The History Makers Digital Archive is a collection of video interviews with 400 African Americans, including Barack Obama and other well-known figures.

That’s nice, but how their presented is what makes this site extraordinarily impressive. Here’s how they describe it:

As a registered user of the new web-based archive, you will be able to:

* Search the spoken text of over 900 hours of video divided into
18,254 story segments.
* Filter searches by geography, time period, and the gender,
occupation and birth year of the interviewee.
* View your search results as 3-5 minute video story segments,
each aligned with a running transcript below a Flash video player
(compatible with most browsers).
* Save video story segments of interest and return to them through
web site bookmarking.
* Search dozens of historical topics, biographical themes and
interview qualities, newly coded to interview segments through thousands
of hours of human indexing.

It’s pretty neat.

Registration is free, though it’s a bit more cumbersome than most other sites. I still was able to finish it in a couple of minutes.

I’m definitely adding it to The Best Websites To Teach & Learn About African-American History.