US Colonial History
and Revolutionary War

Web Resources

Pennsylvania

• Brandywine Battlefield Park
  Located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, this is the site of the largest engagement of the Revolutionary War, fought on September 11, 1777, between the Continental Army led by General George Washington and the British forces headed by General William Howe.

• Philadelphia Campaign 1777
  A virtual marching tour of the American Revolution from ushistory.org (Independence Hall Association of Philadelphia) with background leading up to Valley Forge.

• Rebels with a Vision
  An online site with information on all the signers of the Declaration.

• Sons of the American Revolution
  The Pennsylvania branch of the society that works to perpetuate the memory of the American Revolution. Members must be descendents of participants in the American Revolution.

• Valley Forge National Historic Park
  http://www.nps.gov/vafo/

United States

• Archaeology Interactive Dig: Brooklyn's eighteenth-century Lott House
  Uncover the buried past of a Dutch family in the 18th century living on the fringes of the burgeoning city that would become New York.

• Archiving Early American History
  http://www.earlyamerica.com/
  original newspapers, maps and writings from 18th Century America. Includes biographies of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

• American Memory Project
  Online collections from the Library of Congress.
  • Thomas Jefferson Papers
  • George Washington Papers

• Coin and Currency Collections
  http://www.coins.nd.edu/
  Coins and currency of Colonial and early America at the University of Notre Dame. This site includes photographs of both coin and currency as well as a description. Also includes examples of wampum beads used by the Native Americans for trade.

• Colonial Williamsburg
  http://www.history.org/
  Links to the historic capital and to other history-related links.

• DoHistory
  http://www.dohistory.org/
  A site from the Film Study Center at Harvard University that encourages hands-on history, featuring the case of midwife Martha Ballard's diary.

• The Freedom Trail (Boston)
  http://www.thefreedomtrail.org/
  The Freedom Trail is a 2.5 mile long red line painted on Boston sidewalks in 1958, connecting 16 historic sites that played a role in the American fight for Independence. You can follow this trail online.

• Jamestown
  The first permanent English settlement in North America
  • Jamestown Rediscovery
    The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities is investigating the remains of 1607 Jamestown on Jamestown Island, Virginia.
  • Virtual Jamestown
    http://www.virtualjamestown.org/
    A digital research-teaching-learning project to explore the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment. From Virginia Tech.

• Library of Congress: France in America
  http://international.loc.gov/intldl/fiahtml/
  Conceived in partnership with France’s national library, France in America is a bilingual digital library thatt explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century.
• Library of Congress: Spain, United States, & the American Frontier: Historias Paralelas
  http://international.loc.gov/intldl/eshtml/
  The Parallel Histories pilot project examines the history of Spanish expansion into North America from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas across the continent through Louisiana and Texas to the Southwest, California, and as far as Alaska. Created in conjunction with The National Library of Spain.

• The Midwife's Tale (The American Experience)
  From the weekly (Mondays at 9 pm) TV series by WGBH (Boston) and PBS, hosted by David McCullough. "Martha Moore Ballard was born in 1735. She died in 1812. And that's about all that would be known of her life had she not kept a diary, something few woman did then. It's not known what she looked like. Nor did she figure ever in what are commonly thought of as historic events. There is only what she herself wrote with her quill pen steadily in a steady hand, day after day for twenty-seven years, never missing a day." Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Laurel Ulrich.

• PBS Thomas Jefferson
  http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/
  The Companion website for the PBS documentary by Ken Burns.

• Plymouth
  • Plimoth Plantation
    http://www.plimoth.org/
    Information about Plimoth Plantation, the living history museum of the seventeenth century in Plymouth, Massachusetts as well as resources on the Pilgrim Story, the history of Plymouth Colony (1620-1692), the Wampanoag Indians, and Thanksgiving.
  • Plymouth Colony Archive Project
    A University of Virginia collection of historical documents.

• Spy Letters of the American Revolution
  http://www.si.umich.edu/spies/
  This online exhibit is based on spy letters from the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. The Gallery of Letters gives a brief description of each letter and links to more information about the stories of the spies in the letter or the secret methods used to make the letter.
• Washington, George, the Papers of
  http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/
  A collection from the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.