 35 years of age left New York to work at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, DC, for one year and three months. During that time, she both kept a journal and wrote letters to her sisters recording her experiences.

The website offers images of Akin's diary, photograph portraits, and choice quotes from her recollections, as well as brief explanations and sources related to Civil War nursing in general—for example, books of orders and photographs. The title is somewhat misleading in that the diary itself is not available on the website. Instead, the interactive document link takes you to a map of Washington, DC, with locations relevant to Akin's story and major events of the time. Each location provides photographs (sometimes with a comparison image of the location today), advertisements, and/or artworks; quotes from Akins and other sources; and a small amount of contextual information.

The site links to a copy of Amanda Akin Stearns's (Akin's married name) The Lady Nurse of Ward E which Akin penned in 1909 as a memoir of her time working in the hospital.

Laurel Grove is a one-room school house in Northern Virginia. In the 1990s, a community team successfully blocked a developer's bulldozer, formed the Laurel Grove School Association, and restored the one room schoolhouse. An interdisciplinary team of community members, curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators recovered the history of the school from oral histories and local archives, refurbished the classroom, and crafted a history curriculum to teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and life under Jim Crow. Today the school is a museum along the African-American heritage trail.

Six lesson plans (scaffolded for K-12) focus on understanding racial issues in Virginia from 1800 through the 1930s, on working with primary sources, and with an emphasis on critical thinking skills. Essays fill in the historical background including Slavery and Free Negroes, 1800-1860, A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction, The Impact of the Jim Crow Era on Education, and A Child's Life in a Segregated Society. Lesson plans are geared to standards and exemplify exploration of local resources to teach American history.

The Laurel Grove website is a work-in-progress, building on the open-source Omeka web-publishing platform especially for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and history enthusiasts developed through George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

Opening this website, visitors are greeted with several pictures of Frederick Douglass throughout his lifespan, while a five-part historical overview of his life explains what the exhibit entails. Visitors can access more of the site's content through the three key feature links in the lower right corner of the home page: the "House Tour," "Lesson Plans," and "Portraits." The "House Tour" takes the user on a virtual room-by-room tour of Frederick Douglass's home, which is physically located in Washington, DC. This link may be useful for educators who would like their students to experience Douglass’s home but who cannot reach DC, offering a memorable classroom experience for any K–12 classroom studying the life of Frederick Douglass or of African Americans during the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras.

Additionally, educators could assign this website to students for research using primary source artifacts and documents. "Portraits" provides not only portraits with captions explaining their significance in Douglass's life, but of his children and close abolitionist friends, as well as personal items such as his Panama hat, eyeglasses, coffee pot and articles from his paper, the North Star. In total, the site offers more than 150 primary source documents and artifacts from the time period and Douglass's life. Clicking on the link for “All Image Galley” allows the viewer to step into Frederick Douglass’s world, viewing all of the primary sources in one exhibit gallery with nine subsections, including "Leisure Time" and "Presidential Appointments." This truly brings history to life!

One of the most useful links for educators is "Lesson Plans." This takes the user to a section of the National Park Service's website called Teaching with Museum Collections, where educators can download two lesson plans on Frederick Douglass, or download lesson plan templates to create their own artifact-based lessons. The lessons are clear and include state standards as well as differentiated instruction ideas. "Frederick Douglass's Hat" is appropriate for middle school students, but can be modified and integrated to the needs of all students. "Forced March," created by an 8th-grade middle school teacher, can also be modified or enhanced to meet the needs of a differentiated classroom.

Teachinghistory.org Teacher Representative Lynn Roach wrote this Website Review. Learn more about our Teacher Representatives.

A collaborative effort between students and faculty at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, this site includes two sections. In the first, a timeline from 1888 to 1899 provides, for each year, snapshots of major national events, personalities, and statistics as well as excursions to approximately 30 additional links, background essays, images, quotations, bibliographies, and other material. The second, "Bowling Green, Ohio: A Tour of the Crystal City," contains 27 photographs; a month-by-month timeline covering town events during the years 1892-97; a 19,000-word essay written in 1897 on Bowling Green's "early history"; and essays ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 words on specific topics. No search engine, but the site may be browsed by year. Useful both as a general overview of the period and as a local history resource.

This site offers two exhibits featuring the photography of Camilo Jose Vergara that document decay and renewal in the "post-industrial" cities of Camden, NJ, and Richmond, CA, since the 1970s. The collection of more than 450 photographs explores the transformation of these cities' urban landscapes through the erosion of their "late 19th and early 20th-century architectural grandeur" through "their subsequent neglect and abandonment" to "scattered efforts at renewal." The site has an essay by Vergara that explains his work and introduces the two collections. The Camden exhibit has a large collection of photographs, organized into 24 themed galleries, and an introductory essay by Howard Gillette placing the photographs in a historical context. The Richmond exhibit is somewhat smaller, with 10 themed galleries.

The collection of photographs can be browsed by theme or by using the site's interactive city maps. Some of the themes are geographic; some are tours surveying an area of the city. Other themes group images sharing similar characteristics such as post-industrial, churches, and people. Additionally, some of the images are linked to views of the subject at different periods to show change over time. The site also has a feature allowing visitors to post comments on the photographs. This site is of interest to anyone researching urban history in the 20th century or these two cities specifically.

Homepage for Mt. Vernon Estate and Gardens, George Washington's Virginia estate, this site offers valuable sources for researching the life and home of the first U.S. President. An exhibit contains more than 50 images of furniture, art, documents, and other Mount Vernon household objects. Each image is accompanied by a 150-word description of the artifact and its location or significance to the estate. A virtual tour of Mt. Vernon's mansion takes visitors through every room with a photograph and 350-word description of the room and its furnishings. An archaeology section describes digs at eight sites on the estate, a 500-word description of a current excavation of Washington's distillery, and a 1500-word essay on the Mt. Vernon mansion's restoration beginning in 1858. An Educational Resources section offers a fifth-grade lesson plan, complete with trivia about Washington, excerpts from his Rules on Civility, and anecdotes from his military career and presidency; a 2000-word essay on Washington's attitude toward slavery and information on his slaves' lives, including links to a facsimile copy of Washington's 1798 slave census and 18 images of paintings and artifacts depicting the everyday lives of Mt. Vernon's slaves. This site is ideal for researching Washington's life and home, and it could also be useful for those studying material culture and archaeology.

President Thomas Jefferson worked on designing his estate, Monticello, throughout much of his adult life, drawing heavily on classical architecture as well as the French architecture he became acquainted with during his time in Paris in the 1780s. This website presents an interactive map of Monticello, at its height a 5,000 acre plantation—its buildings, fields, orchards, and slave quarters—providing a window into Jefferson's domestic life.

Visitors can click on one of more than 25 locations on the Plantation, and see a short explanation of that place's function, as well as a small selection of current and historical photographs and documents pertaining to that location, including some of Jefferson's original building plans. Visitors can then virtually move inside Monticello itself through a 3-D tour of Jefferson's home, accompanied by text highlighting the social function of each room.

Also offered are virtual tours of the house, highlighting domestic life at Monticello and Jefferson's relationship with farming and gardening. Each of these tours is accompanied by a useful video introducing these topics and providing other background information about Jefferson's life and work.

This exhibit documents the history of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State from inception, in November 1938, to collapse, in November 1940, and eventual reconstruction in 1950. In 1940, the original structure was the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The bridge was initially referred to as "the Pearl Harbor of engineering," but the wavelike motion the bridge displayed soon earned it the nickname "Galloping Gertie." The exhibit divides the history of the infamous bridge into five themes--construction, opening, collapse, aftermath, and reconstruction--each with 15 to 30 photographs and newspaper articles accompanied by 50- to 100-word captions. A bibliography of more than 30 items rounds out this online exhibit and those interested in the impact of the bridge on the Gig Harbor Peninsula residents should visit the link Gig Harbor Museum. This is also a valuable site for anyone interested in engineering, aerodynamics, and Pacific Northwest history.