Websites

21st Century Social Studies is interwoven with the web. In the Dark Ages of Computers (the 1980s) technology belonged to the Maths and Sciences it must now be on equal footing with all academic disciplines and a teacher of Social Studies must have a grab bag of sites and web addresses for almost any lesson.

Listed below is a running list of suggestions that I keep in my virtual bag, but you can also check out the Technology category from the blog on the front page for more suggestions and ideas.

• Front Pages from the Newseum
  www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages
  This is an amazing free resource, provided access to an image of front page of over 700 newspapers from around the world. The pages are updates daily and you can access them as images or PDF.

• Our Documents
  www.ourdocuments.gov
  This is a great resource from the National Archives. It contains 100 documents from United States history, in high resolution and PDF format as well as a text transcription. My two favorite documents to teacher form this site are the 16th Amendment (with the first Form 1040) and the Zimmerman Telegram. Both great starting points for teaching students of all ages about how to decode (no pun intended!) primary source documents

• The Living Room Candidate
  www.livingroomcandidate.org
  Now a classic for social studies teachers, if you have not used it beware you may become addicted. The site feature EVERY presidential campaign commercial produced. The best news about this site is that its popularity has allowed it to update to the latest technology. The videos are now in Flash formate (like YouTube) so that you do not have to worry about strange plug-ins.

• Historical Society of Pennsylvania
  http://www.hsp.org/
  The Historical Society of Pennsylvania,  is not just for teacher in PA. The vast archive and collection held at HSP contains one of the greatest treasure troves of Early American History. The site is a great resource for teachers looking for materials on everyday life and people in Early America. Also a great resource for independent student projects.
• The White House
  www.whitehouse.gov
  The new Obama White House website  provides amazing behind the scenes information and easy to access information life inside the Executive Branch. This is not a partisan recomendation, you can find all the information without the poltics and have you students decide

• Philly History
  www.phillyhistory.org
  This is a remarkable site, and not just for those of us lucky enough to teach in and around Philadelphia. You will find hundreds of photographing capturing the evolution of one of America’s greatest cities. You can browse the photographs by address, map, or category.

• David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
  www.davidrumsey.com
  A map collection any social studies teacher would drool over. A fair warning, this site is beautiful and you will find yourself getting lost staring at the maps, but you will find some real holes in the collection especially with the United States and parts of Africa. Then again, they do now act as layers in Google Earth which makes them even more compelling. The best use of these maps is to show “change over time” pull up a couple of maps of the same area but from different time periods and move between each (another warning: in Google Earth this come up as VERY large image layers and will suck computer power).

• The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy
  avalon.law.yale.edu