Thousands of old, beautiful maps are sadly being kept from the public that deserves them — sometimes by clumsy or unwieldy government ftp sites, and other times by archives with steep fees for research, and steeper fees for reproduction. Not anymore the BIG Map Blog offers Enormous historical maps with free full access.

Start exploring these amazing maps by checking the Chevalier map of San Francisco (1912) and the Map of the coast of Rio de Janeiro (1780).

Crap At My Parents House – The goal of Crap At My Parents House is to pay homage to all of the weird crap that everyone’s parents have. Please help in this project by submitting anything you deem funny, weird, odd, unique,…

Storytree – Family stories form an important part of a person’s identity – stories about love, friendship, childhood dreams, hardships, triumphs, and the ongoing journey that is life. Too often these stories remain unshared and are forgotten before they can be recorded.

The StoryTree team is dedicated to help you preserve your precious family memories and share them with the ones you love. As time passes, your captured stories come to represent a bond across generations and become invaluable to your family’s collective identity. Your family history has finally found a place to reside. To find some inspirations check out the Storytelling tips.

How to be a Retronaut – Tap into captivating time capsules in a variety of subjects, thanks to this super cool blog celebrating the wonder of history in digital form. The theme diversity of Retronaut makes it a genuinely encompassing experience in diving into the past right now, in the present. Discover rare photo collections of people and places in various contexts in Retronaut’s well-designed online time-machine.

See the two images below as wonderful examples. The first is an exceptional photo series from TIME magazine in the late 1950s, showing a photo shoot of Christian Dior in Soviet Russia. The second is a chic Polaroid of Sean Young and Rutger Hauer, the cast of Blade Runner (Ridley Scot film, 1982) took while on set. Click on the images to go to the full post and see additional photos.

Courtesy of www.seanyoung.com

DocsTeach – The National Archives are reaching out to teachers and educators across the country, offering an amazing collection of primary resources of historical documents and information. Moreover, DocsTeach invites teachers to browse and create classroom activities built around primary sources. DocsTeach is the perfect example of how drastically education has changed since the old blackboard school days. It is the perfect aid for the didactic confluence of fascinating history with engaging teaching methods.

Here’s an activity example I found on DocsTeach, The Settlement of the American West. Click the image below to get to the full activity.

Civil War 150 – It’s hard to believe, but America’s most influential war is a century and a half old. Thanks to the rapid flow of information online and the advancement of technology today, it’s possible to explore the American Civil War like never before. The History Channel offers an exciting interactive spot commemorating the Civil War, and invites you to discover unique relevant details. These include technologies and weapons used in battle, individuals of the time who made history, the five deadliest battles and much more.

The entire Civil War 150 interface is absolutely amazing, and it’s obvious a lot of time and thought have went into the design of this historical project. To give an example, see the beautiful infographic below of the weapons used during the Civil War. Clicking on each of the methods below will prompt another page with explanations and illustrations.

The History Channel’s Civil War 150 is a must for every American, young and old. Kudos, History Channel!

280daily – What happened to those hand-written diaries we used to keep as kids growing up? I had three of those during my teenage years, but once I became an independent, grown woman, those diaries went straight to the attic. 280daily invites us to revisit the personal diary tradition by offering a free and private documenting service where each day you can use up to 280 characters to describe your day.

As a default, you will receive email reminders of your daily 280 character summary at 4 pm, but you can change this of course in your settings. Since 280daily is optimized to mobile device using this digital documenting service will be a breeze on the go as well. There’s also an import to PDF option if you wish to immortalize your entries… Here’s a video explaining the full features of 280daily.

Iconic Photos – Captivating photos are mesmerizing, and this Weekly Blog winner offers a large collection of culturally and politically significant photos spanning across space and time. Each photo on this blog is more magnificent than the next, and each is accompanied by a textual explanation of its context. Disclaimer: Iconic Photos includes powerful, compelling photos that often consist of graphic images, so take that in mind before entering the blog. Having that said, here are two photos that caught my eye (and heart): The famous WWI Christmas Truce in the trenches, and the poignant story of little Elian Gonzalez.

Photographed by Alan Diaz

Proust – For those of you unfamiliar with Marcel Proust, the man after which this website is called, here’s the gist: This 19-century French novelist is most famous for his work In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), where the main character, while having a pleasant visit at a relative’s house, is taken aback by a powerful moment of involuntary memory -his childhood- and goes through a strong emotional experience, all as a result of the Madeleine cookie’s taste in his mouth. Proust the website plays on the same family moments theme and offers an easy platform to create, document and share family memories.

Sign up to Proust.com and start creating your story. The system will ask you a few questions to get you started, and from then on you can share these, send questions to family members and see where the story takes you and your family. Here’s Tom’s story as an example. To learn more about Proust.com watch the video below.

Archives –  Like Geni and Ancestry.com Archives, too, wishes to become a leader in the family history tracing industry. But instead of supplying merely the platform for adding, processing and viewing user-fed data, Archives already comes with “a database of over one billion fully searchable records and historical documents” which are continually updated.

With Archives, tracing family trees and ancestry is both affordable and simple. If you were considering embarking on a family roots project, Archives should be your first one to explore. Besides, there are many rewards to family history research; here’s what other people have found.

The Old Photo Album – Although this site’s photo gallery has more war and military pictures in the archive than any other category, the digital quality visuals here are mesmerising and intriguing. See American history and culture in a new way, through the camera lens, thanks to The Old Photo Album, a Weekly Blog winner. Here a couple of examples, American Civil War (part 12) and Jack Delano – City Life.

OhLife – This site has such a unique concept I was anxious to try it out. The basic idea of OhLife is to keep a daily diary -totally private of course- that shows you how you’ve changed through time, and what events and feelings affected you the most. And all this happens using a tool you use on a daily basis anyway – your email.

Once you’ve signed up OhLife sends this question to your email: “How did your day go?” Simply answer it and hit Reply. Over the course of the following days this will go on and over time you will see the changes you went through in terms of events, relationships and feelings – essentially life in a nut shell, only it’s the most interesting one since it’s yours! Set up the time you wish OhLife to send you the question email, even add pics. It’s the ideal modern-day diary for the busy urbanists.