www.Virginia
Here are the most useful websites for teaching Virginia history and social studies. We have carefully selected and screened each website for quality and provide a paragraph annotation that summarizes the site’s content, notes its strengths and weaknesses, and emphasizes its utility for teachers.
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Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon Ladies' Association
Homepage for Mt. Vernon Estate and Gardens, George Washington's Virginia estate, this site offers valuable sources for researching the life and home of the first U.S. President. An exhibit contains more than 50 images of furniture, art, documents, and other Mount Vernon household objects. Each image is accompanied by a 150-word description of the artifact and its location or significance to the estate. A virtual tour of Mt. Vernon's mansion takes visitors through every room with a photograph and 350-word description of the room and its furnishings. An archaeology section describes digs at eight sites on the estate, a 500-word description of a current excavation of Washington's distillery, and a 1500-word essay on the Mt. Vernon mansion's restoration beginning in 1858. An Educational Resources section offers a fifth-grade lesson plan, complete with trivia about Washington, excerpts from his Rules on Civility, and anecdotes from his military career and presidency; a 2000-word essay on Washington's attitude toward slavery and information on his slaves' lives, including links to a facsimile copy of Washington's 1798 slave census and 18 images of paintings and artifacts depicting the everyday lives of Mt. Vernon's slaves. This site is ideal for researching Washington's life and home, and it could also be useful for those studying material culture and archaeology.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-08.
Wet with Blood: The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln's Cloak
Chicago Historical Society and Academic Technologies at Northwestern University
Visitors to this site are invited to learn about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln primarily through artifacts and relics in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society. More than 100 images of artifacts, documents, photographs, and lithographs, in addition to more than 50 quotes from contemporary testimonies, illustrate how examination of a variety of types of evidence can help to illuminate events from the past. In addition, the site presents the story of Charles Gunther, a Chicago confectioner who purchased a Richmond prisoner-of-war camp and reconstructed it in Chicago in order to display his growing collection of Americana, which the Society acquired upon his death. The site also includes two videos on techniques of examining material evidence; audio recordings of tunes from the period and a musical tribute to Lincoln that was performed at his Chicago funeral; a registry of 29 Lincoln relics in the Society's collection; a glossary of 11 technical and historical terms; a bibliography of more than 130 published sources; listings for 28 related sites; and a virtual tour of the Society's Conservation Laboratory. Of interest to students of the Lincoln assassination, the history of museums and Americana collectors, and to those intrigued by the use of material culture to help answer questions about the past.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-09.
Afro-American Almanac
Afro-American Almanac
Presented by the Afro-American Almanac, this site provides materials that provide a historical perspective of Africans in America, from the beginning of the slave trade through the Civil Rights movement to the present. The site includes roughly 30 biographies of prominent African-American men and women, such as abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Charlotte Forten, educator/author Charles Chesnutt, and Dr. Ida Gray Nelson, the first black female dentist; 30 full-text books, speeches, and pamphlets by white and African-American authors and activists, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau; over 30 primary documents related to African-American history, from the Virginia act of 1705 that declared slaves to be real estate, to Plessy v. Ferguson (1898), to the Black Panther Party Platform and Program; 20 brief (roughly 750-word) narratives of important historical events, such as the history of the Missouri Compromise of 1819 and the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riots of 1921. The most unique portion of this site is a collection of 35 full-text traditional African and African-American folk tales. There is also a bibliography of 19 scholarly works and websites on African-American history. Though there is no search engine for this site, it is easy to navigate and is an ideal tool for examining African-American cultural history.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2000-12-26.
The Papers of George Washington
Christine Madrid French, University of Virginia
Sponsored by the Papers of George Washington, housed at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, this is a companion site to the ambitious project of collecting, editing, and publishing Washington's papers. Begun in 1969, the project has completed 44 of a projected 90 volumes of papers. The site gives information on the letterpress editions of Washington's papers and provides some online excerpts from the volumes. The "Maps and Images" section offers ten of Washington's maps and sketches and nine images of George and Martha Washington, family members, and Mt. Vernon, their home. The "Documents and Articles" section features 31 primary documents, including Washington's 1796 Farewell Address and his last will and testament. It also provides links to 21 full-text scholarly articles on Washington's life and political and military careers. An index of names of persons identified in the papers, along with the volume and page numbers on which the names appear is uesful for researchers. As a special feature, the site also provides full-text images of Washington's handwritten notations to the Constitutional Convention's draft of the Constitution. This site provides a good introduction into the papers of one of the United States' Founders.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-06-15.
Thomas Jefferson Papers
American Memory, Library of Congress
This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.
The Presidents
Kunhardt Productions and Thirteen/WNET in New York
All 42 of the nation's completed presidencies are profiled in detail at this website, which is geared towards teaching the history of the American Presidency. In-depth biographies include information on childhood, education, career, elections, family life, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. Many biographies include links to numerous primary sources--speeches, writings, letters, and diplomatic documents--and to lesson plans. As a companion website to the PBS American Experience documentaries, these resources are hooked into a larger "Archives" section available at the top of the screen. Here, users will find thousands of resources, including maps, movies, and QuickTime Virtual Reality, on many topics in American history divided by theme and chronology, such as technology, popular culture, war, and urban and rural environments. The "Teachers" section similarly provides hundreds of lesson plans exploring such topics as media coverage of presidential elections, the vice president's role in electoral politics, presidents and foreign policy, and the importance of political compromise.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2007-11-15.
African-American Texts from the Modern English Collection
University of Virginia
This site contains over 100 full-text scholarly and literary works on race and African-American history and culture from the University of Virginia's Modern English Collection. The site includes works by over 50 authors, primarily from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Works represented include Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Frederick Douglass's autobiographical works and abolitionist speeches, and several essays and speeches by W.E.B. DuBois, as well as pieces by lesser-known writers. The site is keyword searchable and includes a help sheet to aid in searching the collection. While the site contains no contextualizing or biographical information on the writers represented, it is a useful tool for researching and teaching African-American history and literature from the antebellum period thought the early 20th century.
Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2008-10-08.
Classic African American Literature
Dr. Paul Gorski, Multicultural Pavilion, University of Virginia
Provides links to 49 full-text versions of books, essays, articles, and poems about African-American life and culture, from the 18th century to the present day. Authors represented include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Chester W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, Rita Dove, Booker T. Washington, Phillis Wheatley, and Maya Angelou. Many texts are from the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center.
Resources Available: .
Website last visited on 2002-03-01.
The American Experience: John Brown's Holy War
PBS
This companion site to the 1999 PBS documentary on John Brown uses special features, a timeline, an interactive map, short biographies and histories, and a teacher's guide to explain the story of Brown's life and times. The site offers special features on the Maryland farmhouse where John Brown assembled his men before their raid on Harpers Ferry, the Harpers Ferry firehouse where Brown's raiders were captured, a history of the famous song "John Brown's Body," and a short essay on Brown's failures as a businessman before he became a radical abolitionist. The timeline traces the major events of Brown's life from 1800 to 1865. An interactive map follows Brown's movements across the country from his birth in 1800 to his execution and burial in 1859. The "People and Events" section features short biographical essays on Brown, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, abolitionist newspaper editor James Redpath, writer Henry David Thoreau, 1859 Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, and "The Secret Six"--the radical abolitionists who funded Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The section also features short histories of four events of Brown's radical abolitionist crusades: the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, Brown's Missouri raid, the Harpers Ferry raid, and Brown's hanging. The teacher guide offers discussion questions and four classroom activities.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-08.
Eye of the Storm
Michael Johnson, Adam Stoltman, and Alan Dorow, Journal E
In 1994, a rare book dealer brought to the Virginia Historical Society a most remarkable find--over 500 watercolor drawings and maps by Union Army Private Knox Sneden. Sneden's art depicting life as a Civil War soldier, along with his diary/memoir, was recently published by The Free Press. This website features images and diary entries drawn from the book, entitled Eye of the Storm, and details in vivid watercolors, maps, and journal entries, events from the Civil War as witnessed by Sneden. The site offers over 40 entries from Sneden's diaries from 1861 to December 1864, accompanied by 20 of his watercolors depicting battle scenes, camp life, and maps of the areas in which Sneden served. There is a roughly 500-word overview of Sneden's life before the Civil War and as a soldier during the war. There are also four Flash presentations of approximately 40 more watercolors depicting particular incidents Sneden witnessed. These feature comments about the scenes by Charles F. Bryan, Jr., Director of the Virginia Historical Society, and related descriptions from Sneden's journals. Incidents featured include a surprise artillery attack by Rebels against a Union fortification, views of battles, and sabotage operations. This site gives unique insight into the war through the eyes of a talented soldier and is an ideal source for illustrations and first-hand accounts of the Civil War.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-09.