American History Teachers' Collaborative

Annotated Web Resources for American History and

Primary Documents

 

American Memory:  Historical Collections for the National Digital Library

http://memory.loc.gov/

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.  It has a search engine that mines the data base of documents by keyword and topic.

 

Our Documents

http://www.ourdocuments.gov/

To help us think, talk and teach about the rights and responsibilities of citizens in our democracy, we invite you to explore 100 milestone documents of American history. These documents reflect our diversity and our unity, our past and our future, and mostly our commitment as a nation to continue to strive to "form a more perfect union."

Digital History

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/

An outstanding website that contains primary documents, teacher guides, online text books, multimedia resources, and more.  It is the result of a collaboration among the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society, the National Park Service, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Project for the Active Teaching of History

The History Channel.com

http://www.historychannel.com/

A companion page to the History Channel.  The site contains audio/video clips of famous speeches, teacher and classroom resources, and online exhibits.

The Smithsonian

http://www.si.edu/

Online resources and exhibits from the Smithsonian.

The National Archives and Records Administration

http://www.archives.gov/

This site is the main page for the NARA.  It contains links to records as well as teacher resources in the classroom link.

http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/index.html

The NARA Digital Classroom link that has lesson plans that are tied to primary documents.

http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/analysis_worksheets/worksheets.html

The NARA link that contains the document analysis worksheets

The Digital Imaging & Media Technology Initiative

 

http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/

A collection of projects that the DIMT at UIUC has compiled.  It includes several projects dealing with maps

Champaign Co, ILGenWeb

http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilchampa/

A local site that is primarily used for genealogy, but it has links to local history, a few primary sources, and historical maps.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/

The Gilder Lehrman Institute offers a variety of resources for students and teachers. There are many primary documents and exercises for use in the classroom.