Crossroads. The U.S. Army's Center of Military History , the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center and the U.S. Air Force History Support Office all serve as portals to rich collections of documents, publications and assorted links on the role of the military in the Cold War era. The U.S. Army War College's US Military History Institute has created digital finding aids for its archival collections, but has also established a Digital Library of documents relating to U.S. military history, including the Cold War. See also, the Redstone Arsenal's extensive Web page on Cold War Studies. Even the National Park Service gets into the game: the Eisenhower National Historic Site at Gettysburg offers a lesson plan on the Thaw in the Cold War: Eisenhower and Khrushchev at Gettysburg.
The Media Magazines, newspapers, television and other media offer information online which, though uneven in quality and usually aimed at a general audience, can be valuable resources, especially for the classroom. For example, The Washington Post has compiled a timeline of Superpower Summits, 1959-1995, with links to the paper's coverage of those summits. Major newspapers have also begun to establish online archives. The New York Times archives articles from 1996 forward. You can search that database for free (the phrase "Cold War" produced 3280 hits), but the Times charges a daunting $2.50 to read and/or download each article. The Washington Post
Foundations and other Non- Government Organizations (NGOs).Most foundations, associations and other non-profit organizations also maintain Web sites which, though focused mainly on contemporary foreign affairs, often contain historical materials also. For example, on The Brookings Institution's Web site one can find The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project's Atomic Audit, the recently released study on the costs of nuclear weapons since 1940. The National Resources Defense Council maintains a Web site on U.S. nuclear policies. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists maintains an extensive set of Atomic Links on issues surrounding the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons. Or, one may learn more about secrecy and the declassification of cold war documents by visiting the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. The Rand Corporation has placed online the full text of many of its studies of U.S. military and foreign policy, as well as a searchable database of report abstracts. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Web site contains guides and finding aids to the organization's large collections. The Council on Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Policy Association, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among many others, all maintain Web sites with extensive set of links to resources for the study of international issues.
MuseumsMuseums play an increasingly significant role on the Web. For example, the Bureau of Atomic Tourism (surely a candidate for Yahoo's "strange site of the day") lists more than a dozen museums with exhibits relating to the development and the first atomic bombs, including the Bradbury Science Museum operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Strangely absent from the Web site (and largely absent from the museum as well) is any indication that the end result of the Manhattan project was the almost instantaneous death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese. To learn that story, once must visit instead the Hiroshima Peace Site or the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. See also Remembering Nagasaki, a virtual exhibit by San Francisco's science museum, The Exploratorium. The U.S. military also maintains an extensive network of museums, some of which have technically outstanding Web sites. See, for example, the Web site of the U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright Paterson Air force base in Dayton, Ohio. Historians interested in the culture of the cold war, may take a virtual tour of the Diefenbunker: Canada's Cold War Museum. Built in 1959-62 under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, the bunker was designed to house the leaders of Canada's gover