This website explores "girls' history" with 40 oral history interviews conducted by women's studies students at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Each interviewee was asked extensively about her girlhood. Questions focused on adolescence and growing up as well as the social, cultural, and physical implications of girlhood and personal experiences. Topics include family, race, sexuality, education, and women's issues. The archive includes brief biographies, video clips, and transcripts of interviews (arranged thematically), photographs, and reflections of the interview process. Most of the women interviewed were born and raised in Minnesota, although a few came from other states with a smaller number immigrating from other countries. The site is not searchable, and the video clips are not high quality.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) serves as a portal to the digital collections of more then 40 state, regional, and online-only libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. Created to strengthen access to public resources and to "create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps," the DPLA is an invaluable first stop for teachers and students looking for primary sources, particularly regional history sources.

Visitors to the website can search the more than 4,500,000 objects in the collections of participating institutions using keywords, returning results they can filter by format, owning institution, partner, date, language, location, and subject. Clicking on an object brings up detailed metadata, including creator, date of creation, and a description of the object, as well as a link to its original location online. Visitors who create a free account can save their search results, make them private or public, and share them via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Visitors can also browse objects on a map or timeline—a fantastic way to prompt thinking about how primary sources are located in time and space. The timeline stretches from 1000 BCE to the present. (Note that zooming into the map returns finer results.) In addition, more than eight virtual exhibits demonstrate how DPLA sources can be curated to tell stories about themes and events.

The DPLA's API (application programming interface) allows visitors with the know-how to create apps drawing on the DPLA's collections. An eclectic set of more than 10 apps lets visitors browse DPLA's search results as a "river of images," discover primary sources related to their Zotero bibliographies, and more.

A fantastic starting point for anyone looking for primary sources, teachers can feel confident pointing students towards the DPLA to begin research projects or turning to the DPLA themselves to find resources to support lesson plans.

This website features 85 selections from the "Golden Age of Radio," which lasted from the early 1920s until television replaced radio in many homes in the United States in the 1950s. Shows include original dramatic favorites such as Dragnet, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Sherlock Holmes, and the Radio Detective Story Hour, and adventure and western shows such as The Adventures of Superman, The Lone Ranger, and Batman Adventures. Other selections include shows discussing aspects of radio's Golden Age, and presenting clips from shows, such as Theater of the Mind and Yesterday's Radio, as well as shows devoted to music and radio soap operas. There are at least 10 episodes of each show available, and often more than 70. All shows can be streamed online, and many can be downloaded via an iTunes podcast. This website is now part of a larger website devoted to presenting more contemporary radio shows, some of which may not be appropriate for young audiences.

The stated purpose of this website is to provide an overview of World War I. This it does effectively through hundreds of essays, 3,100 encyclopedic entries, 618 biographies, 318 resources on the war's major diplomatic and military events, and a timeline. Primary documents include over 100 diaries and firsthand accounts of soldiers and politicians, 3,900 photographs, 651 propaganda posters, and 155 audio files of songs and speeches. Documents include treaties, reports, correspondence, memoirs, speeches, dispatches, and accounts of battles and sieges.

The site also provides 95 essays on literary figures who wrote about the war. While admittedly a work-in-progress, the site offers much material on the leaders who engaged their countries in war and on the experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought the battles.

This online presentation of an ethnographic field collection from the Library of Congress American Memory Project documents the religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking people from rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. It features the audio recordings and transcriptions of over 100 songs that Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University recorded during a 1940 research trip to the region. Recordings include alabados (hymns), folk dramas, wedding songs, and dance tunes. Descriptive information about the title, performers, genre, instrumentation, location and date of recording, and any other brief (10-25 words) notes about the music accompanies each tune. The collection also includes over 35 pieces of correspondence from Rael about his trip. The site offers a keyword search and is browsable by performers and titles. For persons interested in Spanish American culture, music, and folklife, this site is a good source.

This collection of commercially produced Mexican American vernacular music is the largest of its kind, with more than 100,000 recordings. The music, originally published between 1905 and the 1990s, is primarily in Spanish. This website presents digitized versions of roughly 30,000 recordings. The music ranges widely in style and includes lyric songs, canciones, boleros, rancheras, sones, instrumental music, and the first recordings of norte and conjunto music, as well as politically motivated speeches and comedy skits.

A browseable list of subjects shows that love (unrequited love, adultery, regrets), war (Korean War, Mexican Revolution, World War I and II), and praise (of country, guitar, mother) are common themes in the collection. Unfortunately, the songs are available to the general public only in 50-second sound clips. Users interested in gaining full access to a select group of songs for research are encouraged to contact the website's administrators.

Part of the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, this site features audio recordings of more than 350 songs and speeches from the Omaha Indian tribe in the 1890s and 1980s. It offers 44 wax cylinder recordings collected between 1895 and 1897, 323 speeches and songs from the 1983 Omaha Harvest Celebration Powwow, and 25 songs and speeches from the 1985 Hethu'shka Society concert at the Library of Congress.

More than 80 segments from interviews with members of the Omaha tribe conducted in 1983 and 1999 help to contextualize the music and spoken-word recordings, and more than 350 photographs from the 1983 powwow and 1985 concert illustrate Omaha Indian culture.

Each item is accompanied by brief (100–250 words) descriptions that give the names of speakers or performers, the date of the performance, and the original recording format. The 1983 powwow field notes are available in transcript and image forms (17 pages). Excerpts from Dorothy Sara Lee and Maria La Vigna, eds., Omaha Indian Music: Historical Recordings from the Fletcher/LaFlesche Collection (Washington, DC, Library of Congress, 1985) provide further context to the recordings.

The site also provides a stylized map of the Omaha Indian reservation, two selected bibliographies listing over 150 primary sources and scholarly works; and four related essays from Folklife Center News, 1981 to 1985. This site is searchable by keyword and browsable by medium and event. The Powwow audio is also available in sequence for those wishing to hear the entire performance. The site is easily navigable and ideal for those interested in Great Plains American Indian history and culture.

This website is the result of a collaboration among Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), the Springfield Armory, and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). The site provides a narrative of Shays’ Rebellion told through images, summaries, and primary sources—a wealth of materials for classroom teachers.

The Shays’ Rebellion website is designed to be navigated through a series of six historic scenes. Framed on either end by a prologue and epilogue, the scenes present the perspectives of key groups involved in the run-up to rebellion, as well as its aftermath. In “A Bloody Encounter,” for instance, the assault by Shays and his men on the Springfield arsenal is represented in pictures. By rolling a cursor over the image, users can learn more about the scene—the great strength of this approach is that information is contextualized and given greater meaning.

One of the most unique features on the site is that each scene is accompanied by the commentary of eyewitnesses and other figures from the time period. With background knowledge acquired from the scene and brief synopses of events, users are well prepared to understand these commentaries—an excellent use of primary sources.

The site can also be navigated by people, by artifacts and documents, or by themes and essays. Exploring it in any of these ways, however, can be a chaotic experience. The site also includes resources for extension activities like songs and music, a timeline, and a series of historic maps.

Shaping the Constitution revolves around the role of Virginia in early American military and political history.

The first section, Becoming Free and Independent States, offers an overview of the perspectives of early Virginians on the Revolutionary War. The page includes biographies of figures of note, ranging from George Washington to Billy, a slave impressed by the British Navy. Each biography offers titles and/or web links for further reading. The main draw of the section, though, is a collection of 32 primary sources—broadsides, portraits, maps, warrants, petitions, a cartoon, and more. Each primary source can be selected for additional information, a transcript, related sources, and/or a high-resolution copy of the source. One surprise worth noting is that selecting the high-res copy of the source sometimes provides a PDF file with multiple related sources, rather than just the one you may have thought you were downloading.

Each of the following sections follow a similar structure—biographies, primary sources, and a short text overview. Topics include Virginia and the Constitutional debate; Bill of Rights; and 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments.

An additional feature, located within the majority of the individual sections is a "For Educators" button. This button opens a list of lesson plans and their respective Virginia standards. Only the 15th and 19th Amendment portions of the site lack this option.

A laudable fact about this website is that it provides unpleasant sources (such as a photo of an Alexandria slave pen) as well as copies of major government documents. These sources are useful for showing precisely what facts of historical life various political decisions and amendments were created to change.