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Internet Resources for U.S. History: Text, Image, Sound, and Archival Databases
These are links to publicly accessible databases. For subscribed databases, go to Databases for History.
Ad*Access
The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment “Library 2000” Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.Africans in America
Web site of the PBS special. Each of its four parts contains a narrative, resource bank, and teacher’s guide, with access to primary documents.Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820
A database of information on 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement: A Digital Library and Learning Center
This site, from the Wisconsin Historical Society, consists of documents selected to provide a wide range of geographical, cultural, and chronological information about the exploration of North America by Europeans and, later, Americans. Roughly equal numbers of pages are devoted to each of six regions: the Northeast, Southeast, Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Southwest and California, and Pacific Northwest and Hawaii.American Memory Project, Historical Collections for the National Digital Library
A premier site. Online archival collections presented by the Library of Congress.The American Revolution: National Discussions of Our Revolutionary Origins
Bibliography, discussions, essays, program notes, and resources relating to the television series Liberty! and the American Revolution.American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
A collection of interviews with former slaves, transcribed verbatim from the interview transcripts collected by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s. The site features photos and RealAudio sound clips from one of the original interviews. Selected readings on American slavery and slave narratives as well as links to other resources are also provided. Part of the AS@UVA Hypertexts Project at the University of Virginia.The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
Digital documents relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government.Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER)
One of the American Memory projects from the Library of Congress. The site includes images, surveys, survey photos, and measured drawings from 1933 to the present, which document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories.Calisphere
“A world of primary sources and more.” The University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items—including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts—reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1873
Over 23,000 digitzed images, chronicling the history of the early American lawmaking bodies from 1774-1793. Included are the House Journal, Senate Journal, Senate Executive Journal, Annals of Congress, Journals of the Continental Congress, Elliot's Debates, Farrand’s Records, and Maclay’s Journal. All publications are available both as digital facsimile images and as searchable texts. The only exception is the Annals of Congress, which is available as digital facsimile images accompanied by searchable indexes and page headings.A Chronology of US Historical Documents
Maintained by the University of Oklahoma Law Center.City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s
Hosted at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham in the UK, this electronic text offers excellent multimedia essays on American urbanism as represented by Chicago and New York from the 1870s to the 1930s. Music, photographs, illustrations, and text are used to explore the emergent urban life of these two great American hubs.Cold War International History Project
The project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War, and seeks to disseminate new information and perspectives on Cold War history emerging from previously inaccessible sources in the former Communist bloc.Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson
The complete, definitive 19-vol. set of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Albert Ellery Bergh, and published in 1907, available online as a 5145KB zipped text file, which expands to 14,448KB.Coney Island
A companion site to the PBS American Experience program which provides a history of the amusement park. It includes a substantial essay on the history of roller coasters, an enhanced transcript of the broadcast, a gallery of Coney Island images, and historical film clips of the park in action.Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
From the Mann Library, Cornell University, this site is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century.Cornell University Collection of Political Americana
A major collection of materials from U.S. national political campaigns between 1789 and 1972, from Cornell University Library. It consists of thousands of artifacts from ballots and slates of candidates to songbooks, buttons and souvenirs of all kinds, including plates, cups, vases, trays and bottles from the Susan H. Douglas Collection of Political Americana.Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland
This site from PBS examines the settlement and cultivation of the Midwest through the focusing lens of the typical L-shaped farmhouse. It uses text, photographs, video, and audio to tell the story of agricultural life in the Midwest from the 1830s to the mid-20th century when agribusiness effectively transformed both the physical and cultural landscape of the prairies.The Digital Classroom: Primary Sources, Activities, and Training for Educators and Students
This National Archives and Records Administration site provides materials from the National Archives and methods for teaching with primary sources.Documenting the American South: the Southern Experience in 19th-Century America
This database presents primary source materials documenting the cultural history of the American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It offers diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, titles on slavery and regional literature drawn from the Southern holdings of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Academic Affairs Library.Eighteenth Century Studies (English Server)
A collection of eighteenth-century works—novels, plays, memoirs, treatises, and poems.The Electric Ben Franklin
Contains primary source material, narratives, activities, interactive games, streaming videos, 360 interactive panoramas, and scores of pictures. It is the latest addition to Revolutionary-War era sites developed by Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Association on its collection of Web sites known as ushistory.org.Eleanor Roosevelt
The PBS companion site to the film biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, broadcast in the American Experience series.The Farber Gravestone Collection
Over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States. From the American Antiquarian Society.Federal Township Plats of Illinois (1804-1891)
Digitization of nearly 3,500 federal township plats of Illinois, from the collections of the Illinois State Archives. These are the maps made by U.S. surveyors before the land was offered for public sale. The site includes additional material about the Rectangular Survey System.France in America / La France en Amérique
A cooperative project of the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, this bilingual digital library of books, maps, prints, and other documents explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century.Historic Pittsburgh
A joint project of the University of Pittsburgh and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, this digital collection provides an opportunity to explore and research the history of Pittsburgh and the surrounding Western Pennsylvania area. It includes a Full Text Collection, Maps Collection, Finding Aids, and Census Records (1850-1880).Historical Census Browser
This site is made available with the cooperation and consent of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The data originate in ICPSR study number 0003, “Historical Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790-1970.” Search each of the decennial census pages by selecting variables you want to view. Choose to see county data, state data, or both.A Historical Investigation into the Past: The Lizzie Borden/Fall River Case Study
A joint project by the History Department and the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Using late nineteenth century primary source materials from the Lizzie Borden axe murder trial and from Fall River, Massachusetts, this project teaches students at all levels to reconstruct the historical past using their own ideas and explorations to explore the evidence at hand.Historical Text Archive
Large collection of historical texts, photos, and maps with links to resources elsewhere.History and Politics Out Loud
A collection of audio materials capturing significant political and historical events and personalities of the 20th century. Speakers include Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and others.Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930
The Chicago Police Department Homicide Record Index chronicles 11,000 homicides in Chicago during years of its dynamic growth. The online resource is both a sequential text file and a quantitative database from these handwritten records. It also features in-depth treatment of 25 selected cases.In the First Person
Keyword searching of more than 2,500 collections of oral history in English from around the world.Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States
From Washington through Obama. From Columbia University’s Bartleby Library of electronic texts.Index of Continental Army Orderly Books
Provides an online index of all surviving orderly books of the Continental Army in order to assist students and researchers in accessing these primary resources. Excepting for limited excerpts, it does not provide transcriptions of orderly books.Internet Archive of Texts and Documents
Access to a vast number of historical documents, both primary and secondary sources as well as translated selections. Most of the documents, mainly American and European, are from primary source material.Lewis & Clark: A Journey
Includes vol. 2 of the Journal, a complete timeline, and an online exhibit entitled Geography of the Lewis & Clark Expedition.Life in Western Pennsylvania, 1840-1970
From the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, this Web site features photographs and related newspaper articles.Lincoln/Net (Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project)
A project of Northern Illinois University. Its goal is to bring together digital versions of documents, images, and even music related to Abraham Lincoln’s life in Illinois from institutions throughout that state. Currently a pilot database of 70 campaign songs from the 1860 Lincoln-Douglas presidential race is available at the site.Lost and Found Sound: A Special Radio Series for the Millennium
National Public Radio presents this site to accompany its ongoing Lost and Found Sound series, radio programs which look at everyday life in last 100 years by showcasing “lost treasures” of recorded sound such as a cassette tape sent to a little boy by his grandfather and left in a closet, or the field recordings made by Tony Schwartz in his New York City neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s.Making of America
A collaborative project of Cornell University and the University of Michigan, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MoA is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The Cornell collection comprises 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The Michigan collection contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles. Both collections are made up of images of the pages in the books and journals.The Material History of American Religion Project
Resources for scholarly discussion of the material aspects of American religion.Medal of Honor Citations (U.S. Army Center of Military History)
Full-text listings of more than 3,400 medals of honor awarded since the establishment of the decoration in 1861.Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) Visual Resources Database
As of September 1, 2004, 188,500 objects in the Society’s collections have been added to the Visual Resources Database. 117,500 of those entered have a corresponding digital image. The strength of the database is its coverage of Minnesotans’ lives, landscapes, leisure activities, and occupations from 1850 to the present.Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library
One of the American Memory collections, this site offers selections from two collections at the Library of Congress that illuminate the life of Abraham. The Emancipation Proclamation draft and accompanying documents are from The Robert Todd Lincoln Family Papers housed in the Manuscript Division. The selection of prints and broadsides about Lincoln’s assassination, as well as the first official U.S. government printed edition of the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, are from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The Stern Collection contains over 10,500 books, pamphlets, broadsides, sheet music, autograph letters, prints, cartoons, maps, drawings, and other memorabilia that offer a unique view of Lincoln’s life and times.A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution
From the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, this site focuses on Japanese Americans who were forced out of their homes and into internment camps during World War II.National Park Service Historical Handbook Series
Online editions of classic publications will give the viewer a sense of early efforts to provide educational and interpretive material for the historical and archeological areas in the National Park System.National Register Information System
The official database of the National Register of Historic Places. The NRIS contains information on more than 80,000 properties and includes an searchable index of more than two million terms.Native American Documents Project
The project, maintained by A. Schwartz, California State University, San Marcos, is working to make documents about the history of federal policy concerning native peoples more readily available.The New York Public Library Digital Library Collections
Includes Digital Schomburg (African American collections), Online Exhibitions, Archival Finding Aids, and Cooperative Projects.19th Century Advertising
“A taste of the advertisements found in the pages of Harper’s Weekly.” One of several Web sites presented by HarpWeek.The Nineteenth Century in Print
One of the American Memory collections. Currently over 1,500 books and 23 popular magazines are available.The Oregon Trail
This site, by Professors Mike Trinklein and Steve Boettcher, creators of the award-winning PBS documentary of the same title, provides access to a wealth of information and documentation additional to the film. Included is a “complete primer” on the Trail, images and text covering over two dozen historic sites along the trail, a collection of anecdotes about incidents and (mis)adventures suffered by pioneers along the way, and an archive of diaries, memoirs, and period books written during the overland period.The Papers of John Jay
An image database and indexing tool comprising some 13,000 documents (more than 30,000 page images) scanned chiefly from photocopies of original documents.PA’s Past: Digital Bookshelf at Penn State
Provides the text of 643 works pertaining to Pennsylvania history.Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier
A bilingual, multi-format English-Spanish digital library site devoted to Spanish exploration and settlement in North America from the 15th to the early 19th centuries. It is a cooperative effort between the National Library of Spain and the Library of Congress.Pioneering the Upper Midwest
One of the outstanding collections of the Library of Congress' American Memory site. Includes first-person accounts, biographies, Colonial-era documents, and local histories relating to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.The Plymouth Colony Archive Project at the University of Virginia
Documentary materials from the original Plymouth Colony settlement. The archive presents an extensive collection of searchable, online texts, including “court records, Colony laws, biographical profiles of selected colonists, probate inventories, wills,” and analyses of these primary materials.Presidential Elections and the Electoral College
Part of American Memory’s A Century of Lawmaking, this page has links to a number of Electoral College resources.The Presidential Elections, 1860-1912
Political cartoons and prints commenting on US presidential elections. The images are drawn from periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly, Vanity Fair, and Puck, as well as the Library of Congress political print collection, and feature famous cartoonists and artists such as Thomas Nast, Matt Morgan, A.B. Frost, and Joseph Keppler.Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740-1810
A project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University and Gunston Hall Plantation.Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States
From GPO Access, this online service makes available material that was compiled and published in hardcover printed volumes entitled The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (U.S. Documents - AE 2.114:). The hardcopy series includes volumes covering the administrations of Presidents Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, as well as President Clinton. Online volumes extend from 1991 to 2004 and cover parts or all of the presidencies of George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush.Remembering Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941
A National Geographic Web site offers a peek at the military details and personal insights of those who were there.The Rockefellers
Companion Web site to the PBS documentary The Rockefellers. It features some fascinating additions to the information provided by the broadcast itself. In addition to a transcript of the broadcast and a timeline of the history of the Rockefellers from 1839 to 1985, it posts primary documents giving insight into the business practices, politics, and personal temperament of John D. Rockefeller. Of particular note are an extended “conversation” between John D. Rockefeller and muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.SCETI: Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image — University of Pennsylvania
Established in the University of Pennsylvania’s Special Collections Library, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) functions as a gateway to online resources in the Penn Library System and “provide[s] the scholarly community with Web access to virtual facsimiles of ... books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, broadsides, ephemera, and recorded sound.” The interdisciplinary SCETI contains eighteen online collections and virtual exhibitions that encompass topics in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.September 11 Archive
A collection of Web materials preserving the Web expressions of individual people, groups, the press and institutions from around the world, in the aftermath of the attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica. Free registration required.Supreme Court Decisions, 1937 - 1975
Contains the full text of decisions issued between 1937 and 1975.Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive
This site from the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia contains a wealth of materials concerning Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the nation’s response to it. Besides a complete electronic edition of the first published version of the novel along with the various prefaces Stowe wrote for different editions, users can also examine and compare different published editions of the text using 3-D applications as well as view selected manuscript pages and sheets from the novel's original newspaper serialization side-by-side. The site’s unique value, though, lies in the documents it presents that elucidate the novel’s historical and cultural context.The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
A hypermedia archive of thousands of sources for the period before, during, and after the Civil War for Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Those sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. The project is intended for secondary schools, community colleges, libraries, and universities.Veterans History Project (Library of Congress)
Collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.Vincent Voice Library (Michigan State University Libraries)
The online sampler of recorded utterances of over 50,000 individuals features RealAudio and MP3 recordings of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Big Ben, Edwin Booth, Kenneth Landfrey, Florence Nightingale, and Will Rogers.Virtual Jamestown
A digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and “the Virginia experiment.” As a work in progress, Virtual Jamestown aims to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony.Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly transported over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteen centuries.Web de Anza
An “interactive study environment on Spanish exploration and colonization of Alta California, 1774-1776.” The site features primary source materials, such as the original diaries and letters of the expeditionary leader, Juan Bautista de Anza, as well as additional information including bibliographies, biographies, commentaries, maps, timelines, pictures, and sounds and video clips associated with the expeditions.Women Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment
From the National Archives and Records Administration. Primary sources, activities, and links to related Web sites for educators and students.World Lecture Hall
A gateway to online lectures, course outlines, and entire modules on the Web. Click on “Search WLH” in the left frame, enter “History” as Category on the pulldown menu, then click the search button.The World of Thomas Nast
One of several Web sites presented by HarpWeek.The World War I Document Archive
International in focus. Intends to present in one location primary documents concerning World War I.World War Poster Collection
Over 600 original World War I and World War II posters from the Rare Book & Texana Collections, University of North Texas Libraries.
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Last modified: 10/21/09
