This website offers an archive of more than 35,000 items from 75 individual collections at nearly 30 institutions in Illinois. Items include black-and-white and color photographs, post cards, audio recordings, maps, books, newspaper articles, newsletters and bulletins, handbills, and film clips. The focus of all the collections is the history of Illinois, its places, and people. A strength of the collections is the large number of photographs of residential and commercial buildings from cities and towns throughout Illinois.

Visitors can browse the contents of all collections by city, organization, or proper name. Once in a collection, other collections can be individually browsed by selecting from the collections dropdown menu. All collections are searchable by such fields as subject, description, creator, publisher, contributors, date, type, or format. Clicking on the thumbnail image brings up a new window with a large image and descriptive data. There are also 14 exhibits on various topics such as "History of Park Ridge, 1841-1926" and "Brides of Yesteryear." This is a useful collection of primary source material on the social and cultural history of Illinois.

The Civil War in Art website offers a pictorial entry point to the Civil War. The site consists of a set of web exhibits, with text by specialists at DePaul University, as well as photographs, images of statuary, paintings, and more. The artworks and their descriptions have been contributed by a variety of Chicago-area institutions—the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago History Museum, Chicago Park District, Chicago Public Library, DuSable Museum of African Art, Newberry Library, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Two features are worth noting. One, the broad definition of artwork adopted by the site includes documentary practices such as portrait photography and journalistic sketches. Two, the site states that the majority of the works are from Northern states. Educators should keep artists' perspectives and intended audiences in mind as they analyze images and guide students in analyzing them.

Each exhibit offers a few short pages of text, alongside selected works of art. Hover over bold names and selected words to reveal a definition or short biography. In addition, all of the artworks referenced can be accessed together on the final page of each exhibit or, for the more than 120 artworks located throughout the website, as a list under "Image Gallery." Clicking on a piece enlarges the image and presents details about the artwork's content and context, as well as a list of suggested classroom questions and further reading. Exhibits available at the time of writing cover causes of the Civil War, life in the military, emancipation and freedom, the Northern homefront, Lincoln, and remembering the Civil War.

There are three additional smaller sections. "Glossary," lists all of the vocabulary terms and short biographies available as "mouse-over" text in the exhibits. The page also offers downloadable PDFs of the vocabulary and the biographies. "Classroom Projects" offers three middle-to-high-school-level lessons, each of which has been implemented in Chicago area classrooms. Here, you can also access a file on teaching with art. Finally, "Additional Resources" provides external links for further enrichment.

A modestly-sized exhibition of visual materials from a variety of labor-related organizations that focuses on ways in which artists and others have celebrated working people and labor unions in 20th-century America. Includes 44 photographs, 19 images of leaflets and pamphlets, 13 buttons, badges, and ribbons, 25 examples of cartoon art, eight songbook and sheet music covers, six images from murals, and nine covers from the journal Labor Defender. Covers themes of workers at work, strikes, parades, demonstrations, and the civil rights movement. Provides exhibits on original art depicting labor, the New York City "culture of solidarity," and the early struggles of the Hotel and Motel Trades Council. Materials are identified with short descriptions of up to 100 words. Offers links to 61 related sites. Useful for those studying political uses of visual culture in 20th-century America.

Joe Hill was created as a companion to PBS channel KUED's documentary on the c. 1900 labor movement figure of the same name. Born in Sweden, Joe Hill's life is largely an enigma. Over time, he became involved in the Industrial Workers of the World, and was known as a writer of labor movement songs. Eventually, Hill was tried for murder, resulting in an outcry from sources as varied as the Swedish ambassador to the American Federation of Labor.

This website provides a brief biography of Joe Hill (also known as Joel Hagglund), introductions to major protestors against his sentence, an overview of the impact of his songwriting, audio recordings and lyrics of several of Hill's songs, lengthy sections of the formal appeal against Hill's sentence, and an interview with a lawyer and professor concerning the case and its legal and social context. Low-resolution images of Joe Hill, his cartoons, labor propaganda, and correspondence related to his trial and sentence are located throughout the site. In some cases, transcriptions are available of historical documents.

Joe Hill also contains information on various labor professions in the early 20th century. You can read about mining, immigration, the Scofield Mine Disaster, and more. Included are five interviews with professors and authors who contributed to the documentary film.

A final section on labor today offers readers an opportunity to submit their own labor stories, as well as a list of publications related to the life and death of Joe Hill.

Site navigation is not as intuitive as it could be. The best way to peruse the "Story" section, for example, may be to use the timeline, rather than to move through the pages in the order the "next" arrows would have you do. Using the timeline, however, will link you to sections in both the "Story" and "Legal Battle" section of the site. Expect to use your browser's back button frequently.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), the prolific and talented children's book author, was also a political cartoonist. From 1941 to 1943, Seuss drew over 400 editorial cartoons as the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. All 400 of his cartoons have been scanned onto this website by the staff of the Mandeville Special Collection Library at the University of California, San Diego, which houses the original cartoons in the Dr. Seuss Collection.

The cartoons are primarily related to issues surrounding World War II; and include caricature images of political figures like Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There are also a series of 10 War bond cartoons that Seuss drew for PM.

The site has a brief (500-word) introduction that gives an overview of Seuss's life and career. Currently the images are accessible by the month and year of publication or by subject. The site is somewhat difficult to use because of the lack of keyword search, but it is still a rich resource for information on popular culture, politics, and the media during World War II.

A well-designed introduction to the major political events in Massachusetts that preceded and coincided with the beginning of the American Revolution. This website provides a series of 15 essays on the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Sons of Liberty, the Townshend Acts, boycotts, the Boston Massacre, the Committees of Correspondence, the Tea Party, the Coercive Acts, the First Continental Congress, Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress, the Battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington, and the Declaration of Independence.

Each of these essays is keyed to a selection of the site's more than 150 primary documents—letters, newspaper articles, government acts, broadsides and more—that are available in high-resolution scanned versions on the site. The essay on the Declaration of Independence, for example, links to images of the various drafts of the document, as well as letters between John and Abigail Adams exalting over the Declaration.

The website also has brief biographies of the political actors in the historical drama that was unfolding. In addition, the website has a section that approaches the same material with lesson plans and curriculum objectives appropriate for the use of American history teachers. A short orientation for students is also included.

[FREE AND SUBSCRIPTION]

These 22 exhibits present free access to a wealth of texts and images on a variety of subjects dealing with 19th-century American history. Each section provides illustrations, articles, editorials, and overviews. Materials include four exhibits on politics and elections, including the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Six exhibits deal with race and ethnicity, including slavery and Chinese Americans. Three exhibits offer material on business and consumer culture, such as advertising history and tobacco.

Additional exhibits include "The American West"; "A Sampler of Civil War Literature"; "Russian-American Relations, 1863–1905"; and "The World of Thomas Nast." A subscription-based website presents the entire run of Harper's Weekly. With free registration, Nineteenth-Century Advertising presents an archive of 40,000 advertisements that appeared in Harper's Weekly.

This site offers a large archive of selected documents, reports, records, maps, photographs, newspapers, artifacts, and oral history interviews. Items are searchable by ethnic group, keyword, archive, type of material, date, or subject. Brief historical overviews and bibliographies for each ethnic group profiled are also available in the archive section. Another section has lessons plans for teachers on African Americans, immigration and settlement, migration, and ethnic culture and identity, 1850-1950. It also offers tutorials on using the archive, using history databases on the web, interpreting photographs, interpreting documents, and interpreting oral history. Historical overviews are provided on the various ethnic groups that settled the Columbia River Basin.

A discussion forum offers a place to talk about discoveries in the archive or questions. Topics currently include ethnic groups, ethnicity and race, work and labor, immigration and migration, family life, religion, social conditions, discrimination, and civil rights. A very useful site for researching or teaching the social and cultural history of the Columbia River Basin.

An exhibition on Jewish life in America emphasizing the themes of accommodation, assertion, adaptation, and acculturation. The website features more than 200 illustrations, portraits, and images of books and documents from Library of Congress collections. The website offers an explanatory overview of the exhibition and four brief electronic exhibits focused that help to tell a part of the Jewish story in America from 1654 to the present. Some of the items highlighted by the exhibition include the first book printed in the English settlements of America, The Bay Psalm Book printed in 1640, the first published American Jewish sermon, and a hand-drawn plaque from c. 1942 with dual Hebrew prayers for Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. A small bibliography lists 10 books plus six books for children. The site provides an introduction to the Library of Congress collections and is useful for teaching about the history of Jewish life in America.