The New York Public Library's excellent online exhibit on the year of gay liberation opens with an inviting digital poster with all the names of the gay liberation groups represented in the exhibit. Visitors can click anywhere on the poster to enter the exhibit. Take a look at the "Introduction" to learn about the history of gay liberation groups. About half a dozen or so of the groups are...

Policy analysts, mayors, government officials, and many others are anxiously awaiting the results of the 2010 Census. It's not taking place for a few years, but the U.S. Census Bureau has already created this website to provide information to a wide range of interested parties and stakeholders. On the homepage, visitors can learn about the nuts and bolts of the Census, read about the "Census in...

This 2013 blog post from the Open Education Database's iLibrarian Blog lists over 250 digital archives and collections from around the United States. The collection focuses mostly on localized and regional libraries that provide open access to anyone. It also includes larger collections and archives focused on U.S. History. The collections and archives are organized alphabetically by state,...

The Ashbrook Center at Ohio's Ashland University seeks to educate students, teachers, and citizens about the intricacies of American history and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship using conversation and primary source documents. Consider this list of 50 Core Documents of historical importance. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom...

Created in 1948 as the Research and Development Corporation (RAND), this organization is financed by the U.S. government and a range of other private entities. Their work has included hundreds of research reports and briefs on health care policy, national security, technology, and civil and criminal justice. This interesting website provides access to "Sixty Ways RAND Has Made a Difference", which...

80s.NYC is an interactive map created by Brandon Liu and Jeremy Lechtzin that makes use of a unique source: photographs taken by New York City's Department of Finance in order to access the property value of buildings in the city. Today, these photographs, which are freely available via the city's online Municipal Archives, document what the city looked like three decades ago. On this website,...

In the 1960s, Warren Furutani and Victor Shibata decided to travel to Manzanar: a former internment camp in Owen Valley, California where 110,000 Japanese-American citizens had been incarcerated during World War II. Furutani's parents had been incarcerated at an internment camp and the pair were hoping to learn more about a chapter of U.S. history that had been missing from their textbooks. To...

This intriguing and thoughtful collection was created by the University of Washington's Digital Collection initiative, and it deals with the struggle of Washingtonian women who sought to obtain the right to vote in the 19th century. Visitors will find the digital exhibit is streamlined and easy to follow, with text, photos, and documents divided up between six sections, including the...

A Biography of America is an impressive undertaking by public television station WGBH and it is designed for high school, college, and adult learners. The site presents America's history as a "living narrative" and by utilizing first-person narratives, photos, film footage, documents, debates and lectures, the video series encourages critical thinking and offers American history as something best...

Senator J.W. Fulbright served the United States and the state of Arkansas in the Senate for four terms in the period after World War II. He was an astute student of American foreign policy, and he remained a "voice of calmness in the halls of congress, counseling international cooperation, the exchange of information, and support for the United Nations." The University of Arkansas's Special...