History Resources

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Abraham Lincoln, including the complete Abraham Lincoln Papers from the Manuscript Division. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Lincoln such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Lincoln and a bibliography containing selected works for both general and younger readers.

AlabamaMosaic is a repository of digital materials on Alabama's history, culture, places, and people. Its purpose is to make unique historical treasures from Alabama's archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories electronically accessible to Alabama residents and to students, researchers, and the general public in other states and countries.

Over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations from the personal collection of materials related to baseball and other sports gathered by the early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding. This collection includes 19th-century studio portraits of players and teams of the day, rare images, photographs, and original drawings.

The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of printing in Mainz, Germany around the middle of the fifteenth century is a topic of great importance to the history of European civilization. This website uses Flash to depict the spread of European printing in a manner that allows a user to control dates and other variables.

Calisphere is 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. Calisphere's content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California.

The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The initiative promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement, 2) a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement by connecting related digital collections on a national scale, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources - such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities--to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process. The CRDL advances cross-disciplinary approaches, promoting a seamless infrastructure for learning, emphasizing context and structure for digital information, and recruiting and educating new leaders for a learning society. The Civil Rights Digital Library initiative achieves its desired outcomes through a partnership among digital library and information technology professionals, archivists, humanities scholars, educators, university graduate and undergraduate researchers, academic publishers, and public broadcasters.

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s.

Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 21,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways.

Densho's mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. We offer these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy and promote equal justice for all.

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

This digital collection presents over 700 images of Russia and the Caucasus region, particularly of rural areas in Georgia and Dagestan. The photographs, taken by William O. Field in the late 1920s and early 1930s, are housed at the American Geographical Society Library. The photographic collection is supplemented by Field's diaries and travel notes, and a selection of maps of the Caucasus region.

There is a growing interest in the history of South Asia. India has played a crucial role in global trading networks for centuries and was central to the story of Empire. More recently it has emerged as a vibrant democracy and a major economic power.

The National Library of Scotland has wonderful collections documenting this history from the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 to the granting of independence for India and Pakistan in 1947.

The sources are extremely varied ranging from the papers of key East India Company representatives and colonial officials to records of daily life in Agra, Bombay, Lahore, and Madras. There are original Indian manuscripts containing histories and literary works, as well as accounts of wars, discussions of Indian Nationalism and papers of tea and coffee planters.

The collection is particularly strong for the 18th and 19th centuries and will be of interest to scholars studying:

Social history
Urban history
Trade and economic development
Agriculture
Travel and antiquities
Indian politics
The growth of Nationalism
Empire and World History
There are also important sources covering Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Singapore.

Founded in 1921 by A. F. Pollard, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) is an important resource and meeting place for researchers from all over the world. Based at the University of London, the IHR offers:

IHR library - an outstanding open-access library
conferences and seminars that are open to the public
postgraduate degrees and research training
The History Lab, a hub for postgraduate students
resources for historical research in both digital format and print
publications - including the Institute's journal Historical Research

The Joseph Berry Keenan Digital Collection—comprised of manuscript materials and photographs—offers researchers invaluable insight into the Japanese War Crimes Trial -- one of the most important trials of the twentieth century.

Making the History of 1989 has three key features: a substantial collection of high quality primary sources; a set of multimedia interviews that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources into historical narratives; and lesson plans and document based questions provide historical context, tools, and strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources in ways that make “history making” visible and vivid.

We invite all Americans to participate in a series of events and programs to get us thinking, talking and teaching about the rights and responsibilities of citizens in our democracy. At the heart of this initiative are 100 milestone documents of American history. These documents reflect our diversity and our unity, our past and our future, and mostly our commitment as a nation to continue to strive to “form a more perfect union.”

We want everyone—students, teachers, parents, and the general public—to read these milestone documents, consider their meaning, discuss them, and decide which are the most significant and why. This initiative creates a number of ways to do that—through classroom activities and competitions, and votes.

Online military history encyclopedia with nearly 3,500 entries, 1,300 pictures and 370 maps.

The National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives collect and preserve historical and contemporary anthropological materials that document the world's cultures and the history of anthropology. Their collections represent the four fields of anthropology – ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology – and include fieldnotes, journals, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars.

This resource provides a searchable collection of select electronic Peace Corps materials from 1961-present. This collection consists of materials from the Peace Corps archives and contributions from current and returned Peace Corps Volunteers and Staff.

Created in 1993, REESWeb is the Virtual Library covering Russia and Eastern Europe. In its 15 year history, REESWeb has sought to help users identify high quality web content that is located in or focuses on the region stretching from Bohemia to Central Asia.
All web sites listed in REESWeb are vetted by the editors, categorized for easy searching, and annotated to provide users with a good idea of what they will find upon visiting a site. This hands-on orientation places a high value on precision and quality in its listings rather than volume and, as such, should provide helpful to researchers, academics and casual users who want to find relevant material on the web rather than sifting through thousands of search results.

The Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive serves as a research facility for scholars of U.S. public policy. The Library's collection is a specialized one focused on American politics and history with special attention paid to the American presidency. The Library makes available a breadth of research material on the American presidency, both in print and digital form.

The core of the Library's print collection is made up of standard works on the American Presidency. Our collection includes complete collections of presidential papers; memoirs of presidential administrations; biographies and secondary scholarship on the presidency; and standard reference sources.

The Library's multimedia collection is a truly unique collection of material on U.S. public policy. The Library's multimedia archive includes more than 2,500 hours of secret White House recordings, hundreds of presidential oral history interviews, audio and video recordings of Miller Center Forums, and documents related to the executive branch of American government. The Library's digital archive on the American presidency is more than 3 terabytes in size and growing.

Social Explorer is a premier U.S. demographics website. Our online tools help you visually analyze and understand the demography of the United States through the use of interactive maps and data reports. Our primary product is a web-based application that creates fast, intuitive, and visually appealing maps and reports. Our software gives anyone with an Internet connection access to census data that was previously the domain of social science experts.

It is our intention to build the most informative and fun demographics website in the world, and indeed we are the busiest U.S. demographic mapping site on the net today.

Our goal is to visually display the demographic change that has occurred in the U.S. from 1790 through the present at a variety of geographic levels, including neighborhoods, counties, and states. To accomplish this, we have developed a collection of interactive demographic maps that can be viewed, queried and manipulated on our site. Demographic patterns throughout American history spring to life in the form of reports, maps, and animations.

Online database with over 250,000 service records of English soldiers from the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) is a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TIMEA brings together images, texts, maps, research and teaching guides.

The Vietnam Archive mission is to collect and preserve the documentary record of the Vietnam War. The first collection received by the Archive - a package of letters from a Navy hospital corpsman to his family while serving in Vietnam - symbolizes our commitment to preserve the record of individuals and provide greater understanding of their experiences. While the Vietnam Archive continues this commitment as its primary objective, it has expanded its collection policy to include records of veterans' organizations and scholars of the period as well as other individuals and organizations who share experiences from the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam Archive has collected millions of pages of material and tens of thousands of photographs, slides, maps, periodicals, audio, moving images, and books related to the Vietnam War, Indochina, and the impact of the war on the United States and Southeast Asia.