For Us the Living is a resource for teachers that engages high school students through online primary-source based learning modules. Produced for the National Cemetery Administration's Veterans Legacy Program, this site tells stories of men and women buried in Alexandria National Cemetery, and helps students connect these stories to larger themes in American history. Primary sources used include photographs, maps, legislation, diaries, letters, and video interviews with scholars.

The site offers five modules for teachers to choose from, the first of which serves as an introduction to the cemetery's history. The other four cover topics such as: African American soldiers and a Civil War era protest for equal rights, the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth after Lincoln’s assassination, commemoration of Confederates during Reconstruction, and recognition of women for their military service. Most of the modules focus on the cemetery’s early history (founded in 1862) although two modules reach into the post-war era. Each module is presented as a mystery to solve, a question to answer, or a puzzle to unravel. Students must use historical and critical thinking skills to  uncover each story. Each module ends with two optional digital activities, a historical inquiry assignment and a service-learning project, related to the module theme.

Teachers should first visit the “Teach” section which allows them to preview each module (including its primary sources, questions and activities), learn how to get started, and see how the site’s modules connect with curriculum standards. In order to access the modules for classroom use, teachers do have to create their own account, but the sign up process is fast, easy, and best of all, free! The account allows teachers to set up multiple classes, choose specific module(s) for each class, assign due dates, and view student submissions.

In conjunction with the National Park Service, Clemson University has digitized over 350,000 cultural heritage objects and 1.5 million pages of unpublished sources housed in over 20 national parks and historic sites. All images are high-resolution and downloadable.

Each park’s page contains a number of source collections, generally grouped by topic or time period. Open Parks Network allows users to find sources in a number of ways. Users may search by park, source collection, or keyword. For instance, the user can choose to see all collections and items from Andersonville National Historic Site by clicking on the park’s name.

Alternatively, users can navigate directly to a collection of Outer Banks Shipwrecks by browsing an overview of each park’s collections. Open Parks Network also features a map illustrating the number of sources from each geographical location that users can use to access sources. Each of these options are conveniently located in a single “Explore” tab.

The classroom utility of Open Parks Network’s sources varies widely. While the sources within some collections could be beneficial for classroom source analysis and research (e.g., the collection of Civil War Newspaper Illustrations on the Fort Sumter National Monument page), other collections would be of greater use to those with a specialized interest in a park’s operational history (e.g., the collection of Kings Mountain National Military Park Personnel). None of the sources come with any descriptive text, which can make it difficult to contextualize sources.

Instructors and students may find Open Parks Network useful for a variety of classroom activities, including using sources to encourage historical thinking about the past that the parks memorialize or about the parks themselves. This site might be of particular interest for teaching about the National Park Service, given its centennial anniversary in 2016.

This website overviews the early history of the U.S. Parcel Post system. Although the website states that it examines “one hundred years of parcels, packages, and packets,” most of the content is from the first few years of the service, 1913 through 1915. An introduction and six subsections—Congressional Opposition, The First Packages, The Oddest Parcels, The Service in Use, Preparing for All of Those Packages, and A Century of Posted Parcels—feature short essays and 25 photographs and cartoons.

Though the website is text-heavy, teachers could potentially use its resources with students to examine early 20th-century United States history or changes in communication within the United States.

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.

The private organization behind this website is in the process of digitizing millions of records from the Lincoln Administration (March 4, 1861, through April 15, 1865), drawing from collections at the National Archives; the State Treasury, Justice, and War Departments; and other federal offices and agencies.

These records include pardon case files, applications for Federal jobs, the papers of Generals Ambrose Burnside and Henry Halleck, records on the capture of Jefferson Davis and the John Surratt trial, and numerous telegrams and letters about all aspects of Presidential business, as well as maps, photographs, and newspaper articles.

Though the majority of these records are accessible by subscription only ($150/year for individuals, more for school districts and libraries), a few are freely available at the website: thumbnails of 35 photographs (most available in higher quality elsewhere), and roughly 50 political cartoons (too small to read).

More useful for the non-subscriber is the inclusion of 100-200 word descriptions of many of the newspaper publications included in the archive, as well as video footage of several scholarly conferences and presentations about Lincoln.

An interactive timeline of Lincoln's entire life is also included, interspersed with video footage of scholars discussing important events, as well as staged audio recordings of several of Lincoln's letters and speeches, such as a letter he wrote to Mary Owens in 1837 before she broke off their courtship.

For teachers, the website presents a list of 20 links to outside lesson plans covering many themes in Lincoln's life and Presidency.

This archive offers a collection of more than 900,000 photographs, maps, letters, documents, books, artifacts, and other items relating to all aspects of Texas history, from prehistory through the 20th century. Subjects include agriculture, arts and crafts, education, immigration, military and war, places, science and technology, sports and recreation, architecture, business and economics, government and law, literature, people, religion, social life and customs, and the Texas landscape and nature. Some subjects include sub-categories. For instance, social life and customs, with 694 items, includes 13 sub-categories, such as clothing, families, food and cooking, homes, slavery, and travel. The visitor can also search the collection by keyword.

Resources for educators include seven "primary source adventures," divided into 4th- and 7th-grade levels, with lesson plans, preparatory resources, student worksheets, and PowerPoint slideshows. Subjects of the lessons include Cabeza de Vaca, Hood's Texas Brigade in the Civil War, life in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the journey of Coronado, the Mier Expedition, runaway slaves, the Shelby County Regulator Moderator war, and a comparison of Wichita and Comanche village life. This website offers useful resources for both researching and teaching the history of Texas.

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.

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 interactive case study explores the 18th-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard and the construction of two late 20th-century historical studies based on the diary: historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's PBS film by the same name.

The site provides facsimile and transcribed full-text versions of the 1,400-page diary. An archive offers images of more than 50 documents on such topics as Ballard's life, domestic life, law and justice, finance and commerce, geography and surveying, midwifery and birth, medical information, religion, and Maine history. Also included are five maps, present-day images of Augusta and Hallowell, ME, and a timeline tracing Maine's history, the history of science and medicine, and a history of Ballard and Hallowell. The site offers suggestions on using primary sources to conduct research, including essays on reading 18th-century writing and probate records, searching for deeds, and exploring graveyards. A bibliography offers nearly 150 scholarly works and nearly 50 websites.

Presents about 50 facsimile reproductions and transcriptions of original documents, newspapers, books, autobiographies, biographies, portraits, and maps from the 18th and early 19th centuries. Examples include the Declaration of Independence, the Jay Treaty, George Washington's journal of his trip to the Ohio Valley, published in the 1754 Maryland Gazette, and 15 contemporary obituaries of well-known figures. Portraits include 24 statesmen and 12 "notable women." The site also furnishes guidelines for deciphering early American documents; seven "short films of noteworthy events," including a 35-minute feature entitled "The Life of George Washington"; four discussion forums; a collection of interactive crossword puzzles; the online journal, The Early America Review; and a news-ticker relating events that occurred "On This Day in Early America." Includes an "Early American Digital Library" from which visitors can view more than 200 digital images from early American engravings of people, places, and events (full-size images are available for purchase). Created by a collector of early Americana.