History

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.

Video archive of the Associated Press, including recent and historical news coverage from 1895 to the present.

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.

A catalog which links to free digital collections at libraries all over the United States. It provides access to a variety of resources, including photographs, maps, books, audio and moving image recordings, as well as objects.

The following is a list of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.

This collection of nearly 45,000 elementary and secondary textbooks covers subject areas from agriculture to zoology. The collection contains materials published in the United States in English from 1776 through 1985. A small number of European imprints in foreign languages are also included.

This collection also contains a number of textbooks focused on reading and teaching literacy, also known as readers or basal readers. Harvard Library's Open Collection Program entitled Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership and Reading History may also be of interest to users.

The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.

Oral histories conducted with Rutgers alumni and/or New Jersey residents who served during times of conflict.

Schlesinger Library’s digital collections platform allows researchers to visually explore digitized collections and to find related materials based on people, locations, or topics. We invite you to explore the growing number of collections that are accessible through this platform.

The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center 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.

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.

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.

Digital primary source collection from the Library of Congress documenting the process of creating laws from the Continental Congress to the United States House and Senate.

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.

Collection of texts written about the Americans from 1492 to 1820 compiled by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900.

“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.

Between 1760 and 1765, merchant James Poyas maintained a daybook documenting his numerous business transactions in the growing colonial trade center of Charles Town, South Carolina. Poyas's account provides insights into developing commercial networks in Charles Town, the expanding South Carolina backcountry, and the British Atlantic World.

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 Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.

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 Virtual Jamestown Archive is 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.

Ongoing project to digitize images of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th and 18th century North America. Topics include social life, education, trade, finance, politics, revolution, war, women, Native American life, slavery, science, medicine, and religion in the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico. The ‘Essays’ on this website are the work of a Summer 2015 Arcadia Fellow, Alicia DeMaio, who was one of the first researchers to connect thematically related material from among the images digitized to date.

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.

The 19th Century Schoolbooks Collection contains schoolbooks from the Nietz Old Textbook Collection. In addition, this online collection also contains two works by Dr. John Nietz, which survey historic American schoolbooks in the context of the history of education.

The papers of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), lawyer, representative from Illinois, and sixteenth president of the United States, contain approximately 40,550 documents dating from 1774 to 1948, although most of the collection spans from the 1850s through Lincoln’s presidency (1861-1865). Roughly half of the collection, more than 20,000 documents, comprising 62,000 images, as well as transcriptions of approximately 10,000 documents, is online.Treasures in the collection include Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses, his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, the two earliest known copies of the Gettysburg Address (the Nicolay and Hay copies), his August 23, 1864, memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest, and a condolence letter written to Mary Todd Lincoln by Queen Victoria following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The Lincoln Papers are characterized by a large number of correspondents, including friends and associates from Lincoln’s Springfield days, well-known political figures and reformers, and local people and organizations writing to their president.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).

Digital primary source collection from the Library of Congress documenting the process of creating laws from the Continental Congress to the United States House and Senate.

Guide to women in the Civil War from Duke University libraries. Includes a collection from Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a famed Confederate spy. Other letters include those written by African American slaves, describing their living conditions in the South.

Inside you will find information related to the U.S. Civil War including Union and Confederate Regimental Histories, Union Corps Histories, Soldier's Letters, and Diaries.

A huge online collection of scanned letters, newspaper articles, images, photographs, diaries, and much more, filled with the stories of Michigan soldiers.

These collections consists of diaries and collections of letters from the Civil War era found in Special Collections and Archives. The diaries offer a unique look into the lives of common soldiers, spies and even a bodyguard of Abraham Lincoln. Letters include both private and official correspondence.

Diaries, newspapers, and other ephemera documenting experiences on the Northern Homefront during the Civil War.

The diary of Captain Edward Hill conveys the pleasures, hardships, and heroism of a Union soldier who served in the Civil War's climactic showdown in Virginia between the armies of General Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. Hill and his regiment, the 16th Michigan Infantry, took part in many of the Army of the Potomac's key battles, and in later life Hill wrote about the Battle of Fredericksburg. Information about his daily wartime activities, however, is only available from February 16, 1864 to July 27, 1864 through jottings in his diary.

This collection includes 23 letters (September 1861- July 1862) from Forrest Little (1843-1862) of Crown Point, Essex County, New York, to his parents, Henry and Amanda Little. Forrest enlisted in Company F of the Fifth Vermont Volunteers at Middlebury, Vermont, on September 6, 1861. His letters begin shortly after his arrival at Camp Griffin in northern Virginia, and they continue as he trained for, then participated in, the Army of the Potomac's Peninsula Campaign led by General George McClellan. Forrest survived the battles of Lee's Mills, Williamsburg, and Savage Station, but at the end of the campaign he died of typhoid fever at Harrison's Landing, Virginia on July 23, 1862.

Civil War Washington examines the U.S. national capital from multiple perspectives as a case study of social, political, cultural, and medical/scientific transitions provoked or accelerated by the Civil War. Drawing on material ranging from census records to literary texts and from forgotten individuals to the famous (such as Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman) we examine how Washington changed from a sleepy Southern town to the symbolic center of the Union and nation.

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. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts.

The Making of America collection comprises the digitized pages of books and journals. This system allows you to view scanned images of the actual pages of the 19th century texts. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been performed on the images to enhance searching and accessing the texts.

The archive of this popular weekly newspaper highlights only the Civil War years. The site is searchable and is arranged chronologically with thumb-nails of the front pages. All pages from the 1861–1865 Civil War period have been scanned including the engravings and illustrations. From the Lee Foundation.

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.

This collection presents over 3,300 items relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.

Douglass’s papers were digitized by the Library of Congress. They are searchable, and also can be browsed by date, and then narrowed by type, such as speeches or correspondence.

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.

A thematically-related digital library documenting American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. At the University of Michigan, approximately 1,600 books and ten journals with imprints primarily between 1850 - 1877 were selected, scanned, and made available through the present system.

The Papers of Jefferson Davis, a documentary editing project based at Rice University in Houston, Texas, has published (1971-2015) a 14 volume edition of his letters and speeches, several of which can be found on this web site. The site also provides extensive information on Davis and his family and numerous images.

The digital collection consists of 31 volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, political cartoons, and sheet music from the larger collection. Other materials will be added to the digital collection as processing continues.

Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspaper Collection contain all the words, photographs, and advertisements from selected newspapers published during the pivotal years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War.

This collection consists of 105 library books and manuscripts, totalling approximately 8,700 pages drawn principally from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with a few from the General Collections. The selection was guided in large part by the entries in Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases by Paul Finkelman (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985), which was based on research in the Library collections. The documents comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Most of the items date from the nineteenth century and include materials associated with the Dred Scott case and the abolitionist activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison. Eighteenth-century cases include Somerset v. Stewart, decided in England a few years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which "underscored the great tension created by slavery in Anglo-American law." (Finkelman, p. 6)

Included are letters written by Jackson, spanning his West Point cadetship, U. S. Army career, professorship at the Virginia Military Institute, and the Civil War years; the bulk of the items date from prior to the outbreak of war. Topics include professional, personal and domestic matters, religious faith, health and diet, and his family. The correspondence provides insight into Jackson's personality and philosophy and presents a portrait of the man as he was in the years before he gained national fame as a wartime military leader.

Diary kept by wartime cadet John Hanna, containing a colorful account of life at VMI and in Lexington during the spring of 1864. Entries begin April 17, 1864 and end May 9, 1864, just prior to the Battle of New Market. The entries contain comments about VMI activities and people, Lexington (VA) social life, and discussion of personal concerns

Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience is a collection of first person narrative accounts of Wisconsin soldiers and citizens. Through their letters, diaries, poems and other records, we learn about the state’s contributions to the Union victory that cost the lives of over 12,000 of the state’s men.

Women Working, 1800–1930 is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University. The collection includes digitized diaries, memiors, institutional records, and manuscripts.

The digitized items in the Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition Collection are from the Alcoholism and Addiction Studies Collection, as well as from various collections in the Brown University Library — broadsides, sheet music, pamphlets and government publications.The digitized pamphlets were published by various groups leading up to prohibition, during the prohibition era, and ending with the 21st amendment in 1933, which repealed the 18th amendment from 1919 prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.

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.

This collection presents over 3,300 items relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.

The photographs in the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935-1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937-1942), and the Office of War Information (1942-1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and non-governmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations.

Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.

A Primary Source guide list to digital collections on the United States during the Gilded Age.

From the stock market crash of 1929 to the beginnings of World War II, The Great Depression tells the dramatic and diverse stories of struggle and survival during the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. Originally debuting on PBS stations in 1993, the 7-part series was met with critical acclaim, winning an Emmy for writing and a duPont-Columbia Award. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film & Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each video and transcript represents the entire interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., including portions that did not appear in the final program. For more information, please contact the Film & Media Archive.

Women Working, 1800–1930 is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University. The collection includes digitized diaries, memiors, institutional records, and manuscripts.