U.S. History

Interface in English or other, major European languages. Content in multiple languages.
Europe-wide unified search of digitized collections. Images, audio, texts, and more. Funded by the EU. Covers more than 1,000 years of history. Strongest for 1500 to 2000.
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.

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.

Located in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the most widely used research facilities in the world devoted to preserving materials on the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Provides much useful information pertaining to African-American authors and literature.

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.

The World Digital Library is a Library of Congress project sponsored by UNESCO. Items in this digital library, including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and sound recordings, are individually described and searchable in seven languages. Most countries and regions around the world are represented.

The Portal represents a scholarly critical edition of New England Native American primary source materials gathered presently from the partner institutions into one robust virtual collection, where the items are digitized, transcribed, annotated, and edited to the highest academic standards and then made freely available over the Internet, using open-source software. [Associated with the Yale Indian Papers Project]

The portraits in this web presentation were collected by four Bostonians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles W. Jenks and Francis Parkman collected carte de visite and tintype portraits of American Indians during the 1860s as historical records of tribal groups and their role in contemporary American politics. After a visit to southern California, Boston collector Kingsmill Marrs brought home platinotypes of southwestern Indians taken by Adam Clark Vroman in the late 1890s.

The DigitalMaine Repository is a partnership of the Maine State Library, Maine State Archives and community institutions around the state. Includes access points for some state and community collections. Consider exploring Maine in the Digital Public Library of America.

A collaborative effort led by the Maine State Library to facilitate digitization of Maine’s historical newspapers focused on the 19th and 20th centuries. Titles listed by county.

Digital collections include focuses on ephemera such as photographs and postcards ; environment ; government ; as well as COVID.

Something like a mini-DPLA for Massachusetts, this site draws together records from archives and historical societies all over Massachusetts. Searchable by place name, subject, title, or creator.

Access points for different cuts of Lowell history, including Southeast Asian and Portuguese. Focuses on the 20th century.

Includes a selection of digital facsimiles of state records including: Vital Records, 1841-1925 ; Census and Military Records ; limited legislative and court records ; and more.

Includes access points for small, local collections of yearbooks and local ephemera in photographs, maps, and more.

An online repository containing the digital collections held by the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). Includes photographs, oral histories, letters, and more. Topics focus on African American history ; disability rights movements ; individual and family papers ; and more.

"Digital Collections contains digital versions of books, letters, photographs, and other items from the collections of the University of New Hampshire Library. The focus of Digital Collections is the history of New Hampshire, its people, places, events, governance, and industries, including the history of UNH. Digital Collections also contains historic books on a variety of topics such as science, music, poetry, and fly-fishing." Focused on the 19th and 20th centuries.

Includes a "...wide array of material, including photographic items (e.g., glass plate negatives, slides, photographic prints, etc.), books, and manuscript content as well as oversize materials, such as maps, drawings and blueprints" focused particularly on the 19th and 20th centuries.

Includes collections focused on 19th and 20th century labor and politics with a focus on rail, steel, and building.

Comprises primary and secondary sources about the greater Pittsburgh region, including a wide range of publications, maps, manuscripts, visual images, and audio-video materials, that support personal and scholarly research.

Searchable image collections relating to Rhode Island history and architecture.

Consists of approximately six linear feet of manuscripts and ephemera, 200 sound recordings, and 17,000 photographs which document the ethnic, regional, and occupational traditions of Rhode Island, especially ethnic arts (African American, French Canadian, Greek, Irish, Jamaican, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Italian, Lithuanian, Narragansett, and others), maritime activities, material culture, and local history.

Focused on Rhode Island history, these collections include graphic and printed material as well as manuscript collections and ephemera. Material from the 16th century to the present.

"Our collection currently contains more than 100,000 works of art and design dating from ancient times to today. Of these objects, 1,997 of them are on view in the museum now. 13,662 of them are available online."
Open Access.