If your class is going to study the Underground Railroad, one website you should check out is Documenting the American South (DocSouth). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has put together a great collection of primary sources, including slave narratives published before 1920. To see a list of what they have available, go here. Besides the full text of books, DocSouth has great supplementary material for almost every title. On Frederick Douglass, for example, the site provides a short biography and related primary sources. While students may be familiar with Douglass or Harriet Tubman, they can find on DocSouth many new interesting stories from fugitive slaves like Solomon Northup and William Wells Brown.

CivilWarHome.com is a great site with a ton of information on life during the civil war. Their main page is separated in several categories including Medicine, Biographies, and Essays each with numerous links and descriptions for subcategories.

I ran into a great site today with tons of transcribed documents from the civil war. There are several categories to choice from including Soldiers Letters, Battle Reports, and Diaries. Its a great place to gain an insight on everyday life throughout the civil war.

The U.S. National Park Service has a wealth of information on some of the key battlefields of the Civil War. Not least among them is Gettysburg, located nearby Dickinson College in Adams County, PA. Along with pages discussing the battlefield itself, the National Park Service features a web exhibit of the day-to-day life of Civil War soldiers. The site includes definitions of some Civil War era military terms and brief descriptions of what soldiers of the time would have experienced during their long encampments. Most interesting are the image galleries included in the site. These are contemporary, high quality digital images of artifacts related to encampment life. Among these artifacts are game boards, musical instruments, diaries, letters, and personal photographs. Certainly a site worth checking out!

I stumbled across a great site today called Picture History. It has a lot of great scans of original letters and pictures from the time period. I ran across the site while researching Grace Bedell, the young girl influential enough to convince President Lincoln to grow his beard. They have scanned and posted the letter Lincoln wrote back. There are many other documents to browse around through.

This site was created especially for teachers and has a very clear, but yet brief, overview of the Dred Scott case. In addition, both Taney’s majority decision and the two dissenting opinions are provided so that students can read the debate from both sides. This site is brief enough to keep students’ attentions and integrates primary source documents into its material without becoming cumbersome.

Washington University in St. Louis, in conjunction with the Missouri State Archives and the St. Louis Circuit Clerk, have launched an informative and well-organized digital collection on the Dred Scott Case. This website provides full text transcriptions of one hundred and eleven relevant documents, a detailed timeline, a thorough historical background, and helpful links to additional information.