LINKS

General:

Primary Sources for the Constitution and the Making of the Nation
Click the line above to view a guide to online sources for a wealth of key documents, along with tips on how to navigate the sites and access those documents. This is taken from the appendix to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation, so chapter references are to that book.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/
History Matters!
The site proclaims, “This site serves as a gateway to Web resources and offers useful materials for teaching U. S. history.” Absolutely true. Another meta-page for teachers, with links to numerous sources helpful in preparing lesson plans, is Online Schools—American Military History Online: The Revolutionary War. http://www.onlineschools.org/resources/the-revolutionary-war/

http://www.geocities.com/arrtop/revwardata.htm
Another good place to start, a wide variety of links to “Searchable On-line Databases and Lists,” put together by the American Revolution Roundtable of Philadelphia. Use this site to browse or start any search.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwjclink.html
Journals of the Continental Congress and Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789. This source, part of the Library of Congress’s “American Memory” project, is absolutely invaluable for the political history of the Founding Era. The letters are a particularly rich field to be mined.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/continental/
Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. Another American Memory site, taken largely from American Archives series (see next entry), but covering a broader time span, from 1774 to 1789, and including documents relevant to both the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Best way to browse is to plug in each year to the search box.

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/AmArch/contents.html
Digitization of American Archives, Fourth Series. A wealth of source materials collected in the during the early archival movement in the nineteenth century, including newspaper articles and records of a wealth of committees and convention, covering the key period leading up to independence, from March 1774 to July 1776.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/18th.asp
A large compilation of official documents of the 18th century, mostly from the late colonial and revolutionary eras.

http://www.nara.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Site rich with primary documents, but difficult to navigate. For 140 visual images of the Revolution (these are not all “primary” — many date from the 19th century), go to “search” on left menu, then type in “pictures of the revolutionary war.”

http://www.common-place.org/
Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life
Scholarly interchange of the highest quality.

http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Access to the most respected academic journal in the field.

http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/
The American Revolution: National Discussions of our Revolutionary Origins
This site, created by H-Net, was created to accompany the six-hour PBS series Liberty! Although the show itself perpetuated many of the standard mythologies, this website is probably the best place to start for a serious investigation of the wealth of scholarly material generated in the late twentieth century. (The site has not been updated; there is no current scholarship.) Click on “bibliography,” and note, in particular, the selection of articles in William and Mary Quarterly.

http://hnn.us/
History News Network
Not much on the Revolution here, but this is a way of staying current with how historians are relating the past to the present.

http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/sitemap.html
American Social History Project
Electronic access to Who Built America, the most comprehensive bottom-up textbook for American History.

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/
Gilder Lehrman Institute
Major players in history education, with teacher institutes and lots of primary documents. Particularly strong on the contradiction between slavery and the early American emphasis on liberty.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/
Rethinking Schools
Magazine and publications with ideas for teachers who believe in approaching history from a people’s perspective. Click on “Web Resources” for further sites.

http://www.teachingforchange.org/
Teaching for Change Catalogue
Teaching ideas and tools to “transform schools into socially equitable centers of learning.”

http://zinnedproject.org/
Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History
This site offers more than 80 free, downloadable teaching activities for middle and high school classrooms to bring a people’s history to the classroom, and it lists hundreds of recommended books, films and websites. The teaching activities and resources are organized by theme, time period and grade level.

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
Jim Loewen’s website
The author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America has a nice website helpful to teachers who wish to dig beneath the traditional myths. Loewen does little with the mythology of the Revolution, but he addresses the myth-making process on many other levels

http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100666900
Voices of a People's History of the United States is a new collection of primary sources that documents a rich American tradition of dissent and struggle "from the bottom up." Compiled by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, it can serve either as a companion to Zinn's classic People's History of the United State or as a valuable historical education in its own right.

http://www.sevenstories.com/textbook/
This extensive and intriguing teaching guide to Voices of a People's History of the United States is a great help for teachers wanting to introduce a wider and deeper range of primary sources into their classes. The entire guide is available online at this site.

Specialized:

http://boston1775.blogspot.com/
This is far and away the best and most active site to explore the build-up to the Revolution in Massachusetts. J. L. Bell stays on top of all recent developments and offers both access and astute commentary.

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wcarr1/Lossing1/Contents.html
Both volumes of Benjamin Lossing’s 1850 classic, Pictorial Fieldbook of the Revolution, including digitized visuals. A must for Revolutionary War aficionados.

http://www.walika.com/sr/uniforms/uindex.htm
Uniforms of the American Revolution
Reconstructed illustrations of what soldiers wore.

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/blackloyalists/
Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People
Rich source with excellent overview, biographies, and extensive primary sources — personal accounts, letters, and official documents — for the black experience in the Revolution. This is a “must” site.

http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/
Geography of Slavery in Virginia
Incredible primary documentation: more than four thousand advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants (1736-1795), as well as official records, newspaper and narrative accounts of slavery, and slaveholders’ diaries and correspondences.

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
One thousand images of slavery in America.

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/blackloyalists/
American Women’s History: A Research Guide
Excellent bibliography for printed and electronic materials. Click on “Subject index to research sources,” then on “American Revolution.”

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/repehtml/repehome.html
Early Virginia Religious Petitions
Yes, religion was a key part of the lives of common people in the Revolutionary Era, but you’d never guess it from the attention it gets in history texts. This site contains an overview and primary documents.

http://oneida-nation.net/historical.html
Oneida Indian Nation: Culture and History
Secondary chronicle of Oneida participation in the Revolution.

http://cherokeehistory.com/
History of the Cherokee
Secondary chronicle, including the impact of the Revolution on the Cherokee.

http://www.sullivanclinton.com/
Sullivan/Clinton Campaign, 1779-2004.
Amazing site which details, with visual aids, the genocidal march against the Iroquois in 1779, in which all houses and food sources were systematically destroyed.

http://nationalparalegal.edu/conLawCrimProc_Public/Federalism/PresidentialPowers.asp
National Paralegal College
“Presidential Powers” page delineates in clear language what does and does not lie within executive authority. (Useful source for reading Mr. President.)

(Please contact Ray Raphael if there are other links that you think might be appropriate for this list.)