With so many wonderful resources online, it can be a challenge to find and keep the links all in one place, but for historians and students of history, one site is trying to do that for us.
The Best History Sites website (link here) was founded in 2001 and now contains links to over 1200 history sites. They have been chosen for their suitability for American High School children, but many of them contain appropriate resources for university-level too.
The site has a special American history links page, which contains many primary source pages as well as teaching ideas and resources. It would be very useful if you have to design a new course this summer and are unsure where to start.
Many university libraries in the UK are encouraging their academic staff to make more use of internet resources because they simply haven’t got the money or the space to keep buying huge numbers of books for new courses. So, this sort of resource is an invaluable tool for lecturers who want to ensure their students keep reading but have no library budget to spend.
An example of the useful sites it links to is the Martha Ballard diary, kept by a Maine midwife in the mid-eighteenth century. To explore this page further, click here. As well as excerpts from the diary itself and suggested lesson plans associated with it, the website also contains ‘how to’ articles describing among other things, how to read a graveyard, how to read probate records and how to do oral history.
Historians of America are among the best at using internet resources because there is such a wealth of information for our topic out there. So, why not spend a few hours browsing this summer to see what there is out there to enhance your teaching curriculum?
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