Browse Website Reviews
A curated guide to the best online content, large and small, in world history through website reviews from the perspective of a world history teacher.
1914 cartoon reading "Bound for Berlin: The Great War Game" encircling a German soldier with a frightened look

Cartoons

This site provides students and teachers alike with a way of enlivening their approach to British political and social history. The website has a huge amount of material available, and it is well organized to help the researcher find cartoons from a particular cartoonist, or on a particular theme.
Detail of a1919 photo titled "Group Photo St. Deny's Home for Toddlers" showing a group of young children and a nurse.

Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive

At its heart is a collection of "Photographs", "Case files", and "Learning materials" from one of the many philanthropic societies dedicated to the care of children in Britain at this period.
Detail of a photograph titled "General view of Granada incarceration camp" show rows of internment housing facilities

Japanese Incarceration Camps Sites

One of the richest sites on this topic is the Denshō Website, which documents the lives of internees through text, photographs, maps, and video interviews with survivors.
Detail of a 1930s drawing by Alberto Monos showing a purple tank with multiple guns firing at airplanes

Children's Drawings of the Spanish Civil War

In short, this is a potentially interesting collection that gives a child's perspective on the war, but from a teacher's point of view, there is very little help in ways of deploying it in the classroom.
Image of an ad asking "Wanted: Homes for Orphan Children"

The Adoption History Project

Overall, the Adoption History Project is among the best-designed and most succinctly comprehensive historical websites currently available. It is useful for students and scholars at all levels of academic proficiency
Image of two women making a dress on a dummy

Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH)

Materials are arranged into 11 broadly-defined topics; each is introduced with a short essay, an image, and a substantial bibliography of influential texts on that topic, in PDF format. The history of home economics is a relatively young discipline, so these bibliographies provide an especially valuable service.
Example page from The New England Primer

19th Century Schoolbooks

This site will be most immediately useful to those studying the history of U.S. education, but other historians can find much here that could be of use in their classes
Phelps mourning embroidery from American Centuries' collections. It shows two people visiting a grave flanked by weeping willows.

American Centuries

A section of the site called "In the Classroom" offers numerous lesson plans for elementary and middle-school teachers, some written by museum employees and some by schoolteachers themselves, using materials in the online exhibits.
Childhood headshot of Laura Jernegan

Laura Jernegan: Girl on a Whale Ship

Laura Jernegan: Girl on a Whale Ship is useful for those seeking primary source material on the myriad of subjects with which Laura Jernegan's young life intersected and to students wishing to learn more about the whaling industry and the adventures of a young girl and her family aboard a whaling ship.
Logo for Austrialian Periodical Publications 1840-1845 showing the title in front of newspaper pages

Australian Periodical Publications Project, 1840–1845

The manner in which newspapers in this period created transnational links, both in reporting news from elsewhere and in systematically including extracts from other papers, makes them an especially pertinent source for the study of world history.

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