A joint venture of the Library of Congress and Harper’s Weekly, one of the nation’s preeminent political publications, the website American Political Prints, 1766-1876 collects, and exhibits, an impressive selection of historically significant primary source documents. Specifically, the site seeks to expose the public to an extremely important yet often overlooked form of American political expression; that is, the political print. For a long period of America’s history, from the tumultuous birth of the nation to the violent upheaval of the Civil War, political prints were a vital form of national expression and today provide a vibrant portrait of the nation’s past. This website charts the evolution of the political print from both a technological as well as ideological perspective. A helpful glossary keeps readers informed about the various stages in this development, from the woodcuts of the eighteenth century to the lithography of the Civil War era. Hundreds of political prints can be browsed within a contextual timeline, or searched using key terms. The site is much more than simply a collection of beautifully scanned and cataloged prints; each image is accompanied by copious annotation that helps situate its historical meaning. Since these posters, broadsides, handbills, cartoons, and other images contain often obscure political and cultural references, the explanations immensely aid the reader’s comprehension of the important role these prints played in the nation’s early history.

The New York Public Library’s impressive collection of photographs is digitized and available for browsing on the library’s dynamic website. The tremendous scope of visual materials on the site makes this an invaluable resource for historians, and the library has spent a great deal of time organizing this data so as to maximize its discovery and use. Users can search independently using an advanced search function that keeps logs of the users search terms and results. Simply browsing through the collection is made much easier by the broad categories that separate the photos; a linked menu of these categories appears in the navigation bar at the top of every page, and an illustrated version for Flash-enabled computers opens on this website's home page. The categories are Arts & Literature, Cities & Buildings, Culture & Society, History & Geography, Industry & Technology, Nature & Science, and Printing & Graphics. Perhaps the site’s most helpful function for researchers is its presentation of detailed collection guides. Each of these presentations includes a structured narrative about the digital contents and provides tools for further browsing: "Collection Contents" is a list of titles or a hierarchy of folders and sub-folders enabling researchers to move through a collection's content and follow its internal organization; "Related Subjects" provides a scoped index, derived from the subject terms in the collections' descriptive records. Managing a collection this large (and historically significant) is no easy task, but the New York Public Library has created a website that is enormously helpful in making sense of it all.

The Geography of Slavery project presents full transcriptions and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves and servants placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790, and is in the process of compiling advertisements well into the nineteenth century. In addition, the project offers a number of other documents related to slaves, servants, and slaveholders, including court records, other newspaper notices, slaveholder correspondence, and assorted literature about slavery and indentured servitude. Searches allow users to find out what times of the year slaveholders were most likely to place advertisements for runaways, what skills advertised slaves were most likely to possess, and whether any patterns appear through time in flights of black slaves and white servants together, as well as to trace the progress through time of particular individuals, illuminating stories that may have previously been hidden from our eyes. In addition, users are able to map information from historical geographic locations, allowing them to generate dynamic maps from searches and to produce visual representations of the ranges of slaves' and servants' flight and capture across Virginia as well as throughout much of the Atlantic Ocean region.

This beautifully designed site, presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities, takes as its subject the special role of visual art in American history. The specific approach to this admittedly broad topic is to narrow the list down to 40 canonical works of art that best represent the most powerful themes in the nation’s heritage. What is left is a collection of “masterpieces”; artistic expressions that reflect and reveal the national character so clearly that they have become iconic. What makes this site special, particularly for educators, is the attention to context and availability of additional resources that accompany each item. A famous photograph from the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965, for example, is presented alongside a list of links about the American Civil Rights Movement, sites that further the user’s understanding of what makes these works of art so important. While there is a limited amount of works available in this online gallery, this site presents them with a clarity that makes the connection between art and history both understandable and visually exciting.

Brown University’s collection of African Sheet Music, part of a larger collection from the John Hay Library, digitally preserves and exhibits an impressive range of images unique to American cultural history. Sheet music for songs produced (and sometimes performed) by African Americans during the years 1820-1920 demonstrates the powerful intersection of race and entertainment that defined this era. The images on the site are typically of a single kind: full color scans of sheet music covers, followed by scans of the music itself. The covers are of particular interest for historians of visual culture, as they depict a whole range of racial attitudes (caricature, stereotypes, minstrelsy) as developed over an entire century. The site’s main strength lies in the impressive digital scans of these images, which can be zoomed into without losing clarity or detail. With attention to the collection’s ripe potential for scholarly research, this website offers nearly two thousand examples of African American sheet music, organized by themes and keywords, or completely searchable. While the historical context provided is limited to a few essays by experts in the field, the high-quality images and ease of navigation make this site an important repository for a compelling set of images.