boys in a classroom

boys in a classroom

Digital History

Angela Hanshaw | May 05, 2009

Looking for American history resources, or want to round out your Picturing America or We the People Bookshelf on Picturing America programs? Digital History provides free, high-quality historical resources for teachers and students. Documents include texts about Asian American, Mexican American, African American and Native American history; historical music, trailers of historically significant films, and many more resources.

Materials on this Web site include a U.S. history textbook and more than four hundred annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection supplemented by primary sources on slavery; Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American history; and U.S. political, social, and legal history. Also included are ssays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia exhibitions. Reference resources include a database of annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images. In addition, Ask the HyperHistorian allows users to pose questions to professional historians.

Users can create multimedia American history exhibitions that contain historical images from the site’s extensive database of more than 600 photographs, art works, and digitized letters. Users can easily incorporate their own text, and the presentations can be e-mailed, downloaded, or saved on the Digital History servers.

Other useful Digital History features include fact checks (multiple choice quizzes on every era of American history), nineteenth-century high school entrance examinations, a time machine, an interactive timeline that links to primary source documents, and a flash overview of American history.


Angela Hanshaw is Program Officer/Web Editor for the ALA Public Programs Office.


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