Exploring an Internet Gateway to the Past Where History Matters

With the wealth of endless information available on the Internet today, it’s easy to get mired in sorting through subject-specific websites looking for facts and figures about a specific historical event, person, or period. Most history sites are devoted to a single topic or a group of interrelated topics, but there is one website that was specifically designed for high school and college teachers and students of U.S. history survey courses. History Matters is a well-designed, informative gateway to Web resources that also offers unique teaching materials, fist-person documents and investigations, and guides to analyzing historical evidence and accounts.

History Matters is a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The site is designed, maintained, and updated with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Visible Knowledge Project. The site emphasizes materials focusing on the lives of ordinary Americans, and contributors to the site are actively involved in analyzing and interpreting historical evidence.

No matter what your interest in history, History Matters has at least one section devoted to something that will fascinate and enlighten you. The Many Pasts section contains over 1,000 primary documents that describe the experiences of ordinary Americans throughout U.S. history. Documents can be sorted by time period, topic, keyword, or type of document. To make the most effective use of primary documents, visit the Making Sense of Evidence section. Here you can find detailed strategies for analyzing the online materials including things such as film, music, photographs, oral history, and diaries. Scholars in Action segments show how historical scholars have pieced together puzzles to form the primary documents, allowing you to try to make sense of a document yourself.

For an annotated guide to more than 850 useful websites dealing with U.S. history and social studies, browse the WWW.History section. History Matters experts have carefully screened each listed site and provided a 1-paragraph annotation summarizing the site’s content. Included in the summation is a critique of the site’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its utility for teachers. Information is also provided about the type of resources available on each site—text, images, audio, or video—and the advanced search function allows you to quickly locate sites according to topic, time period, keyword, or other criteria. The sites are reviewed in collaboration with the Journal of American History, and approximately 25 sites are added to the guide each year.

The wealth of information provided by History Matters includes online forums with leading historians in the Talking History section; annotated syllabi from history teachers in Syllabus Central; Web-based assignments in the Digital Blackboard section; interviews with distinguished history teachers in the Secrets of Great History Teachers section; and a Reference Desk providing annotated links to resources on standards used to develop the site. There are even archives of sections that are no longer being updated, such as Puzzled by the Past, a section of historical puzzles and games that can be used in classrooms to inspire creative thinking. Past Meets Present was discontinued in 2001, but an archive is available of past commentaries by historians comparing current events and larger historical themes. A visit to History Matters will not only leave you more informed and enlightened, it will without a doubt leave you with one certainty: history is continually being created, every moment of every day.