Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.

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 While the databases include previously published documents, many also contain thousands of pages of unpublished material.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.

Textbooks often present a quick, uncomplicated overview of Reconstruction—a vast oversimplification of a time of social upheaval, tension, and violence. After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas, a joint project of Queen's University Belfast, the University of Memphis, and the University of London, provides primary sources that take a closer look at the time period.

Focusing on the themes of labor, race, and citizenship, After Slavery presents sources from North and South Carolina as examples of trends nationwide. A 2,500-word Introduction explores Reconstruction and the rationale for choosing the Carolinas as the project's focus. About the Project explains the structure and rationale behind the website's learning units.

The Learning Units form the heart of the site. Ten units cover topics including emancipation, mobilization, land and labor, black soldiers, conservative reactions, justice, gender, poverty and white supremacy, coercion and resistance, and the Republican Party. Each unit includes a 400-word introduction and six or more primary documents with three to eight discussion questions each. Units can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs. An introductory essay explains the mission behind creation of the units, and Recommended Reading lists more than 80 books, 50 articles, and 15 primary sources.

As of December 7, 2012, other materials on the site are still content-light. Interactive Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint only two events—the Hamburg Massacre and the Cainhoy Riot—with five to seven subevents included in each, as well as five-item lists of related sources.

Interactive Timelines includes three timelines with one-sentence descriptions on each item. Timelines look at general Reconstruction history as well as Reconstruction in North and South Carolina. Teacher Resources currently features links to more than 30 digital collections and exhibits, research tools, military records, audiovisual resources, and more. The section notes that lesson plans will be added in the future.

A valuable resource for teachers looking to complicate the textbook narrative on Reconstruction, and for teachers covering North or South Carolina history.

A project of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project preserves the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee, WI. In the late 1960s, the open housing movement worked to break down housing restrictions that segregated the city's population. Milwaukee residents of all ages and walks of life supported or opposed this movement.

The site features more than 150 digitized primary sources from the period, including oral histories, letters to organizations, support and hate letters, meeting minutes, Henry Maier's 1967 mayor's log, speeches, press releases, photographs, official reports and research studies, video clips, curriculum and programming from Freedom Schools (alternative schools children could attend during school boycotts), and more. Sources can be searched by keyword and browsed by media type (audio, documents, photos, or video) or collection (materials are divided into 10 collections by relationship to prominent individuals and groups in the movement). Visitors can add sources to "My Favorites" and review them as they browse.

In addition, a downloadable map shows the division of Milwaukee neighborhoods in 1967 and the path of the Aug. 28 open housing march, and a timeline tracks local and national events from 1954 to 1976. A glossary of key terms gives the context for more than 60 acronyms, names, places, and other terms, and a bibliography lists more than 40 primary sources and more than 50 secondary sources.

Teachers may need to do a little extra legwork to contextualize the primary sources, but the collection can bring Civil Rights Movement history home to Wisconsin students, particularly those in Milwaukee and the surrounding area. Teachers nationwide can use the materials to explore the work of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP Youth Council, and local institutions like Freedom Schools and integration committees.

In this online exhibition from the Library of Congress you will find three primary source documents—the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—along with more than 350 other related sources including laws, acts, essays, letters, political cartoons, and more. The exhibit displays images of the documents in their original and in interactive forms.

Each of the three major documents appears on the home page. Clicking on a link that begins "Read more about the history of..." takes you to a collection of short (1-2 paragraph) essays on steps in the process of creating the document, with each step accompanied by related primary sources. By clicking on a link that begins “View all items from Creating the...” you are taken to a page where you can view all the available documents related to the major document.

Rather than presenting the documents as works that spontaneously came about, this site can be used to teach and learn about the steps that led to the writing of the documents. For example, if you are interested in documents that were written prior to the U.S. Constitution, you can find more than 50 primary sources related to and predating the U.S. Constitution, including the Articles of Confederation and Thomas Jefferson writing on black education. If you are overwhelmed by the number of sources, you can create a free myLoC account where you can download, save, and store the documents you are interested in.

The best part of the website is that you can interact with the documents, completely dissecting them. (In order to interact fully with the documents you need Microsoft Silverlight, free to download on the site.) Clicking on “Interactives” in the menu at the top of the screen takes you to the interactive documents. Once you choose a document, the screen splits in two; on the left an explanatory text overview appears and on the right the original handwritten primary source. By clicking the “Explore” icon and then "Show Themes" on the right-hand side, you can explore the many themes of the primary source. For example, if you click on "Explore" and "Show Themes," the exhibit highlights parts of the document related to “The Pursuit of Happiness,” "Consent of the Governed," or three other themes. Click on a section marked with "The Pursuit of Happiness" on the Declaration of Independence, and you will see an overview/explanation of the idea on the left. Then you have the option of clicking “Where does this idea come from?” Clicking on that brings up documents that are related to the theme, such as Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, with the related passage in each highlighted.

Clicking on "Explore" also lets you click on "Transcribe." "Transcribe" pops up a window that you can drag over the primary source. The window shows a transcription of the handwritten text beneath it, including any changes the writer made to the document.

Teachers as well as students in grades 6-12 will find this website useful in learning about the history of each of the three major primary sources and about where the ideas in these documents come from.

Teachinghistory.org Teacher Representative Karla Galdamez wrote this Website Review. Learn more about our Teacher Representatives.

Hope for America, an exhibition from the U.S. Library of Congress, focuses on the comedian Bob Hope and the marriage between humor, politics, and satire in the modern age. Various viewpoints are on display, which the site believes will allow visitors "...to draw their own conclusions regarding the interplay of politics and entertainment in American public life and its consequences for the nation’s political culture."

The site is divided into three basic themes: Political Humor, Causes and Controversies, and Blurring of the Lines. Each thematic section offers a basic overview, some poignant quotes, and links to items in the collection. A bibliography and list of events are also provided for further exploration in the top navigation menu.

It is worth noting that each of the three main thematic sections contain between seven to nine subsections. Users can choose to view the entire set of items in the three main sections, or by each subsection. In all, around 180 items are available for U.S. history teachers and students. Each item contains a brief description and most images can be viewed in larger sizes and/or downloaded for educational use.

This collection by the Library of Congress is highly recommended for educators and students of American history who want to gain a better understanding of the historical relationship between politics and comedy. Although Bob Hope is the center of the exhibit, comedians and satirists throughout the twentieth century are included. The scope of the exhibit, largely covering the entire twentieth century, is likewise helpful in understanding how humor and political concerns changed over time.