Online Primary Sources & Teaching Materials

    updated: 3/30/16
  1. Using Primary Sources in the Classroom Good advice from the Library of Congress American Memory project
  2. Digital History A good example of how the Internet can improve our delivery of quality history.
  3. PBS/Ken Burns "Lewis and Clark"
  4. Making of America (MoA)--Michigan "A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction."
  5. Making of America--Cornell Companion site to the above.
  6. Milestone Documents: 100 basic documents of American History
  7. Library of Congress, "Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures" Rotogravure, for those of you who missed that word in English class, is "An intaglio printing process in which letters and pictures are transferred from an etched copper cylinder to a web of paper, plastic, or similar material in a rotary press."
  8. Internetl Archive & Open Library.org Full texts; searchable.
  9. The Valley of the Shadow, a University of Virginia Research Project comparing a northern and southern county on the eve of the Civil War.
  10. Analyzing Civil War Photographs by Bill Friedheim, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York
  11. Documenting the American South (DAS) a UNC-Chapel Hill collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. Includes many full text firsthand narratives. Sections include First-Person Narratives of the American South; Library of Southern Literature; North American Slave Narratives; Southern Homefront, 1861-1865; The Church in the Southern Black Community; North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940; North Carolinians and the Great War (Civil War).
  12. North American Slave Narratives: Documenting the American South
  13. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration.
  14. African-American Women Writers: New York Public Library
  15. American Memory, a Library of Congress gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States.
  16. New Deal Network , an educational guide to the Great Depression of the 1930s; sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College/Columbia University.
  17. Remember the Holocaust Accounts by witnesses, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others.
  18. Native American History Resources
  19. Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy: Yale's Avalon Project
  20. American Journeys "18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later."
  21. American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920: American Memory project "comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States"
  22. Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
  23. Many Pasts from History Matters