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American History - Useful Websites
Great Sites for Anytime
This site gives an overview of any year students click on from 1900 to the present, including cultural events, national and world news, politics, sports, prize winners, movie releases, deaths, and --for more recent years -- links to news focusing on other topics such as science and people. It provides an interesting summary of any particular year. This site offers students the opportunity to explore documents of a 100 milestones in American history. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965: Lee Resolution, Treaty of Paris, Federalist Papers Bill of Rights, Missouri Compromise, Monroe Doctrine, Plessy v. Ferguson, Surrender of Japan, Marshall Plan, Brown v. Board of Education, and many more. The neat part about all the documents is that it shows the entire original document (it can be enlarged and zoomed in on) and then offers information about the document below. This site teaches students to critically view and read historical documents. The site will help students find and view primary sources critically as they decipher the past. The site is broken down into student investigations and teaching materials and strategies. There are maps, videos, activities, and more. This interactive map looks at immigration from 1880 through 2000 and draws attention to what census data can tell us for years to come. A slider bar allows you to fast-forward (or rewind) history on the US map, and mousing over each county in the country gives you the population of the county in the given year and the number of immigrants. (Be patient. Sometimes the site is slow to open.) This site on the African Slave Trade has an interactive map, links to resources, an image bank, and large, searchable and downloadable data bases of African names, ships used in the slave trade and their voyages, tables of data focused on the number of slaves involved, and timelines.
Explore the Smithsonian's collection of images for use in student projects. This interactive timeline is an historical experience that explains the key events of the U.S. Constitution. The events begin with the Magna Carta in 1215 and continue to 2009. Students can explore primary documents, view maps and graphs, hear audio clips, listen to debates, read pertinent stories in the New York Times, and learn who had the right to vote during specific time periods. Be sure to also visit the Interactive Constitution. Images of American Political History
Bring two centuries of American history and politics to life with these high-quality, black and white photographs of people and events. Beyond showing the faces of politicians and the famous, this collection chronicles average people who quietly contributed to the times. The photographs are drawn from government sources and are in the Public Domain, which means they are copyright-free. Images can be browsed by keyword, topic or era. The publisher’s website for your textbook
Your borrower ID is wsdpa - go into webfeet online and search for your topic
A great search engine for finding almost anyone - this site will also help you refine your searches
a fantastic site for history research An alphabetical list of famous people
An online encyclopedia with lots of information about lots of people. The entries are a little long but they have great information.
Biographies on many people - provides basic information
Bad Fads is an online museum dedicated to things that history may just want to forget, but we cannot. This site is amusing and will help students understand that history can be funny. There are a variety of topics with available information from collectibles to more academic topics, such as health and technology. There are Google Ads on some pages, so remind your students to avoid clicking on these. Fourteen US Vice-Presidents have gone on to become US Presidents. This site examines the lives of these fourteen men. Navigate the site by using the interactive timeline, and then focus in on images of each of these men, along with brief biographies. There is a pull down bar that allows you to specify which president to learn about. In addition, there are video interviews with four of the five living Vice-Presidents: Dick Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and Walter Mondale. Students can have a taste of what it's like to occupy the highest office in the land with this clever, interactive activity. The site guides them through the process of selecting a cabinet, balancing a budget, responding to questions from the press, and reading reactions in the daily papers! The oddities and ironies of history--from newspaper columnist Bruce Kauffmann
This site offers an interactive map that displays the population and ethnicity of the counties of the United States. Readers can select various ethnic groups and find out where they settled. A drop down menu has lists of immigrant groups. The color coded map of the U.S. displays settlement locations for specified groups. This site provides a large, indexed database of first person accounts and contemporaneous accounts of important eras and events in history. Search by time period or general topic and get speeches, diaries, and eyewitness accounts. Use the "Voices" tab to access audio recordings. Use the "History in Motion" tab to view film clips. SnapShots provides photo montages from recent history. This interactive graph (created with information from the U.S. Census) shows all jobs and the percentages of people who worked them from 1850-2000. You can scroll up over any given year to see any job and the percentage of Americans working that job during that year (gender indicated). This site is designed to be used as an online museum. You can start by searching the museum by geographic location or keyword. You can also search by time period from the “Teaching Kit” area. Or click on one of the featured exhibits which range from excavations of the CSS Alabama, the remains of an 18th century fleet sunk in New York's Lake George, to the HMS Serapis. This site, a collaborative effort among the National Archives, National History Day and USA Freedom Corps, highlights the most important documents in US history. Each of these "milestone" documents is detailed and photographed on a separate page.
Weather's impact on the course of history sometimes goes unnoticed. A heat wave brings about public policy change; a hurricane alerts the public to the need for better planning and an improved safety net; a father of our country dies due to extreme weather. The collection includes events such as Hurricane Katrina as well as numerous others: heat waves, George Washington, the Hindenburg, American colonial times, Nagasaki, D-Day, the Dust Bowl, smog, the Titanic, the Nome Serum Run and the green movement in the wake of tornado devastation.
Last Modified on March 21, 2011
