PBS has a great website for the Reconstruction period. The site contains interactive activities for students as well as lesson plans for teachers. The site is based off of a PBS program on reconstruction which can be viewed in its entirety on the site as well.

In a thought-provoking column today in the New York Times, headlined “Finishing Our Work,” Tom Friedman argues that the Obama victory represents a final act of closure for the American Civil War.  And he finds it particularly fitting that it was Virginia in many ways that provided the key to Obama’s electoral triumph.  Friedman writes:

“A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.”

Amen.

Two websites currently stand out for the access they provide to primary sources about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.  The first from Douglas O. Linder’s quite exceptional “Famous Trials” series.  Linder, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) has put together invaluable primary source packets on trials from Socrates to the 9/11 hijackers.  His archive on the Johnson impeachment trial is quite good and contains both primary sources and useful background information such as a timeline and bibliography.   There’s not too many visual bells & whistles here, but the content is strong.  A more professional-looking site and one that also contains significant content comes from HarpWeek.  Their site relies on over 200 excerpts, including wonderful cartoons and images, from Harper’s Weekly magazine during the period 1865-1869.