Credits

This Web site was designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges and is supported by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston.

The materials on this Web site include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a database of annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images. The site's Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to pose questions to professional historians.

Our website offers a variety of ways for students and teachers to actually do history. We have created 72 inquiry-based interactive modules that we call eXplorations. These modules provide extensive primary sources on such topics as Mexican, Tejano, and Texian perspectives on the battle of the Alamo; Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to relocate Japanese Americans during World War II and the Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to escalate American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1964 and 1965; and children's perspectives on slavery, westward migration, and World War II.

We also allow students and teachers to create multimedia American history exhibitions. These exhibitions can include historical images from our extensive database, which currently contains over 600 photographs, art works, and digitized letters. Users can easily incorporate their own text in their exhibitions. These presentations can be e-mailed, downloaded, or saved on our servers.

Digital History offers many other ways to engage students in the study of history, from fact checks (multiple choice quizzes on every era of American history), to 19th century high school entrance examinations, a time machine, an interactive timeline that links to primary source documents, and a flash overview of American history.

For teachers, we have created 24 learning modules, each of which includes a succinct historical overview; recommended documents, films, and historic images; and teaching resources including lesson plans,fact checks, and activities.

The site also contains resource guides for 44 historical eras and topics. Each includes a historical overview, links to the relevant Digital History textbook chapters, bibliographies, classroom handouts, charts, chronologies, film guides,
historic newspaper articles, primary source documents, lesson plans, historic maps, music, cartoons, quizzes, and images.

This site was created by a collaborative team:

This site was updated on 22-Nov-09.