Allow at least 1 week for materials to arrive. Primary documents via the Internet Researching on the internet means making judgments about the quality of information. Some sites are simply misinforming, like the humorous Mankato Home Page , which attributes tropical qualities to a town just south of the Canadian border. To find scholarly resources on the web, look for sites that have academic or government affiliation, that cite the original source of information, and that list credentials of the author. One way to screen web sites is to use a web directory as your search engine.
Web directories vary in restrictiveness, but all have some sort of rating system for site inclusion.
For the purposes of American history, the sites most recommended are those that contain primary documents. One excellent site is the Library of Congress' American Memory project. See especially their George Washington Papers collection, but also Afro-American Odyssey , Printed Ephemera , and Nineteenth Century in Print . Another good source of primary documentation, or at least earlier documentation, is U. of Michigan's Making of America . Another interesting collection is the University of Michigan's Spy Letters of the American Revolution .