This site exhibits over 150 years of American art, as represented in The Phillips Collection. Key works are placed along a timeline according to their date of completion. To suggest context, a sampling of important events of the time accompanies corresponding images. Images, commentary about the works of art, and biographies of the artists are accessible through the timeline and also through indexes of more than 650 works of art available on the site. Artists and their works may be searched by artist name, medium, or date. The site offers an opportunity to see many examples of the work of a single artist, as the Phillips Collection is noted for its “units,” extensive holdings of works by such artists as Jacob Lawrence, John Sloan, and George Luks. Users can best navigate the site’s many features by engaging the impressive timeline from 1830 to 2000; by clicking on individual works of art (situated within larger historical events), one finds additional works by the artist, learning activities for a wide range of disciplines (science, history, etc.), and links to other supplemental information and images.

This relatively simple site displays the work of a single, important American artist, David Claypool Johnston (1799-1865). Johnston's work was very well received in the United States. His most well known topics included the militia, temperance, religion, and politics, and he is best remembered for his contribution to the early years of lithography in America and as one of the nation’s first prominent humorists. This site offers brief biographical sketches of important phases in Claypool’s artistic development, contextualizing the finer points of his satirical wit, which may elude contemporary audiences. The one drawback to the site is the relatively small scans of art available, and since many of the works require the user to read text, this is no small drawback. Many of the political cartoons are entirely illegible, which significantly lowers the site’s overall historical value. Nevertheless, the site provides a good introduction to a lesser-known but important American satirist.

The Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Publishing Project (PILA), housed at the University of California, San Diego, seeks to digitally preserve and exhibit an artistic phenomenon unique to American history. Between 1860 and 1900, a period of “forced reduction” of Plains Indians tribes to reservations as decreed by the U.S. government, a new form of Native American art emerged as a response to these rapidly changing social, cultural, and environmental conditions. There currently exists over 200 complete “ledgers” (books of drawings from this period) throughout the world, rapidly being sold in auctions, and this website seeks to use digital technology to preserve this history. By scanning each image, the site allows viewers to explore these pieces in high detail without damaging the originals. The website’s viewing interface is among the most advanced and user-friendly of any visual history site, allowing users to open multiple windows showing different pages across the PILA project and zoom in to view the details of any portion of any open ledger book page. The site also includes a virtual research station for registered visitors (free), which allows users to login and save searches, create Web-based slide shows that can be displayed on any computer that has access to the Internet, record their own research notes linked directly to the images, post public comments, as well as download research notes and plate lists to a local computer. This ongoing project helps keep a rare and dying art form publicly alive by combining rigorous scholarship with cutting edge visual technology.

Daguerreotypes were an early form of photography prominent in the mid-nineteenth century. In Secrets of the Dark Chamber: Art of the American Daguerreotype, the Smithsonian American Art Museum presents a series of representative daguerreotypes along with primary source texts that reinforce the significance of this technology and its impact on American history. As the companion site to a book of the same name, the visual component of the exhibition is limited to a few examples placed in three broad categories: landscapes, portraits, and occupationals. While the site then only includes ten examples of actual daguerreotypes, this seeming lack is made up for by the site’s careful attention to primary sources as historical context. For example, one page includes dozens of nineteenth century texts on the rise of photographic technology, while another contains audio files of contemporary scholarly lectures that effectively situate the significance of this artistic development. The sum total of this effort is a site that communicates the importance of a subject rarely covered in much detail, and that presents this hidden history in a clear and understandable, if not often visual, fashion.

Produced by the United States Civil War Center, Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency, provides a detailed look at a unique subject matter; namely, American money. In particular, the site aims to uncover how deeply embedded slavery was in all aspects of Southern life. As evidence, the site offers hundreds of scans of Confederate currency, examining the documents for references to Southern economics, agriculture, and slavery itself. A series of scholarly essays by Civil War historians helps contextualize the phenomenon of Confederate currency and the unique set of political, social, and cultural conditions that created it. Beyond these introductory essays, however, there is little on the site to help the reader understand each individual image and the unique historical reality that it depicts. The site thus maintains an impressive collection of rarely seen primary sources, but lacks a corresponding detailed analysis to aid understanding. Nevertheless, Beyond Face Value catalogs an important set of sources, as Southerners consecrated their culture on the official documents of their seceded government. As site historian Harold Holzer aptly observes, "Much more than remnants of a shattered economy, these artifacts open a rare window onto the Confederacy's view of itself, and they deserve our attention as artistic and political, not just financial, currency."