HST331-Colonial America Resources

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

Worlds of Change is a collection of more than 700,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America. This material was digitized as part of a multi-year project, formerly known as Colonial North America at Harvard Library.

This historical map collection has over 60,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 20th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented.

Exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Colonial Connecticut Records (CCR) is a digital collection created by staff at the University of Connecticut Libraries and supported generously by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center and the Connecticut State Library.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later. Read the words of explorers, Indians, missionaries, traders and settlers as they lived through the founding moments of American history. View, search, print, or download more than 150 rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives from the library and archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

With the first battles of the American Revolution occurring in the Boston area, one of the most important historical time periods represented in the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center's pre-20th-century holdings is the American Revolutionary War era, defined broadly as 1750 to 1800. This collection encompasses approximately 900 maps covering Boston and New England, as well as the remainder of eastern North America and the West Indies during this time period.

The Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century attempts to map as many members of the book trade as possible—printers, booksellers, and many more—in both space and time. The project was begun at the Rhode Island Historical Society in April of 2009 and made available online in August of 2010.

Broadside Ballads Online presents a digital collection of English printed ballad-sheets from between the 16th and 20th centuries, linked to other resources for the study of the English ballad tradition.

New York Public Library's Charting America Map Collection has thousands of maps of North America from the earliest printed portrayals to the close of the 19th century; multiple versions and editions allow for historical comparisons.

Boston Public Library holds thousands of American manuscripts, printed books, and documents from the Colonial and Revolutionary War periods. The materials document American intellectual and political life before, during, and shortly after the Revolution. Highlights include: over 1,300 individual manuscripts, including diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, maps, and administrative records; foundational works of American democracy, including the only surviving copy of the first printing of Thomas Jefferson's bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia and the first edition of The Federalist Papers; and a copy of the first edition of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, annotated by Franklin himself.

Boston Public Library holds thousands of manuscripts, correspondence, documents, and printed records from the Colonial and Revolutionary War periods. This collection is unparalleled in the extent of its administrative and judicial records of Massachusetts Bay Colony and early Boston. The collection documents the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as the ensuing political, social, and financial crises that led to the American Revolution and the formation of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The events leading up to the Revolutionary War, as well as the war itself, are well-documented in both print materials and manuscripts written by George Washington, John Hancock, John and Samuel Adams, James Otis, and other important patriots.

The Digital Library only includes a small portion of the vast manuscript collection, but new materials are always being added. Research Reports include historical, archaeological, architectural, and other reports documenting the study of Williamsburg's history. Foundation staff created the first reports over 80 years ago, and continue to write new ones to this day. Access digital issues or browse the index of surviving Virginia Gazettes published in Williamsburg in the 18th century. The newspapers were printed on a weekly basis until 1780, when operations moved to the new capital of Richmond. The Digital Library includes transcripts of a large selection of 17th- and 18th-century inventories from across York County, which in the colonial period encompassed the northern half of the city of Williamsburg, Yorktown, and the surrounding areas.

“Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past” is a collaboration among LSU Libraries Special Collections, the Historical Center at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, The Historic New Orleans Collection, and Tulane University’s Louisiana Research Collection to bring together digitally the personal and family papers of free people of color and public records that relate to the group from the repositories’ collections.

Google's index of digitized newspapers from around the world, organized alphabetically by titled.

ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aimed to digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data. The project finished in 1999. The scope is limiting as there are only three journals published over the course of 20 years for each century, but this site might be helpful if you are trying to see topics published in these early journals over a long timespan.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

Fourteen New York Historical Society collections of diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions that document American slavery.

Martha Ballard wrote in her diary nearly every day from January 1, 1785 to May 12, 1812 (27 years) for a total of almost 10,000 entries. Her diary is an unparalleled document in early American history.

Massachusett's Historical Society has online resources relating to Colonial America; they have been organized either around a common topic, such as the American Revolution, or to highlight a specific collection, such as the papers of Thomas Jefferson.

Digitized Primary documents from University of Virginia's McGregor Library focusing on European discovery and Early American settlements.

This Plymouth Colony Archive presents a collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies. Among other works, published here for the first time are a Glossary and Notes on Plymouth Colony, Seventeenth Century Timber Framing, and Vernacular House Forms in Seventeenth Century Plymouth Colony: An Analysis of Evidence from the Plymouth Colony Room-by-Room Probate Inventories 1633-1685, by Patricia Scott Deetz and James Deetz.

Searchable full text editions of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674-1913. The texts describe 197,745 trials held in the Bailey.

This Library of Congress exhibition demonstrates that many of the colonies that in 1776 became the United States of America were settled by men and women of deep religious convictions who in the seventeenth century crossed the Atlantic Ocean to practice their faith freely.

The portion of the Emmet Collection housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division consists of approximately 10,800 historical manuscripts relating chiefly to the period prior to, during, and following the American Revolution. The collection contains letters and documents by the signers of the Declaration of Independence as well as nearly every prominent historical figure of the period.

Thousands of photographs, documents, maps, and ephemera populating these digital collections. Some of the topics covered include the gubernatorial papers of Thomas Jefferson, Colonial Virginia records, African American history, the Civil War, historical and recent Virginia government and journalism, and a range of other topics.

The Native Northeast Portal is a scholarly critical edition of primary source materials about Native communities from the American Northeast gathered into one robust virtual collection. It offers students, educators, researchers, Native American tribal members, and the general public, visual and intellectual access to significant historical knowledge for the purposes of teaching, scholarly analysis, and research.