What if Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights had been named Jimmy? Or can one imagine J.D. Salinger’s Fanny as, say, Sarah? Authors frequently spend long hours determining the appropriate names for their characters and readers often develop a close bond with these personas as they begin to develop throughout a novel or short story. In a very interesting twist, a number of contemporary authors are...

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, along with the Verizon Foundation, has developed a website that offers standards-based online resources for teaching and learning American history. This lively looking red, white and blue-themed website has an eye-catching feature on the homepage which highlights an item from the Museum's Artifacts. Visitors should click on the "Learn More"...

The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School brings together legal documents from the time of Hammurabi to the most recent Supreme Court Decisions. The materials here are divided into nine chronologically ordered sections. For example, selecting the 18th Century Documents section will bring up everything from The Alien and Sedition Acts: 1798 to the United States Constitution. The site also has the...

Recently, The Constitution Project (TCP) started the bipartisan Task Force on Detainee Treatment. The purpose of TCP is to "bring the American people a comprehensive understanding of what is known and what may still be unknown about the past and current treatment of detainees by the U.S. government, as part of the counterterrorism policies of the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations." Visitors...

Stanford University has been the home of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project for over twenty years, and they also have the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. On their website, visitors can learn about their work, which includes sponsoring conferences, providing research fellowships, and developing the Liberation curriculum for educators interested in nonviolent...

In 1927, Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for the armed robbery of two pay-clerks in South Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. Their case became a cause celebre across the world, as many felt that their trial was prejudiced by the prevailing anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist sentiment of the time. This collection of documents related to their trial is offered as part of...

Launched by Oxford Constitutional Law, this Timeline of the United States' Constitutional Law provides an overview of legal history from the Magna Carta to the present day. The interactive timeline invites users to scroll through centuries of history, delving into landmark cases and major moments from the past. Some of these events will likely refresh your prior knowledge, but other events are...

The City of Angels may be bracing for another dramatic event and, oddly enough, it may have nothing to do with the climatic conditions in that region of the country. Recently the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it would sue Los Angeles County unless the governmental entity comes up with a plan within 14 days to remove a tiny cross from the County's...