U.S. History

Interface in English. Content in English or other languages.
Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. Strongest between the 17th and 21st centuries. Content dating back to B.C.E.
Open Access.

Showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

Images of objects from the National Museum of African American History & Culture's collection are now available to view, download, and share through a CC0 license.​ Includes sections on Activism and Civil Rights.

The San Jose State College Digital Civil Rights Collection documents campus protest movements that took place from the 1960s-1970. San Jose State College (SJSC) campus protest movements reflected the explosion of student unrest on college campuses across the nation. Between the years 1968-1972, student unrest dominated college life. Students at SJSC responded to national and local issues that included civil rights, equal access to housing, student clubs and organizations, athletics, demands for relevant curriculum, and protest against the escalation of the Vietnam War, that included protests against the draft and the presence of the ROTC and DOW Chemical on campus.

An initiative of the University of Georgia providing access to a variety of primary sources from the Civil Rights Movement including letters, pamphlets, oral histories, photographs and film. Search or browse by year, event, people or topic.

On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record new interviews with people who participated in the struggle, over a five year period beginning in 2010. More than 200 video interviews are available.

The Till Archives includes newspapers, magazines, oral histories, photographs, government records, scholarly literature, creative works, and other materials documenting the Till case and its commemoration, memorialization, and discussion in scholarship and popular culture.

Interface and content in English.
The Burnham-Nobles Archive is a digital resource dedicated to identifying, classifying, and providing factual information and documentation about anti-Black killings in the mid-century South.
Open Access.

Interface and content in English.
The main objective of the Burnham-Nobles Archive is to document racial killings in the Jim Crow American South. The current version of the Archive documents incidents between the years 1930-1954. 7 By American South, we mean eleven states of the Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. By racial killings, we mean killings where racial animus or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms and customs can be documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports and supporting documents. Browse and use advanced filters for People, Incidents, and Documents regarding more than 1,000 cases.
Open Access.

Interface and content primarily in English.
On March 24, 1800, Forlorn Hope became the first newspaper published within a prison by an incarcerated person. In the intervening 200 years, over 450 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons. This collection includes more than 5,000 issues from those newspapers between 1800 and 2020.
Open Access.

Interface and content in English.
Intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions. Angus Johnston, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, states, “The activists of the ’60s and ’70s, confronting universities that were hostile to their values and ideals, launched a movement that remade American higher education in their own image — not completely, and perhaps not permanently, but in significant, lasting ways. Today’s activists may yet articulate — and enact — a similarly far-reaching agenda.” As of October 2022, included more than 18,000 issues.
Open Access.

Correspondence, memoranda, book drafts and notes, articles, speeches, reports, minutes, financial papers, scrapbooks, printed material, clippings, blueprints, maps, drawings, prints, photographs, negatives, and other papers relating chiefly to the early history and administration of Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Ala., founded by Washington in 1881; the National Negro Business League which he organized in 1900; the General Education Board, New York, N.Y.; Hampton Institute, Hampton, Va.; other African American schools; funding tor the education of African Americans; education; and Washington's personal and family life. Subjects include race relations as well as social and political developments between Reconstruction and World War I.

Presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865.

The Louise Gilman papers consist of letters written by Louise Gilman while serving as a teacher at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, a school established to educate freed slaves. The letters describe Gilman's activities as a teacher and her thoughts about the African American students.

Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence (more than three quarters of the papers), speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, book reviews, pamphlets and leaflets, petitions, novels, essays, forewords, student papers, manuscripts of pageants, plays, short stories and fables, poetry, photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, videotapes, audiotapes, and miscellaneous materials. The bulk 1877-1963.