War rations is a concept that is difficult for students to understand. This site uses a painting of people shopping at a grocery store during WWII and makes it interactive. Visitors to the site can examine the picture and click on details to learn more about what is happening in the photo. For instance, it shows pictures and explainations of actual ration booklets, propaganda, posters, grocery prices, etc. There are also nice "Did you know" buttons to learn more and all the primary sources can be downloaded and printed as PDF's.

This site is part of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. It would be extremely useful for civil rights units. This is a nice collection of some of Eisenhower's most important correspondence during the Little Rock High School integration crisis. It is also neat to read them because they are scans of the actual typed documents and not just transcriptions. It seems more authentic when students can see the real thing. His notes, diaries, telegrams, letters and press releases really help to show how Eisenhower handled the situation. (Note: There is even an exchange of letters between Jackie Robinson and the president in which they discuss how blacks need to be patient for civil rights)

This site is a small collection within the American Memory Project website created by the Library of Congress. What makes it nice, is that it easily brings together many important documents that help provide insights into the African American experience from the slave trade to the Civil Rights era. Sometimes the larger American Memory site can be hard to navigate. This smaller sub-collection has nicely collected the highlights of the African American collection.

This site is presented by the Virginia Center for Digital History and the University of Virginia Library. It showcases two communities during the Civil War. One count was in the north, and one was in the south. It provides an interesting case study of life on both sides of the war. Students and teachers can use this site to compare maps, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, speeches and records in both communities. It also organizes the war into three eras: the eve of war, the war years, and the aftermath.

I heard about this site when I saw Pam Berger at the Heartland School Library Conference this summer. This sites lets you design your own interactive primary source activity. You can create digital movies, comic strips and rebus stories. Teachers can create and manage activities for a class. The site is simple enough that students (or student groups) could even create their own activities to present to their class. The site also operates completely online and requires no downloads.

This site was developed by educators working with the National Archives. It is an incredible site where you can design your own interactive activity with primary sources. There are seven kinds of activities you can build based on the type of learning you want student to achieve: finding a sequence, focusing on details, making connections, mapping history, seeing the big picture, weighing the evidence, and interpreting data. There are also a lot of really insightful pre-made activities that would work with many different grade levels. This site is just extraordinary! I plan to start using it right away!

This site is a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office has hundreds of U.S governmental documents sorted into the following categories: cornerstone documents, Congressional, presidential, judicial, regulatory, demographic, economic and miscellaneous. This site would be great for social studies students who are studying U.S. history, or those who are comparing our government to other countries.

This site would be a great addition to a civil war unit because it uses documents from Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. It would help to present both sides of the war to students. Often in teaching the civil war, we neglect to explain some of the ways that the South felt slighted and it would make for a good analysis for students to be able to view and examine the papers of Jefferson Davis.

The Harry S. Truman Library website has a plethora of primary sources in audio, video and government documents. The videos alone contain 500 films from 1934 to 1984, Many feature Truman in some way. Their online documents are organized by important topics. For instance, there is a collection of primary source/govt docs relating to the atomic bombings in Japan. One is even a letter from Einstein to Truman. These documents would be very useful in connection with the 8th grade Nebraska social studies curriculum, where they discuss WWII. The collection on Japanese Americans in WWII would also be great for the high school American History courses.

This site is a WEALTH of information on the history of the United States. It includes letters, documents, photos, audio and video that are all in the public domain (and there fore also legal to use) since they are all owned by the U.S. government. Using the search box will yield many results. My favorite search on this site is to find primary sources about the great depression. A search tip: be sure to click "gallery view" when you look at your search results. It helps you know what type of source you are looking at.