U.S. History

"The Canadiana Collections contain content created over five centuries that tell an incomplete, oftentimes distorted and, sometimes harmful, story of Canada."
Open Access.

Interface in English and French (and other major, European languages). Majority of the content in French.
France's fantastic digital library from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Digitized periodicals, images, recordings, and more. Covers two millenia with particular strength from 1500 to the present.
Open Access.

Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more.

Search over 16 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 5.1 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

A wealth of information on the Constitutional Convention, Continental Congress, and Congress provided by the American Memory site at the Library of Congress.

Correspondence and other writings of six major shapers of the United States:
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Over 183,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.

The American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals database includes digitized images from American magazines and journals from 1684 - 1912. Detailing American history and culture, these specialized collections cover advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, industry and professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and much more.

Digitized early American monograph, pamphlet, and broadside collection. Includes American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I; Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 & Library Company of Philadelphia Series I Supplement; Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 & Library Company of Philadelphia Series II Supplement.

A database of graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.

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.

Most of the items presented here are documented in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee in 1981. The bibliography contains approximately 2,000 maps and charts. Over the next several years many of the maps and charts in this bibliography will be added to the online collection each month.

More than 1,000 digital facsimiles of maps of the North American continent from the 16th to the 19th century from the John Carter Brown Library.

More than 37,000 maps available through the US Library of Congress with collection focus between 1600 and the present.

Fantastic collection of maps of places around the world hosted at the University of Texas at Austin. These maps are facsimiles of their historical collection as well as drawn from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Army Map service as well as Aeronautical Charts. Includes links to other sites with maps by country.

This collection contains images of maps from the Stephen S. Clark Library for Maps, Government Information and Data Services' map collection. 1317 images/descriptions are openly available with excellent metadata.

The Andrew Jackson Papers is one of twenty-three presidential collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The Jackson archival collection contains more than 26,000 items dating from 1767.

The Jonathan Chase papers contain letters and documents relating to the services of Colonel Jonathan Chase, of the 13th and 15th New Hampshire Militia regiments, during the Revolutionary War. These record Chase's involvement with recruiting soldiers and providing supplies for the army during the war.

This collection is comprised of seventy muster rolls and 15 additional letters and documents of the German regiments employed by the British to fight in the American Revolutionary War.

More than 150 recently gifted important books, pamphlets and prints representing the major themes of Lapidus' collecting: the intellectual origins of the American Revolution; the Revolution itself; the early years of the republic; the resulting spread of democratic ideas in the Atlantic world; and the effort to abolish the slave trade in both Great Britain and the United States.

The University of Virginia gathered maps, literary works, portraits of notable people, and documents including court records, record books and personal letters regarding the Salem, MA witch trials. Some materials are transcribed; others are images of original documents.

More than 22,000 documents and images related to the study of medicine in the Americas. Material mostly in English and Spanish. [US National Library of Medicine]

Learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods.

One of the fifteen important manuscript collections relating to slavery in the United States and the Atlantic slave trade with over 12,000 pages of text.

Collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

These documents reveal the inexorable growth of slavery as a labor system, in New England as well as the South. To a surprising degree, many Rhode Islanders defended slavery, particularly those who were profiting from the slave trade and its many economic dependencies. But from the beginning, there were those who found the idea of slavery in the New World a betrayal of the idealistic possibilities America held out to the world, and Rhode Island nurtured an especially lively opposition to the peculiar institution.

This free website is currently down (Dec 2023). Selection of over 1,200 images from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.

Online version of a major exhibition on slavery in New York City, mounted by the New-York Historical Society in 2005.

The small selection of slave narratives presented here reflect only a fraction of the millions upon millions of stories that could have been told by people who had the misfortune to toil under the yoke of slavery.

This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action. [Emory Libraries]