The Presidential Timeline curates and presents primary sources drawn from twelve Presidential Libraries and Museums, institutions housing and presenting archival materials for the presidents from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. Under "Interactive Timeline," you can choose any of the 12 presidents—Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or William Jefferson Clinton—and explore his life.

Timelines consist of at least two sections: "Early Life and Career" and "Presidency." All timelines except Roosevelt's, Kennedy's, and Clinton's also include a "Post-Presidency" section. Marks on the timeline indicate events of interest in the president's life and career; click on a mark to read a brief summary of the event, and to view primary sources (a + sign in the mark indicates primary sources are available).

Browse "Exhibits," also under "Interactive Timeline," for more than 30 collections of short essays, accompanied by 2–6 primary sources per essay, covering major events and topics related to the presidents' lives and careers. Topics covered stretch from "The Stock Market Crash, October 1929" to "William J. Clinton and the Supreme Court, 1993-2001."

Try the "Gallery" to search more than 1,500 primary sources (including artifacts, maps and charts, video, photographs, sounds recordings, and documents) by keyword, library of origin, date, or source type.

The "Educators" section includes 14 ready-to-go activities, on topics ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Iran Hostage Crisis to Bill Clinton's visit to Little Rock Central High School. Students and teachers can view pre-selected primary sources online in each activity, with suggested rubrics, applicable standards, and links to related sources also included. "Resources" links out to 16 websites recommended for history and primary sources, education, and technology, while "Multimedia" rounds up more than 50 audio and video primary source clips for download.

If you can't access the interactive Flash version of the timeline, try the HTML "Text Version" that includes the same primary sources.

In 2008, the Smithsonian launched History Explorer, in partnership with Verizon's Thinkfinity. Designed as a portal into the National Museum of American History's online resources, the site lets users search or browse the museum's resources. Use the keyword search to look up artifacts, interactives/media, lessons/activities, primary sources, reviewed websites, reference materials, and worksheets; narrow the search by selecting grade levels, historical era, resource type (artifact, lesson, worksheet, etc.), and/or cross-curricular connection.

Or browse by content type, using the tabs at the top of the page—"Lessons and Activities" contains more than 300 resources designed for teacher presentation; "Interactives and Media" contains more than 100 resources including audio, video, or interactive components; and "Museum Artifacts" contains more than 300 artifacts suitable for object-based learning. All individual entries list related content and relevant National History Standards and teaching strategies.

"Themes" offers collections of resources for major U.S. history topics such as immigration and civil rights; "Books" lists synopses for nearly 300 books suitable for reading levels varying from preschool to adult; and "Teacher Resources" includes information on teaching with primary sources, webinars, and joining the Thinkfinity Community. Check "Web Links" for links out to more than 100 history websites, chosen for design, usability, and content.

Founded in 1846 and chartered in 1853, the Wisconsin State Historical Society is the oldest American historical society to receive continuous public funding. This website provides a host of online collections containing thousands of documents and images addressing Wisconsin's social, political, and cultural history, drawn from the Historical Society's collections.

Highlights include full-text access to 80 histories of Wisconsin counties, and 1,000 more articles, memoirs, interviews, and essays on Wisconsin history and archaeology first published between 1850 and 1920; thousands of articles from the Wisconsin Magazine of History; and hundreds of objects form the Society's Museum, including moccasins, dolls, quilts, ceramics, paintings, and children's clothing.

Other objects can be viewed at the website's Online Exhibits section, which includes objects from exhibits on Presidential elections, Wisconsin's Olympic speed skaters, the Milwaukee Braves, Jewish women, and family labor in Milwaukee after World War II.

The website also provides a vast collection of images available through Wisconsin Historical Images, including photographs, drawings, and prints relating to both regional history, as well as more national histories of 19th-century exploration, mass communications, and social action movements.

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.

Funded by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as a project of the U.S. Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, this exhibit focuses on depictions of slaves on Confederate currency. The project treats currency as a way to interpret the culture and identity of the southern people during the Civil War. The site offers over 70 images of Confederate Currency printed by individual southern states and provides roughly 500-word narratives of the general history and economic environment of the Confederate states as background to the interpretation of the images. The images are grouped both by state of origin and thematically, in seven categories that describe the kinds of activities that slaves are depicted performing on the money: Individuals with Cotton; Individuals with Assorted Tasks; Field Scenes; Stylistic Scenes; Post-Civil War Scenes; Sugar Plantations; and Transportation. There are 15-20 word captions with each image describing the currency on which the image appeared. There is a list of ten Web links and a bibliography of over 50 scholarly books and articles on the Confederate economy and currency. This site is useful for researching the economic history of the southern states as well as for learning about southern identity during the Civil War.

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.

Visitors to this site are invited to learn about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln primarily through artifacts and relics in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society. More than 100 images of artifacts, documents, photographs, and lithographs, in addition to more than 50 quotes from contemporary testimonies, illustrate how examination of a variety of types of evidence can help to illuminate events from the past. In addition, the site presents the story of Charles Gunther, a Chicago confectioner who purchased a Richmond prisoner-of-war camp and reconstructed it in Chicago in order to display his growing collection of Americana, which the Society acquired upon his death. The site also includes two videos on techniques of examining material evidence; audio recordings of tunes from the period and a musical tribute to Lincoln that was performed at his Chicago funeral; a registry of 29 Lincoln relics in the Society's collection; a glossary of 11 technical and historical terms; a bibliography of more than 130 published sources; listings for 28 related sites; and a virtual tour of the Society's Conservation Laboratory. Of interest to students of the Lincoln assassination, the history of museums and Americana collectors, and to those intrigued by the use of material culture to help answer questions about the past.

This site, created by Professor Emeritus Leslie V. Brock, deals with the study of American colonial currency. During the colonial period, each colony issued its own paper money, which caused considerable conflict with Britain in the 18th century. This site contains five full-text 18th-century pamphlets on colonial economic and currency issues from 1720 to 1749; ten other contemporary writings about the economic situation in the colonies, including sermons, currency acts, and letters to Britain's Board of Trade, the governing body for colonial economic issues. The site also offers one article and excerpts from a book by scholars of colonial economy, and links to six other scholarly essays on similar topics. There are links to ten tables from Brock's book, Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates, as well as a very thorough bibliography of over 70 scholarly works on colonial economies. Additionally, the site offers a link to a site that provides images with roughly 100-word explanations of over 150 species of paper currency, lottery tickets, and fiscal documents from the 18th-century Anglo-American colonies and links to 14 other sources of information on monetary history. This is an ideal source for teaching and researching the colonial economies and money in 18th-century America.

This site, created by a graduate student at the University of Virginia, provides a useful introductory and historical overview for the persistent stereotype of "poor white trash," a subject not unknown but surely under-studied. An 8,000-word essay, divided into five sections—"media," "religion," "race," "lifestyle" and "work"—forms the core of the site, though readers will find a handful of illustrations and pictures in each section. "Media" is best developed and most interesting. There author Angel Price has written about "Lil'Abner" and other comic strips, television programs such as the "Dukes of Hazzard," and works of literature that have both fostered and refuted images of poor white men and women. A handful of primary documents are also presented here, including brief selections by 19th-century humorists Augustus Longstreet and Simon Suggs. Readers will find, too, the full text of historian Henry Nash Smith's classic book, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. The background text, which draws from 29 scholarly and popular sources, is uneven yet generally reliable, particularly useful for students unacquainted with the topic. The site is somewhat difficult to read, owing to a dark navigating bar at the bottom.

An archive of nearly 300 images and approximately 500 text files relating to the post-WWI Red Scare, created by Robert Leo Klein, the Web Coordinator and Digital Resources Developer at the William and Anita Newman Library, Baruch College, CUNY. The weekly compendium, The Literary Digest, constitutes "the primary source of material for this database." Klein notes, in describing his site, that "because the anti-red hysteria was so emblematic of the time" "we use it in the context of this database as a short-hand way of expressing the whole period." Whether or not this interpretation succeeds, this site is an impressive source for first-hand documents. Users will find them organized chronologically, as well as by more than 100 subject headings. No background text is offered, but students curious about the history of antiradicalism will discover here a rewarding presentation.