United States History

The exhibit is based on spy letters from the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Gallery of Letters provides a brief description of each letter and links to more information about the stories of the spies in the letter or the secret methods used to make the letter.

The Louisiana Purchase is a landmark event in American history, one that had a lasting impact not only on the size of the United States, but also on its economic, cultural, and political makeup. Before President Thomas Jefferson's administration purchased the territory in 1803, parts or all of the territory had been under the control of various Native American nations. From the 16th century onwards the Spanish and later the French controlled the territory.

This presentation focuses on the various documents—from maps to newspapers to cultural artifact—that help to describe the region of North America that stretched from as far east as Alabama into what is now the state of Montana. The 119 items presented here come from the various special and general collections of the Library of Congress.

Fire destroyed the War Department office in 1800. For decades historians believed that its files, and the window they provide into the early federal government, had been lost forever. This collection unites copies of the lost files in a digital archive that reconstitutes this invaluable historical resource.

Images and documents from the 1812 period organized by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The Library of Congress has made the full text of the Federalist Papers available as part of THOMAS.

163 Sunday school books published in America between 1815 and 1865.

6,500 items, or approximately 50,000 images, that document Morse's invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, his participation in the development of telegraph systems in the United States and abroad, his career as a painter, his family life, his travels, and his interest in early photography, religion, and the nativist movement.

These documents are accounts of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the first half of the 19th century. Most of these are either primary or secondary historical sources; that is, either written by, or as told by those who were actually there.

These documents have been transcribed from printed or manuscript form. The resulting text files have been manually checked and edited to conform to the original source. In most cases, any spelling or grammatical errors from the original have been retained.

Letters and diaries representing the westward expansion of the United States.

The Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850.

The books in this collection bear nineteenth century American imprints, dating mainly from between 1850 and 1880. Currently, approximately 1,500 books are included in this American Memory site. The collection is particularly strong in poetry and in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material. Most of the 20,000 items are from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, 1860-65. Treasures include Lincoln's draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, his March 4, 1865, draft of his second Inaugural Address, and his August 23, 1864, memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest. 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. In its online presentation, the Abraham Lincoln Papers comprises approximately 61,000 images and 10,000 transcriptions.

A digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War.

A collaborative effort by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, this site contains links to digital content held at over 30 major libraries in the South including the University of Mississippi.

The University of Mississippi Civil War Archive provides a sampling of the Archives & Special Collections extensive Civil War primary source holdings. Pulling from various physical collections, these materials document troop movements, social conditions, battles, the home front and an extensive variety of topics.

extensive digital collections focusing on VMI alumni in the Civil War and in particular on Stonewall Jackson.

digitized materials include letters, broadsides and published reports.

produced by the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission and provides a short summary of the battle including commanders and alternate names.

more than 20,000 original documents. The collection provides ready access to dozens of diaries, regimental histories and book-length memoirs, thousands of soldiers letters, hundreds of newspaper articles, and more than 1,000 photographs, maps and other images.

Created by the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania, this collection contains pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, paintings, maps, and other print memorabilia about America from circa 1830 to 1880.

Visualizing Emancipation is a map of slavery’s end during the American Civil War. It finds patterns in the collapse of southern slavery, mapping the interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and the actions of enslaved men and women on countless farms and city blocks.

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.

Digitized materials from the Library of Congress' Rare Books and Special Collections by African American authors written 1822-1909.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson College has undertaken the monumental task of creating a presidential digital library that will serve as a repository for all Roosevelt-related documents, photographs, and ephemera, providing instant access via the internet in a well-organized, comprehensible manner. It is working closely with other institutions such as the Library of Congress and Harvard College to obtain copies of their holdings in order to create a truly comprehensive digital collection.

resources and documents about the Spanish-American War, the period before the war, and some of the fascinating people who participated in the fighting or commented about it. Information about Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United States is provided in chronologies, bibliographies, and a variety of pictorial and textual material from bilingual sources, supplemented by an overview essay about the war and the period.

Historian Worth Robert Miller of Missouri State University has authored this guide to information on the Populist Movement which includes extensive bibliographies and digital documents.

From February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919, by order of General John J. Pershing, the United States Army published a newspaper for its forces in France, The Stars and Stripes. This online collection, presented by the Serial and Government Publications Division of the Library of Congress, includes the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper's World War I edition.

Collection illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter.

Between 1897 and 1911 Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller, filled seven large scrapbooks with ephemera and memorabilia related to their work with women's suffrage.

68 motion pictures produced between 1898 and 1901 of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine Revolution.

More than 3,800 images of original manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints and artifacts relating to the Haymarket Affair.

Documents the historical formation and cultural foundations of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, through books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and motion picture footage drawn from the collections of the Library of Congress.

The New York Art Resources Consortium has created a digital collection of ephemeral exhibition checklists, pamphlets, and catalogs from this period document artistic movements and artists of the time and of the past, economic markets, and the social and cultural history of New York and the United States.

This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

Correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell's invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, his family life, his interest in the education of the deaf, and his aeronautical and other scientific research. Dates span from 1862 to 1939, but the bulk of the materials are from 1865 to 1920.

The online Leonard Bernstein Collection makes available a selection of 85 photographs, 177 scripts from the Young People's Concerts, 74 scripts from the Thursday Evening Previews, and over 1,100 pieces of correspondence.

This collection comprises over 55,000 images of urban life captured on glass plate negatives between 1902 and 1933 by photographers employed by the Chicago Daily News.

The papers of the author, educator, and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of Adolf Eichmann's trial proceedings, notes, and printed matter pertaining to Arendt's writings and academic career.

This collection documents the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright and highlights their pioneering work which led to the world's first powered, controlled and sustained flight. Included in the collection are correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, as well as the Wrights' collection of glass-plate photographic negatives.

This archive of primary documents from World War One has been assembled by volunteers of the World War I Military History List (WWI-L). International in focus, the archive intends to present in one location primary documents concerning the Great War.

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.

An innovative tool for examining plantation economy and agrarian society in the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns and additional census records, Documenting Louisiana Sugar makes available two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and macro detail the evolution of one of America's definitive plantation crops, namely cane sugar.

A database of primary source materials—photographs, political cartoons, and texts (speeches, letters, and other historic documents)— gathered from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and other sources. Currently there are over 20,000 items in this database.

The collection includes nearly 150 selections from twelve collections of personal papers and two collections of institutional papers from the Manuscript Division; 74 books, pamphlets, and legislative documents from the General Collections, along with selections from 34 consumer and trade journals; 185 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division and the Manuscript Division; and 5 short films and 7 audio selections of Coolidge speeches from the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. The collection is particularly strong in advertising and mass-marketing materials and will be of special interest to those seeking to understand economic and political forces at work in the 1920s.

The Nation's Forum Collection consists of fifty-nine sound recordings of speeches by American leaders from 1918-1920. The speeches focus on issues and events surrounding the First World War and the subsequent presidential election of 1920. Speakers include: Warren G. Harding, James Cox, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John J. Pershing. Speeches range from one to five minutes.

The images in the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II. The core of the collection consists of about 164,000 black-and-white photographs.

This online presentation includes over 13,000 images of items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, and scripts for productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles, and for Power, a topical drama of the period (over 3,000 images). Also included are 68 other playscripts (6,500 images) and 168 documents selected from the Federal Theatre Project Administrative Records (3,700 images).

The collection contains approximately 4,350 items from the Irving Fine Collection. Comprising manuscript and printed music, sketchbooks, writings, personal and business correspondence, scrapbooks, programs, clippings, and sound recordings.

Approximately twelve hours of opinions recorded in the days and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from more than two hundred individuals in cities and towns across the United States. On December 8, 1941.

maps showing troop positions beginning on June 6, 1944 to July 26, 1945. Starting with the D-Day Invasion, the maps give daily details on the military campaigns in Western Europe, showing the progress of the Allied Forces as they push towards Germany. Some of the sheets are accompanied by a declassified "G-3 Report" giving detailed information on troop positions for the period 3 Mar. 1945-26 July 1945. These maps and reports were used by the commanders of the United States forces in their evaluation of the campaigns and for planning future strategies.

The Historic Government Publications from World War II contains 343 Informational pamphlets, government reports, instructions, regulations, declarations, speeches, and propaganda materials distributed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) during the Second World War. The documents are held by SMU Central University Libraries' Government Information Department.

The documents, which reflect the thinking of the time, range widely in topics. You can view information on many categories, such as women's issues, children's issues, pocket guides to other countries, and more. You can view series, like the Victory Bulletin and 10 issues of the State Summary of War Casualties.

The interviews in the collection are mostly with Foreign Service Officers but there also are some with political appointees and other officials. While some 1920s-, 1930s-, and World-War-II-era diplomacy is covered, most of the interviews involve post-World-War-II diplomacy, from the late 1940s to the 1990s. This collection captures the post-World-War-II period in vivid terms and intimate detail, documenting the way that U.S. diplomacy defends the United States and its interests in a challenging world. The narratives span the major diplomatic crises and issues that faced the United States during the second half of the 20th century and, as new interviews are added, will include developments in the 21st century.

Photographs and documents from the library's collection.

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) Digital Archives document the role of Mario Savio and other participants in the Free Speech Movement (University of California, Berkeley, September-December 1964), as well as its origins in political protest and civil rights movements and its legacy of political activism and educational reform that can be traced throughout the country and the world down to the present.

Consists of materials collected by Hamilton during the course of the 9/11 Commission's work to serve as documentation of the process of investigation and creation of the final report

The digitized version of the collection launched in spring 2011 with over 22,000 items selected from four archival collections: the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Archives, the OAAA Slide Library, and the papers of prominent outdoor advertising figures John Paver and John Brennan. A fifth collection, the R.C. Maxwell Company Records, was digitized as a complement to the NHPRC grant-funded collection, and was added to the ROAD installation later in summer 2011. ROAD2.0 is now a portal to over 31,000 outdoor advertising images.

"The Alger Hiss Story" web site recreates one of the most important legal cases in U.S. Cold War history, often cited as a turning point in 20th century American thinking. The site is dedicated to students of recent American history at all levels, including high school, college, and post-graduate work; to the research community of scholars, archivists, and teachers; and to a wide general audience.

The Cold War International History Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War, and seeks to accelerate the process of integrating new sources, materials and perspectives from the former "Communist bloc" with the historiography of the Cold War which has been written over the past few decades largely by Western scholars reliant on Western archival sources. It also seeks to transcend barriers of language, geography, and regional specialization to create new links among scholars interested in Cold War history. The site features numerous archival document collections, readers, and other publications on a wide variety of Cold War topics.

Joint project of the Bancroft Library and the Free Speech Movement Archives is an impressive online collection of documents related to the Free Speech Movement. Included here are primary source materials including the texts of speeches, oral histories, books, pamphlets, reports, meeting minutes, and much more. The entire collection can be searched or browsed.

"This site, developed by the Chicago Historical Society, is a tribute to Studs Terkel, the noted oral historian, author, and radio host for over fifty years. Organized into galleries that are largely centered around the extensive interviews that Mr. Terkel did for each of one of his books, each section contains dozens of audio clips of these long-form interviews. A biography section of Mr. Terkel documents some of his many endeavors, including more audio clips of him speaking about his family history and growing up in Chicago. Complementing this section is a multimedia interview with Mr. Terkel, divided into sections featuring him talking about his books, writing oral history, and documenting everyday life in the United States. Well-designed and organized, the site provides a thorough portrait of this prodigious and talented American storyteller."

The National Security Archive at George Washington University's continually growing collection of Electronic Briefing Books (EBBs) provide timely online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and much more. Updated frequently, the EBBs represent just a small sample of the documents in our published and unpublished collections.

A selection of 100 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Transcripts of interviews conducted by the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at USM.

Mississippi was a focal point in the struggle for civil rights in America, and Hattiesburg, home of The University of Southern Mississippi, had the largest and most successful Freedom Summer project in 1964. The civil rights materials collected at the University document a local history with truly national significance.

The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.

Housed and maintained by the University of Georgia, the Civil Rights Digital Library contains a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia. Materials have been contributed by a number of different archives from around the country.

The Civil Rights Documentation Project provides an accounting of law-making based on the unique archival resources housed at The Dirksen Congressional Center. The project takes the form of an interactive, Web-based presentation with links to more than 100 digitized historical materials and other Internet-based resources about civil-rights legislation created by museums, historical societies, and government agencies.

Companion to a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Independent Lens film about four college students who, in 1960, "began a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in a small city in North Carolina. The act of simply sitting down to order food in a restaurant that refused service to anyone but whites is now widely regarded as one of the pivotal moments in the American Civil Rights Movement." Features biographies, photos, related links, and lesson plans.

The Thurgood Marshall Library at the University of Maryland has worked since 2001 to create a complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held in the Library's collection and available on the USCCR Web site. The publications are made available over the Internet as page image presentations in PDF format. Each item is linked to the appropriate bibliographic record in the Catalog. Publications are also searchable by keyword and accessible by date and title.

The King Papers Project, initiated by the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, has been developed to host a definitive collection of King's most significant correspondence, sermons, speeches, and unpublished manuscripts.

Like the 2000 American Radio Works series on which it is based, this site documents the events of the 1964 "Freedom Summer" voter-registration drive in Mississippi. Read or listen to transcripts from the series and interviews with Freedom Summer alumni, or click through the slideshow.

This site presents the reporters and journalism of the American Civil Rights movement. Find writer profiles, a timeline for 1941 through 1973, and "Perspectives on Reporting," which features personal recollections from reporters active in that era. A companion to the two-volume set from the Library of America, Reporting Civil Rights.

Covers the first six years of the organization's history, presenting its stand and activities on nonviolence, the Vietnam War, white liberalism, feminism, and Black Power. Also find profiles of prominent members John Lewis, Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and Stokeley Carmichael, and information on events (sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the Freedom Ballot, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the 1963 March on Washington). Includes a timeline and sound files.

This project aims to collect, digitize, and present television news footage from the period in streaming video format and to make these valuable materials available to scholars, teachers, and students. The project is currently a research work in progress.

offers a variety of records and photographs that document the history of civil rights in the state.

This digital collection presents primary sources from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society that provide a window onto Milwaukee’s civil rights history. During the 1960s, community members waged protests, boycotts, and legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. The efforts of these activists and their opponents are vividly documented in the primary sources found here, including photographs, unedited news film footage, text documents, and oral history interviews.

Civil Rights Greensboro (CRG) provides access to archival resources documenting the modern civil rights era in Greensboro, North Carolina, from the 1940s to the early 1980s.

The release of the Douglass Papers, from the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, contains approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images) relating to Douglass' life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895. The collection consists of correspondence, speeches and articles by Douglass and his contemporaries, a draft of his autobiography, financial and legal papers, scrapbooks, and miscellaneous items. These papers reveal Douglass' interest in diverse subjects such as politics, emancipation, racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform. Included is correspondence with many prominent civil rights reformers of his day, including Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and Russell Lant, and political leaders such as Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison.

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 of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill traces how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.

Organized and sponsored by the Miami University (Ohio) library, this digital project consists of 765 documents, 27 videos, and suggested curriculum guides for classes from first grade through college. Among the documents are newspaper articles, speeches, newsletters, and photographs. Many of the documents are from a conference sponsored by the university in September 2004. These items should be separated from the records from 1964. Most of the 27 videos highlight speeches presented at the 40th anniversary conferences, including comments from Freedom Summer participants and an assessment of their activism.