This site offers 121 edited documents written by students at the University of North Carolina between 1795 and 1868. Documents include letters, speeches, diary excerpts, compositions, and poems. Annotated transcriptions and images of handwritten pages are provided. The collection can be explored through 15 essays divided into six chapters, each covering a different period with links to the associated primary documents. Essay titles include "Early Student Rebellions," "Slaves and Servants," "Writing in the Academy," and "The Debating Societies."

The collection can also be browsed in its entirety or by name, topic, events, organizations, places, publications, genres, or authors. The collection can be searched by keyword or advanced search. Four introductory essays offer an overview of the collection as well as short essays on the value of documentary histories and possibilities for future research. Links to 20 published sources are provided as well as a bibliography of source materials. See also Documenting the American South.

This bilingual website (English and French) explores the history of the French presence in North America from the early 16th century to the end of the 19th century through more than 360 manuscripts, books, maps, and other documents. Each thematic presentation—"Exploration and Knowledge," "The Colonies," "Franco-Indian Alliances," "Imperial Struggles," and "The French and North America after the Treaty of Paris"—includes a title exhibit and additional exhibits that highlight particular items in the collection. Materials can also be browsed in the collections section.

A timeline (1515–1804) organizes events in French America by explorations, colonization and development, and conflicts and diplomacy, and places them in the context of events in France. Additionally, there are eight descriptive maps that show various Indian groups in contact with the French and the changes in political boundaries in North America from before 1763 to the era of the Louisiana Purchase.

This large, attractive site provides high-quality material on American history for historians and teachers. The collection contains more than 60,000 "rare and important" American historical documents, images, and objects from 1493 to 1998; about 10,000 of these are available online. Authors include George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln.

Each week an annotated, transcribed document is featured, and an archive contains 80 past featured documents. "Treasures of the Collection" offers 24 highlighted documents and images. Six online exhibits cover topics such as Alexander Hamilton, the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln, and topics such as freedom and battles. Podcasts with historians address issues such as Presidential history and the Great Depression. Additional resources include links to historical documents, published scholarship, and general history resources on the web.

Offering 16 separate databases of digitized materials, this website provides firsthand accounts (diaries, letters, and memoirs) and literary efforts (poetry, drama, and fiction). Twelve databases pertain to American history and culture.

"Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment" offers primary sources documenting cultural interactions from 1534 to 1850. "The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries" draws on more than 400 sources and supplies a day-by-day chronology with links to documents. "Black Thought and Culture" furnishes monographs, speeches, essays, articles, and interviews. "North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories" covers 1840 to the present. "North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950" provides full-text letters and diaries from more than 1,000 women—totaling more than 21,000 documents and approximately 120,000 pages—written between 1675 and 1950.

Five databases present American literary writings: "Latino Literature"; "Black Drama"; "Asian American Drama"; "North American Women's Drama"; and "American Film Scripts Online." In addition, "Oral History Online" provides a reference work with links to texts, audio, and video files. While the databases include previously published documents, many also contain thousands of pages of unpublished material. In addition to keyword searching, the databases provide "semantic indexing"—extensive categorical search capabilities.

In 1868, Laura Jernegan, six-year-old daughter of a whaling captain, put to sea with her parents and younger brother. This website, created by the Martha's Vineyard Museum, explores her family's four-year whaling expedition, focusing on Laura's own diary.

Two narratives ground the exhibit: "The Story of Whaling" and "Laura's Story." Each narrative is divided up into three sections—"Before the Voyage," "The Voyage" and "After the Voyage"—and consists of 14—15 individual "chapters," each a short essay of approximately 300—1600 words. "The Story of Whaling" describes the rise and fall of the whaling industry and the nature of a whaling voyage, including preparation and hiring crew.

"Laura's Story" narrates the voyage of the Roman, the ship on which Laura and her family set sail. The voyage included a stay in Hawaii, mutiny, and the Roman's sinking in the Arctic (everyone survived). "Laura's Story" also looks at the lives of Laura and her family before and after the voyage, as young children and as adults. Each essay include links to images, descriptions, and other sections of the website that clarify and enrich the text.

For Laura's own description of her time at sea, "Explore Laura's Journal" lets visitors browse her 43-page journal. Written in a child's bold handwriting, the journal is short and easy to read, and can be viewed in the original scans, as a text transcript, or with a magic lens feature that translates the writing into print as the mouse runs over a page.

Further background information supports the two narratives and Laura's journal, including:

• "About Whales," a mini-exhibit answering basic questions about six whale species;
• an interactive timeline reaching from 1774 to 1955, including both general world history events and whaling events;
• "Explore the Ship," a diagram of a whaling ship that visitors can click for information on crew positions and parts of the ship; and
• a "Map of Whaling."

This interactive world map lets visitors display features from six sets of information, turning each set on or off and overlaying them. The sets include the four routes of the Roman's journey, three typical whaling routes, posts and sites important to whaling, 1878 whaling grounds for four species, major ocean currents, and whale migration patterns for three species.

Finally, visitors can view zoomable photographs of 175 different whaling-related objects in "Artifacts," read the descriptions of 15 crew positions in "Meet the Crew," and browse 16 pieces of logbook art, 36 photos, and 53 whaling-related images in the "Picture Gallery." An A-to-Z glossary offers definitions for 180 historical and whaling terms. Visitors can also explore the biographies of five people, including all of the members of the Jernegan family and, in "More About," can read 10 more 1,000-3,000-word essays on subjects like race and whaling, women and whaling, and 19th-century children's literature.

In the "For Teachers" section, educators can download two units on whaling: a four-lesson unit for grades 1–3, or a six-lesson unit for 4–5. "For Further Study" features a bibliography of 75 books for children and adults and eight annotated links.

A thorough website centered around a very unique primary source—use it to invite young children into history through the voice of a peer!

A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.

"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.

Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.

Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."

"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.

An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering more than 36,000 items and 2.3 million pages on all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century American life. It is comprised of a range of publications helpful for researching social, cultural, intellectual, and religious history, as well as political and military history, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, charters and by-laws, cookbooks, maps, narratives, novels, plays, poems, sermons, songs, textbooks, and travelogues. It is especially useful for the history of printing, as it contains an exhaustive list of printers, booksellers, and publishers active in this time period as well as images and the full-text of most of the books, pamphlets, and broadsides they helped create.

Users can browse the imprints by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century North America.

Based on an exhibit of the same name, this website provides a look at the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) photographs of the Western United States from 1895 to 1924. The site is arranged for easy browsing into nine sections: DPC History, "How did they do it?," Cityscapes, Everyday Life, Foreign Views, Getting Around, Michigan Views, Nature, and Workplace; and each section contains 24 to 38 photographs. The first section covers the early years of the company and provides information about DPC photographers and the creation and distribution of pictures. The everyday life photos include images of cowboys shooting craps, children in Chinatown, and an African American Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, VA. The foreign views section consists of snapshots taken in Mexico, Venezuela, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. Roughly 40 photographs focus on the state of Michigan. The nature images, the most popular of the company's photographs, are majestic and many of them fed the growing tourist industry. The section of workplace images rounds out this site and includes harvest scenes, loggers in Michigan, smelters, oyster pickers in Louisiana, and cotton gin workers. For those interested in the history of photography, this easily navigable site is a valuable resource.

These materials come from a museum with approximately 4,000 pieces of racist memorabilia donated from Pilgrim's personal collection. Envisioned as an educational resource for scholars and students, this site contains most of the images within the museum collection, including sheet music, ashtrays, children's book covers, salt and pepper shakers, postcards, dolls, and matchbooks. The exhibit is divided thematically into 11 sections, including racist cartoons; Jezebel stereotypes; the tragic mulatto; and caricatures of the brute, picanninny, nigger, tom, mammy, coon, and golliwog. Each section includes a scholarly essay that provides historical context for the anti-black caricatures. For those interested in further research, the summaries (most between 2,000 and 4,000 words) offer extensive footnotes with primary, secondary, and online sources.

Of the 30 images within "The Brute Caricatures," users will find the covers of Charles Carrolls' The Negro a Beast, published in 1900, and D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation of interest. There are 142 picanninny images, including Buckwheat and the cover of the children's book "Little Sambo." There are images of 50 "Uncle Tom," 87 "Mammy," and 90 "Jezebel" caricatures, both cinematic and commercial. More than 100 pictures and objects bear the appellation "nigger," and 118 19th- and early-20th-century racist cartoons (2 Quicktime and 2 RealMedia) are available. The exhibit includes a radio interview with Dr. Pilgrim, along with links to 13 scholarly essays and relevant newspaper articles. The site will be of special interest to those researching the history of racist memorabilia.