The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About U.S. History

I just agreed to teach two classes of United States History next year to English Language Learners. It will be an interesting experiment, since one class will be done almost entirely in the computer lab and the other will be mostly in my classroom. I’ll be doing a number of different assessments with both groups over the year (including self-assessments) to compare results between the two.

Given these upcoming classes, I thought it would be helpful for me to develop another “The Best…” list, this time focusing on U.S. History sites.

In order for a site to make it onto this list, they needed to be….

* …broad in the time periods they covered.

* …offer something “value-added” by being on the Internet over a hard-copy textbook.

* … accessible to English Language Learners.

* …. available free-of-charge (except for one).

I found surprisingly few sites that had all these elements.

Here are my choices for The Best Websites For Teaching & Learning About U.S. History:

The Voice of America Special English series on The Making Of A Nation is number seven. These short episodes provide audio support to the text covering important moments in U.S. History. The top of their main page also provides instructions on how to easily access back episodes. Many Things has all the Voice Of America Special English broadcasts on American History organized chronologically.

Number six is U.S. History From Hippo Campus. Online movies cover the course of our continent’s history.

Awesome Stories is number five. You can find very accessible articles and interactive exercises at this excellent site, which has made several other of my lists. You have to register for your class or school, but it’s free and takes seconds.

I’m ranking Brainpop’s U.S. History Movies at number two. You have to pay for student access, but it’s well worth the price, especially since they began to close-caption their animations this school year.

And now, my pick as the number one Website For Teaching & Learning About U.S. History is….Mr. Nussbaum. There are tons of resources, interactives, and games there that will engage students.

Pete’s PowerPoint Station is a treasure trove of freely available PowerPoint presentations on all subjects, and most of them appear very accessible to English Language Learners. I’m particularly excited about the ones on United States History. Most of the other sites I’ve found that have history PowerPoints are much more advanced, and not very accessible, which is why I’m adding the site to this list.

“The Price Of Freedom: Americans At War” is a Smithsonian multimedia interactive on each war in United States’ history. Videos (with transcript), images and text are included.

Docs Teach from the U.S. National Archives lets you easily create online activities using primary sources. Plus, you can access the interactives that others have created, too. It’s super-easy to register. Creating the interactives is not as intuitive as I would like, but it’s still pretty easy.

As regular readers know, this past school year I taught two U.S. History classes to English Language Learners — one in a regular classroom and the other in the computer lab. You can read more about the results of this research experiment at Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment.

I used a blog during the computer lab class. You can access the United States History Class blog and see an entire year’s of lessons designed for student self-access. You can also see links to the students blogs used during the course. The lessons include quite a bit of original material I developed for use in both of the classes, and they are available for download (during the year students would open up the documents and cut-and-paste the exercises into their own blogs).

You’re obviously welcome to use the resources there with your students. I just ask that you not publish or reprint any of my original materials for use other than by your students.

You can access older Glencoe materials like this (I especially like these maps because they offer audio support for the text), and different games here.

The History Channel has a great website to support their great United States History mini-series, The Story of Us.

Shmoop has a very impressive collection of U.S. History slideshows organized chronologically.

Have Fun With History has a large collection of short video clips divided by historical era. Even better, they’re not hosted on YouTube, so are accessible to classes where YouTube is blocked.

The Smithsonian, in conjunction with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has unveiled Preparing For The Oath.Not only is it now probably the best site out there for preparing people to take the U.S. Citizenship exam, it’s also just a great site to learn about U.S. History. Audio is available to support all the text, and it includes a practice exam.

Manifest Destiny – The Story of The US Told in 141 Maps is an impressive interactive that does exactly what the title says….

American Latino Theme Study is from The National Park Service.

“American History Handbook” Is A Useful Resource

101 Objects That Made America is from The Smithsonian.

Each year for the past two years I’ve posted about a new online “choose your own adventure” U.S. History game created by Mission US, which is funded by the Corporation For Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment For The Humanities.

First, there was one on the American Revolution, then on slavery.

They’ve just unveiled a third one in the series, this one focusing on Native Americans, and it looks great.

You can play A Cheyenne Odyssey here, and all the games here. You can read more about the new game here, and I’ve embedded a short trailer video below.

Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, has just announced several new online education resources.

The one that really stands out for me is Sea Of Liberty. After registering for free, teachers can create virtual classrooms and student can make lots of online interactive posters and projects using Monticello resources.

British Pathé Makes 85,000 Historical Clips Available On YouTube

Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans is the headline of a useful article in Slate that gives details about the impressive interactive called The Invasion of America: How the United States Took Over an Eighth of the World.

It’s a “must-see” and “must-use” site when teaching U.S. History, and is an excellent illustration of our country’s avarice.

American Panorama is an “Atlas of U.S. History” from Richmond University. Right now, it has several interactive historical maps tracing historical trends over time, including ones for “forced migration of enslaved people,” “The Overland Trails,” “Canals,” and “Foreign Born Population.” They have plans to add several more.

I think the one of “Foreign-Born Population” is particularly useful, and I’m adding a direct link to it to The Best Sites For Learning About Immigration In The United States.

“Reading Through History” Looks Like An Excellent YouTube Channel For…History Classes

TWO NEW INFOGRAPHICS ABOUT U.S. HISTORY – ONE IS VERY GOOD, THE OTHER IS AMAZING

[OC] US City Populations 1790-2018 from r/dataisbeautiful

THE SMITHSONIAN RELEASES NEW CURRICULUM ON U.S. MIGRATION & IMMIGRATION HISTORY

IMPORTANT NY TIMES INTERACTIVE COMPARING HOW HISTORY TEXTBOOKS FROM DIFFERENT STATES TALK ABOUT THE SAME TOPICS

Many teachers are familiar with the Mr. Nussbaum site, which has offered lots of online learning activities for years. Now, its creator, Greg Nussbaum, has unveiled an even more impressive site called Learn About America.  All the activities are available free, but it just costs $45 a year if teachers want to create a virtual classroom and track student work. When I was teaching US History to English Language Learners, Brainpop was a classroom staple.  Its cost eventually just got too much and they required a school subscription if you wanted students to be able to watch the videos on their own. If I was teaching it today, I’d get a subscription to this new “Learn About America” site, and combine it with interactive videos I could create with Wayground (formerly Quizizz), plus our accessible textbook.

American Empire is an impressive interactive showing American military bases and interventions for the past 125 years. In addition, it compares them to those of other countries. You can read more about it at Google Maps Mania.

Here’s how the National Museum of American History describes Becoming US:

Becoming US is a new educational resource for high school teachers and students to learn immigration and migration history in a more accurate and inclusive way.

The Voices Of Democracy site highlights great speeches from throughout U.S. History, and many of them are accompanied by lesson plans. I particularly liked the ones I saw in the Civil Rights category.

There are versions in English and in Spanish.

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