I have spent the last couple of months looking for resources to reorganize my middle school American history class along a thematic framework. Middle school students have difficulty making connections in a chronological course where we don't really get to modern history until close to the end of the year. One of my largest issues was creating inquiry based classwork for digital natives that allowed them to make connections and still use primary sources.  Google labs has created an amazing resource for any historian young or old.  Google News Timeline allows the reader to search news articles from the present day back through the American Revolution and beyond.   The search engine allows thematic keywords (separate them with commas).  Even better if you click the links in the results it opens the scanned originals sources.  This needs to be spread around we can't let this project get abandoned like others have been.