www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/dbq/ssindex.html
The standards-based online courses offered here will give a boost to any teacher who wants to use historical sources in his or her classroom. Learn how to ask exciting “document-based questions” to motivate inquiry.

http://rs6.loc.gov/amhome.html
To find primary source material for American history units at every level, search this Library of Congress site first. The “Learning Page” for teachers includes lessons on the early colonies, the Civil War, and more.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html
Part of the Library of Congress´ “American Memory” site (see above), this page highlights an historical daily event and provides links to related primary sources. Have your middle to upper graders take turns presenting information to the class.

www.nypl.org/digital
Photographs of endangered animals, astronomical phenomena, and depression-era workers are just some of the resources available from this comprehensive site. Don't miss the “Maps, Atlases & Charts” section, which offers a glimpse of the evolutionary nature of map-making.

www.perseus.tufts.edu
If you teach a unit on Ancient Greece or Rome, you'll find the digital collections available here helpful. There are links to hundreds of images, texts, and museum works, so you can easily show students Greek poetry, Roman coins, or whatever else you need to support your lessons.

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu
Click on “Digitized Collections” to access rich resources for grades four and up. Kids will especially love looking at the nineteenth-century advertisements in “Ad*Access,” which you can use to teach history, media literacy, and critical-thinking skills.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
This Web site component to the PBS series on “Africans in America” features an excellent collection of primary sources, including paintings, photographs, and documents. Click on “Resource Bank Index” to see portraits of abolitionists, slave narratives, and more.

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/
Invite your students to explore American history by studying what Americans have eaten, from the Revolution onwards. This site has digitized hundreds of cookbooks, with special sections on regional and ethnic cooking. Weave together history and math lessons by sharing, for example, an 1881 recipe for “Jumble Cake.”

www.americanrhetoric.com
This continually-updated site offers streaming audio and video of thousands of historical speeches, from Martin Luther King´s “I Have a Dream” to many of George W. Bush´s reflections on September 11, 2001. Check out “Figures in Sound,” a bank of historical speech clips each showcasing a different rhetoric device, such as metaphor, parallelism, and synecdoche.

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews
At this online archive, part of the BBC´s site, students can listen to anyone — from late cartoonist Charles Schulz, explaining how he likes to get his readers´ attention, to Frances Crick, who describes discovering DNA. Interviews are broken down into small, labeled audio files, so there´s no hunting down the part you´d like to share.

www.americasstory.com
This site is easier to navigate than the popular “American Memory” page, so it's perfect for students in younger grades. Children will love finding primary sources tied to their birthdays. They can also click on an interactive map of the United States to explore state histories, ending report woes.

www.archives.gov/digital_classroom
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration maintains a fantastic site for tracking down primary sources. Their “Digital Classroom” provides teachers with document analysis worksheets, professional development tips, and lesson plans on the Revolution, the Great Depression, and much more.

 
Hannah Trierweiler is the assistant editor of Instructor. This article was orignally published in the November/December 2004 issue.