Visitors can explore family life in Illinois from 1700 to the present in this site based on a 1992 museum exhibit. The site is divided into six time periods, each featuring biographical sketches providing "glimpses into the lifestyles and domestic situations of real people" at critical moments in Illinois and American history.

In addition, each period contains audio components; timelines; maps; examples of material culture; exercises comparing the lifestyles and experiences of various racial, ethnic, and economic groups; methodological explanations; and teaching aides such as grade-specific lesson plans, discussion ideas, classroom activities, and links to related sites.

Activities can be accessed at three levels of difficulty: Level I (grades 3-5), Level II (grades 6-9), and Level III (grades 10-12). A valuable resource for teachers interested in exposing students social history.

This site consists of hundreds of poems by major and minor figures--from Emily Dickinson to William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg to contemporary artists and writers--hundreds of links to poetry resources, and a "readings schedule" for a course in American poetry. Also offers materials as diverse as audio clips, newspaper articles, and television spots. Although the organization is haphazard, this is a rewarding and eclectic site packed with primary documents and leads for further work.

A syllabus and collection of documents for a course in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, exploring "two simultaneous tendencies in American life": fascination with "personal transformation—with self making, with economic mobility, and also the difference between the real and the fake"; and the emergence of detection "and the wide range of new techniques—like fingerprints, mug shots, and criminology generally—designed to pin down identity." Presents an array of primary material designed to examine these tendencies, organized in four excursions to an urban newsstand, a saloon, a theater, and a police station.

Includes the Horatio Alger novel Ragged Dick; 14 early motion pictures produced between 1897 and 1905; images depicting various "sciences" of detection used by urban police departments; photographs of saloons and crime scenes; an interview and audio file of pianist and composer Eubie Blake on ragtime music; an excerpt from the 1899 book Vitalogy, on achieving "vigorous manhood"; and posters from urban minstrel shows. Also gives a bibliography drawn from course readings.

These 181 firsthand accounts of North American and Canadian exploration range from Viking stories such as The Saga of Eric the Red from circa 1,000 CE to journal entries written in the early 19th century on a trapping expedition in the Southwest. Documents include the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Materials include rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives.

Users can browse the full archive or by expedition, settlement, geographic region, and U.S. state or Canadian province. Each document is individually searchable and accompanied by a short background essay and a reference map. There are also 150 images available, including woodcuts, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Highlights follows the collection chronologically and connects moments in American history with eyewitness accounts.

This archival site makes available public papers and government investigative and research reports concerning the history of transportation in the U.S. It contains Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Department of Transportation railroad accident investigation reports from 1911 to 1994, with more than 4,000 reports, as well as aircraft accident reports from 1934 to 1965, with more than 790 reports. "Turner, Fairbank, and MacDonald" papers contains more than 540 public papers of Thomas H. MacDonald, H.S. Fairbank, and F.C. Turner of the Bureau of Public Roads and later the Federal Highway Administration. These include reports, speeches, development plans, and memoranda. Fairbank's papers cover the period 1920 to 1954, MacDonald's from 1919 to 1952, and Turner's from 1947 to 1971. Other documents include civil aeronautics manuals; Federal Aviation Administration research reports; historical Department of Transportation orders; U.S. Coast Guard navigation and inspection circulars from the 1960s to the present; and reports from the 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1934 National Conferences on Street and Highway Safety. Each collection of materials can be searched individually.

HSI was created in order to facilitate the use of primary sources in history education. By using the concept of historians as detectives, the site has collected several "cases" for students to examine using a pre-vetted set of related primary sources. The site describes the HSI model as having four steps:

1. Becoming a Detective—basic context and introduction of an overarching question
2. Investigating the Evidence—examining primary sources
3. Searching for Clues—answering questions which organize analysis of primary sources
4. Cracking the Case—presentation of an evidence-based conclusion and questions formed by the investigation

Site navigation is not as intuitive as it could be. Be prepared to use the "back" button frequently. That quibble aside, the site offers a good variety of cases—the March on Frankfurt, children in the Civil War, refusal to attend the Constitutional Convention, slavery in Virginia, school desegregation, the Boston Massacre, the demise of Jamestown, the dropping of the bomb on Japan, Elvis and Nixon's meeting, a genealogy case, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and Nathaniel Bacon. There is also a fictional murder/cause-of-death case which can be used to introduce students to the process and way of thinking which each of the historical cases requires.

This website presents historical sources and teaching materials that address notions of childhood and the experiences of children and youth throughout history and around the world. Primary sources can be found in a database of 200 annotated primary sources, including objects, photographs and paintings, quantitative evidence, and texts, as well as through 50 website reviews covering all regions of the world. More than 20 reviews and more than 70 primary sources relate to North American history.

The website also includes 20 teaching case studies written by experienced educators that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth, as well as 10 teaching modules that provide historical context, strategies for teaching with sets of roughly 10 primary sources, and a lesson plan and document-based question. These teaching resources cover topics ranging from the transatlantic slave trade, to girlhood as portrayed in the novel Little Women, to children and human rights. Eight case studies relate to North American history, as do two teaching modules.

The website also includes a useful introductory essay outlining major themes in the history of childhood and youth and addressing the use of primary sources for understanding this history.

This website—a small portion of the larger Documenting the American South project—presents the full text of more than 130 works of literature by more than 75 authors, published between the mid-1600s and 1920. Notable works include the first history of Virginia, written in 1673 by House of Burgesses member Robert Beverley, poems by Edgar Allen Poe, Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery, and several of Mark Twain's and Kate Chopin's works. Other works include collections of slave songs, sermons, and narratives published in the mid-1800s, including Frederick Douglass's famous narrative, several works addressing Ku Klux Klan activities, and many lesser-known works of fiction. Though there is no built-in search feature, all works are presented as lengthy text files and can be searched using a computer's "Find" function. Users new to Southern history may want to turn first to the "Introduction," which provides brief essays on many aspects of Southern history, literature, and culture, including early colonial-era literature, the genres of biography and autobiography, black literature, the Civil War, travel writing, folklore, and humor.

This well-organized and useful site provides full-text versions of over 200 classic American and European literary works, as well as reference materials for scholarly use and readers' enjoyment. The site is divided into four sections. The Reference category includes 27 reference works, from dictionaries to Gray's Anatomy. The Verse section offers over 60 collections from poets like William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman. The Fiction category provides over 75 works from authors like Leo Tolstoy, Agatha Christie, and Charles Dickens. And the Nonfiction section includes over 30 works from figures such as 18th century women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, writings by Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The site is remarkably easy to navigate and provides keyword author/subject/title/phrase indices for searching among works. The individual works are also searchable by index and table of contents. This site is ideal for researching the lives and works of many prominent literary figures.