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You Are Here: Home > US History
Topic: US History
Tip: Press ctrl and F (or apple and F on a Mac) to perform a keyword search of this page. To keyword search all Best of History Web Sites pages use the search engine located on the home page.
Top 5 U.S. History Sites
Library of Congress
An outstanding and invaluable site for American history and general studies. Contains primary and secondary documents, exhibits, map collections, prints and photographs, sound recordings and motion pictures. The LOC's American Memory Historical Collections, a must-see, contains the bulk of digitalized materials, but the Exhibitions Gallery is enticing and informative as well. The LOC also offers a Learning Page that provides activities, tools, ideas, and features for educators and students.
Center for History and New Media: History Matters
A production of the American Social History Project/Center of Media and Learning, City of University New York, and the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, History Matters is a wonderful online resource for history teachers and students. Among the many digital resources are lesson plans, syllabi, links, and exhibits. The Center for History and New Media''s resources include a list of "best" web sites, links to syllabi and lesson plans, essays on history and new media, a link to their excellent History Matters web site for U.S. History, and more. Resources are designed to benefit professional historians, high school teachers, and students of history.
Digital History
This impressive site from Steven Mintz at the University of Houston includes an up-to-date U.S. history textbook; annotated primary sources on United States, Mexican American, and Native American history, and slavery; and succinct essays on the history of ethnicity and immigration, film, private life, and science and technology. Visual histories of Lincoln's America and America's Reconstruction contain text by Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney. The Doing History feature lets users reconstruct the past through the voices of children, gravestones, advertising, and other primary sources. Reference resources include classroom handouts, chronologies, encyclopedia articles, glossaries, and an audio-visual archive including speeches, book talks and e-lectures by historians, and historical maps, music, newspaper articles, and images. The site's Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to pose questions to professional historians.
PBS Online
A great source for information on a myriad of historical events and personalities. PBS's assorted and diverse web exhibits supplement their television series and generally include a summary of each episode, interviews (often with sound bites), a timeline, primary sources, a glossary, photos, maps, and links to relevant sites. PBS productions include American Experience, Frontline and People's Century. Go to the PBS Teacher Source for lessons and activities -- arranged by topic.
CNN.com Archives
The CNN Archives feature special in-depth reports on key current American (and World) events, issues and personalities. Most special reports supply historical overviews, articles, photographs, timelines or chronologies, video clips, maps, interviews, sources and more.
U.S. History in the Classroom
Here are some creative, engaging and activity-oriented lessons & web sites on U.S. History:
NEW "Day in Life of Hobo" podcast
This interdisciplinary creative writing/historical simulation activity incorporates blogging and podcasting and calls on students to research the plight of homeless teenagers during the Great Depression and then create their own fictionalized account of a day in the life of a Hobo. This project will be featured in the spring edition of Social Education, published by the National Council of Social Studies.
Do History: Martha Ballard
DoHistory is an interactive site that presents students with historical documents and engages them in the art of "doing" history. Based upon the 200 year old diary of colonial midwife Martha Ballard, DoHistory includes a searchable copy of Ballard's diary and thousands of original documents. DoHistory was developed and is maintained by the Film Study Center at Harvard University and is hosted and maintained by the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
NEW "Social Mobility in America" Audio Blogging Activity.
This group audio blogging activity calls on students to compare social mobility and social inequality in America today with the "Gilded Age" of the late 19th century.
The Valley of the Shadow
The Valley of the Shadow depicts two communities, one Northern (Franklin County, Pennsylvania) and one Southern (Augusta County, Virginia), through the experience of the American Civil War. Students explore the conflict via the thousands of sources for the period before, during, and after the Civil War for Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They can write their own histories or reconstruct the histories of others. The project is intended for secondary schools, community colleges, libraries, and universities.
Race for the Super Bomb (PBS)
There are some quirky but fascinating features at this site, including a Panic Quiz and a Nuclear Blast Map. Visitors to the site can simulate the drop of 50s-era atomic bombs on American cities and get death and damage reports. Visitors are also treated to interviews, film footage of explosions, a map of target sites in the U.S., a weapons stockpile list for 1945 to 1997, a timeline, primary sources, transcripts, a teacher's guide and a people and events section
The Sport of Life and Death
The Sport of Life and Death was voted Best Overall Site for 2002 by Museums and the Web and has won a slew of other web awards. The site is based on a traveling exhibition now showing at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey and bills itself as "an online journey into the ancient spectacle of athletes and gods." The Sport of Life and Death features dazzling special effects courtesy of Macromedia Flash technology and its overall layout and organization are superb. There are helpful interactive maps, timelines, and samples of artwork in the Explore the Mesoamerican World section. The focus of the site, however, is the Mesoamerican ballgame, the oldest organized sport in history. The sport is explained through a beautiful and engaging combination of images, text, expert commentary, and video. Visitors can even compete in a contest!
U.S. History in the Making
NEW "The Hope for Audacity" The Atlantic, Dec. 1, 2008. Todd Gitlin assesses the difference between Obama's outlook and that of FDR and LBJ, and considers what it will take for him to succeed in office... Read more >>>
NEW "How Lincoln Might Fix Our Economic Mess" History News Network. Richard Striner writes that as America grapples with the worst economic chain-reaction since 1929 -- and as President-Elect Obama takes time to consider more closely the methods of Abraham Lincoln -- it is time to reconsider a monetary method that Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans used, a monetary method that America's leading economists attempted to revive in the 1930s... Read more >>>
NEW "Obama's Nixonian Dilemma with Iraq" History News Network. Brian R. Robertson writes that both inherited divisive wars from the previous administration and both campaigns failed to provide clear answers or solutions for disengagement from Vietnam and Iraq... Read more >>>
NEW "Was the New Deal too small?" Christian Science Monitor, MA, Dec 8, 2008. A lesson from the Great Depression, historians say, is that Roosevelt didn't spend enough to jolt economy into recovery... Read more >>>
NEW "Is Bush's Greatest Achievement a Non-Achievement: No Subsequent 9/11s?" History News Network. Gil Troy writes that perhaps his greatest accomplishment is a non-event. After September 11, most Americans assumed they would endure a wave of terrorist attacks... Read more >>>
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