Awesome Stories

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Click the links, below to enter the site.
Our password for use is: jvbrown which will give you full access.

AwesomeStories takes the stories of history, biographies, movies, religion, and trials and links them to the actual manuscripts, paintings, historical maps, illustrations, data, and graphics that make them come alive for users. Each of the eight channels below offers the stories behind the events or people. Users are encouraged to read the stories, examine the primary source material, and draw their own conclusions.
 

AwesomeStories
Welcome to a Learning Experience unlike any other! Enjoy an interactive learning experience as you see thousands of hand-selected and relevant links to pictures, artifacts, manuscripts, documents and other primary sources, IN CONTEXT, within each story. The first eight chapters of every story are available to all.
 

Click2History
Learn the story behind famous historical events.
Photographs, audio excerpts, video clips and transcripts shed light on historical events and help place them in context.

Click2FamousTrials
Meet the people whose cases shaped the law.
 

Click2Biography
Meet some of history's most interesting people.

Click2Religion
Explore diverse religion topics.

Law Buzz
Learn about famous trials from history, movies and literature. Learn about background information and the story behind the stories.

About AwesomeStories.com

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, and government web sites.

Sources held in archives, which document so much important first-hand information, are often not searchable by popular search engines. One needs to search within those institutional sites directly, using specific search phrases not readily discernible to non-scholars. The experience can be frustrating, resulting in researchers leaving sites without finding needed information.

This educational learning tool also is designed to support state and national standards. Each story on the site links to online primary source materials which are selected and positioned in context to enhance reading comprehension, understanding and enjoyment.

Awesome Stories has been honored by the National Institute for Literacy and is recommended by educators throughout the world. Using "evidence" links to primary sources principally found in hard-to-search national archives, libraries, museums, historical societies and institutions of higher learning, Awesome Stories makes its subject matter come alive on the computer screen. It turns learning into a uniquely interactive experience as the site's users are taken on a virtual, world-wide journey to see original documents, photos, pictures, drawings, annotated maps and other such items at the precise moment they are needed. It is, in effect, like viewing evidence during a trial.

AwesomeStories.com is one of few web sites where viewers can "meet" the real people involved in some of history's best stories and (while reading about the topic) can "see" where the actual events occurred. It is a place where they can go to expand "dry" facts and dates with exciting historical "stuff."

For example...Students study Dostoevsky's famous novels, but what do they really KNOW about HIM? How can they understand the passion behind Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov unless they know something about Dostoevsky the man? Wouldn't it be helpful to know that he was a compulsive gambler? That he stood before a firing squad and, at the last second, was saved by a totally unexpected reprieve? That he went to a penal colony for four years - with the same iron shackles around his legs the whole time? That his famous novel, The Gambler, was loosely based on his own life? Educators barely have enough time to teach a novel, let alone talking in-depth with their students about the author. AwesomeStories - a reliable source that provides "the rest of the story."