Best of History Web Sites: United States History (U.S., American)

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 resume 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.

Here are five excellent, engaging and activity-oriented sites on U.S. History:

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.

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 cam write their own histories or reconstruct the histories of others.. The project is intended for secondary schools, community colleges, libraries, and universities.

Cold War: From Yalta to Malta (CNN)
This CNN Perspectives series explores the Cold War experience from many different angles. Included are interactive maps, rare video footage, declassified documents, biographies, picture galleries, timelines, interactive activities, a search function, book excerpts, an educator's guide and more. For instance, you can watch a video interview with George Kennan, tour a Cold War prison, play a Brinkmanship interactive game interview, and listen to an interview with Fidel Castro. Launched in September 1998, the COLD WAR companion site covers more than a 1,000 Web pages and was honored with a 1998 Sigma Delta Chi Award in the Online Journalism Non-Deadline Reporting category by the Society of Professional Journalists.

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!

America Votes 2004
(CNN.com Special Report)

War Against Terror
(CNN.com Specials)

Classroom Lesson Plans: Teaching About 9-11
(History News Network)

Historians Debate Iraq
History News Network

Is War What's Needed to Bring Peace in the Middle East?
(History News Network)

Quotes From History Relevant to Today's News
(History News Network)

"To what extent do the attitudes of Washington and Jefferson towards slavery diminish their achievements?" by Stephen Ambrose
(Smithsonian Institution)

Thanks to: the best history sites on the web, and John Perno for providing website information