America 1900
Website of the PBS special that takes a look at the year 1900 and the events that took place in the last year of the nineteenth century. The site features several timelines, a detailed look at the program, a look at people and events of the time, a teacher's guide, and a special feature, the “America 1900 Family Tree Builder.”

Benjamin Franklin: Glimpses of the Man
Produced by The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820 to the Present
Online exhibit presented by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Bisbee Deportation of 1917
Created and maintained by the University of Arizona, this Web exhibit offers a wealth of primary and secondary materials on what is now known as the Bisbee Deportation, a signal event in American labor history.

Chicago Historical Society
See especially “The Dramas of Haymarket” and “Wet with Blood: The Investigation of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Cloak.” These two online exhibits allow you to experience two pivotal events in national history via multi-media technology.

A Collector’s Vision of Puerto Rico/Puerto Rico: La Visión de un Coleccionista
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History provides this site, a glimpse of Puerto Rican history and culture as seen through 175 artifacts from the 3,200-artifact collection of Teodoro Vidal, an aide to Puerto Rico’s first governor Luis Munoz Marin. Vidal’s collecting activities span more than 40 years, and his artifacts date from the 18th through the 20th centuries. The collection can be browsed or searched (the easiest access to the entire collection is through the index browse), and it is contextualized through explanatory sections on Puerto Rican history, religion, every day life, carnivals, music, tourism, and “the Great Puerto Rican family.”

Cultural Readings: Colonization & Print in the Americas
An exhibition from the collections of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd.
“Take an interactive journey down one of L.A.’s most fascinating streets. From Victorian mansions to modern skyscrapers, Wilshire Boulevard has seen it all. You can, too, by creating your own customized tours of Wilshire’s past and present.”

Exhibitions in Federal Museums
General exhibition information pages from the major museums: Library of Congress, Library of Congress’ American Memory, new Smithsonian exhibitions, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of American Art online tours of special exhibitions, National Museum of American History virtual exhibitions, and Holocaust Museum online exhibitions.

The Feather Trade and the American Conservation Movement
A virtual exhibit from the National Museum of American History focusing on the origins of the Audubon society and other early conservation movements: nineteenth-century America’s rage for plumage to adorn women's hats. Divided into three sections—Feather Adornment, Hunting and Collecting, and Audubon Movement—the exhibit begins by illustrating the use of feathers as fashion accessories in a period fascinated with the natural world. The excessive hunting practices which fed this fashion and the subsequent devastation of populations of native birds such as the egret led concerned “socialites” to found the Audubon society.

1492: An Ongoing Voyage
An exhibition at the Library of Congress.

Hearts at Home: Southern Women in the Civil War
An online exhibit prepared by Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

The Hoover Dam: Lonely Lands Made Fruitful
Project designer Janet Haven of the University of Virginia American Studies Program presents the construction of the Hoover Dam as an alternative narrative to the devastation of the Great Depression in a photoessay. Five slide shows cover the construction from diverting the Colorado River to pouring concrete and adding the final touches to a completed dam. The slide shows are prefaced by historical background, including short essays on topics such as the Dam as the “Machine in the Desert” and the text of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Dedication Speech upon completion, September 30, 1935. Images of maps and plans are linked throughout, and a list of Works Consulted gives concise source descriptions as well as ideas for further reading.

The Iconography of Hope: The 1939-40 New York World's Fair
Hosted by American Studies at The University of Virginia, this site offers an interesting cultural study of “the working model of the future in Flushing Meadows” that ran from 1939-40. In this study, the period of the Fair is portrayed as a symbol of the transformation of American society from heady, late-depression optimistic futurism, to the anxiety-ridden days of pre-World War II. Astute analyses are accompanied by a number of RealPlayer video segments of Fair exhibits and speeches by some of the notables, including President Roosevelt and Albert Einstein.

Lewis & Clark: A Journey
Features the full text of the 1814 Biddle edition of the journals and other sources for education and research. From the University of Cincinnati.

Meeting of Frontiers/Vstrecha na Grantitsakh
The parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers and the meeting of those frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest is the focus of a new Web site created by the Library of Congress. It includes more than 2,500 items, comprising some 70,000 images, from the Library’s rare book, manuscript, map, film and sound recording collections that tell the stories of the explorers, fur traders, missionaries, exiles, gold miners and adventurers that peopled both frontiers and their interactions with the native peoples of Siberia and the American West. The site is completely bilingual, in English and Russian.

Oliphant’s Anthem: Pat Oliphant at the Library of Congress
60 cartoon drawings by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant, who has been providing provocative commentary on political and social issues for over 30 years. The cartoons featured in the exhibit are organized by topic and offered in thumbnail format with concise and helpful explanatory text.

The Peale Family Papers
Housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Willson Peale Family Papers is comprised of copies of more than 6,000 documents, spanning three generations of the Peale family America from the 1730s to the 1880s. The papers themselves are not accessible online, but the site features essays discussing the papers, the history of the Peale family, and the editorial philosophy behind the publication of the first four volumes of the Peale Family Papers.

Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
Companion site to a Library of Congress exhibit that draws upon the holdings of the Library and other archives to illustrate the importance of religion in the founding and making of America during the 17th through 19th centuries.

Return to Midway
This National Geographic site is devoted to the discovery of the lost ships of the Battle of Midway, the US-Japanese naval battle that turned the tide in the Pacific Theater of World War II. In May 1998 Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the sunken ships Titanic and Bismarck, discovered the USS Yorktown, an American ship lost in the Battle of Midway.

Sold in Oregon: Historical Oregon Trademarks
The 174 trademarks in this online exhibit of the Oregon State Archives reflect agricultural products of the state.

Spy Letters of the American Revolution
A digital exhibition that displays and contextualizes a collection of letters written by spies during the American Revolution. The letters, held by the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, offer historical insight into the military intelligence of both the American and British armies.

Theodore Roosevelt: Icon of the American Century
The National Portrait Gallery presents this visual biography of Theodore Roosevelt, focused on his adult life and political career, 1882-1919. Using the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and those of Sagamore Hill and Manhatten historic sites, the exhibition consists of portraits, photographs, and political cartoons featuring Teddy Roosevelt and his friends, family, and colleagues. The exhibition has an introduction and three sections: Maverick in the Making, 1882-1901; Rough Rider in the White House, 1901-1909; and The Restless Hunter, 1909-1919.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Presented by the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, in cooperation with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!). Contains cartoons, photographs, and oral histories relating to the 1911 fire at a New York garment factory that claimed the lives of 146 workers.

Virtual Greenbelt
“An on-line, dynamic pedagogical platform” containing images, interviews, and other materials relating to Greenbelt, Maryland, a New Deal-era planned community in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.