notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Elsewhere
All links checked January 9, 2021, and again in June, because a links page with dead links is a sad thing. If something here has rotted since, write me.
I am picky about links. The rule I used for years in the classroom was: primary sources first, and if I cannot find a primary source, a university, and if I cannot find a university, nothing. The web being what it is, this page is short on purpose. Everything below is somewhere I have actually sent a student, at 11 p.m., with a paper due.
The big archives
The National Archives. The founding documents with transcripts, plus the Founding Documents section I link from the documents page. If you have never seen the ROTUNDA exhibit in person, put it on the list; there is a crowd around the Declaration at all times, and it is a healthy thing to stand in it.
The Library of Congress. The deep end of the pool, and I mean that as praise. Two specific corners I send everyone to: the Civil War photographs (Brady, Gardner, and the rest; see my essay on Antietam) and the born-in-slavery narratives from the 1930s Federal Writers' Project. The narratives will change how you read everything else on this site, including my pages. They did mine.
Founders Online. The correspondence of six founders, searchable, 185,000 documents, free, and maintained by the Archives and the university presses. When I tell students the founders are more interesting in their own letters than in anybody's textbook, this is where I send them to check.
For students and teachers
ushistory.org. An old friend of a site; the kind of straightforward text resource that has been quietly carrying the web since the 1990s. If you want a second opinion on anything on my independence page, theirs is a good one.
The National Constitution Center (Philadelphia). Their interactive Constitution pairs each clause with commentary from scholars on both sides, which is exactly the right way to teach the thing, and I have cribbed the format in class more than once.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute. Teacher resources, document collections, and the "History Now" essays. Their holdings on slavery and abolition are the ones I used to build my old unit plans.
C-SPAN. Their lectures in history series is a public service: real historians, real arguments, no panel-show nonsense. A lifetime of lectures for free, and some of them are better than the ones I gave, a fact I mention at parties less often than it deserves.
The houses
Mount Vernon and Monticello. Both have spent the last two decades telling the whole story, Washington's and Jefferson's enslaved households included, in the buildings where it happened. It took longer than it should have; it is done properly now, and the archaeology at Monticello (the Hemings family quarters, Mulberry Row) is worth a trip in itself.
One dead site
My old friend Denny kept Civil War battlefield pages for years; driving directions, what to look for at each stop, where the monuments are and which ones lie. He stopped updating them around 2019 and took the site down in 2020, and the apps that replaced it are prettier and worse. There is no link here because there is nothing left to link to. The point stands: the best guide to a battlefield is a man who has walked it forty times and has opinions about the signage. Somewhere in a box I have his printed Gettysburg notes. If I ever find them, I will ask him if I can type them up for this site, and he will say "nobody wants that, Dave," and I will do it anyway. He has been wrong before; see the flip phone.
Somewhere out there a webring survives. Not here. A man has to draw the line somewhere, and I drew it in 1998.