Sarah Elkins's List: Social Studies Resources and Primary Sources

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection focuses on 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic materials. The collection includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps including pocket, wall, children's and manuscript maps. The online selection is an expanding cross section of images designed to highlight the depth and breadth of the collection.

Letters about the Civil War. There are five collections of letters from different viewpoints.

The internet's most comprehensive information resource for the times, places, events and people of British history.

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.

The site was designed especially with young people in mind, but there are great stories for people of all ages, and we hope children and their families will want to explore this site together. "America's Story from America's Library" wants you to have fun with history while learning at the same time. We want to put the story back in history and show you some things that you've never heard or seen before. The stuff you see comes from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

World History Matters is a portal to world history websites developed by the Center for History and New Media. Within the websites there are collections of media related to different topics; World History, Woman in World History, Gulag, French Revolution, Children and Youth in History, French Revolution.

It allows you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. You can display anything from a text file to a movie.

Teaching Resources and Lesson Plans from the Federal Government

This site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). I will plan to use this site to find relevant, authentic articles and images related to the topics that I am teaching.

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968.

This site is geared for younger students and is written in a 4th-5th grade reading level. One of the neat links within the sites was the ability to get recipes related to each of the United States and countries throughout the world.

The Roosevelt Institute created the New Deal Network, a research and teaching resource devoted to the public works and arts projects of the New Deal. It is a database of primary source materials—photographs, political cartoons, and texts (speeches, letters, and other historic documents)— gathered from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and other sources. Currently there are over 20,000 items in this database, many of them previously accessible only to scholars.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. This site is a real collection of several types of media. I like that one search yields several different types of documents and media files.

The following guide provides a basis for beginning electronic research on a wide variety of topics in music, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, composition, and performance practice. It collects links to archival collections, online scores and sound recordings; article indexes, discographies and bibliographies; scholarly societies; musical reference works; and a miscellany of useful websites. Each entry includes a brief description of the resource, with tags for subjects and resource types. This site not only connects you to images of authentic sheet music but then also gives you history and additional information about the music, the composer and the pieces history.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. These artifacts are unbiased pieces of history that will give students a real perspective of Southern United States history.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. Through this site you can look at full naval documents like the official records of the Union and Confederate Navies.