Useful
Digitized Online Resources
To search for other digital collections,
check out the ARL Digital Initiatives
Database, a Web-based registry for descriptions of digital
initiatives in or involving libraries.
- The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives
Provides access 5.5 million photographs
taken over occupied Western Europe by the Allies during World
War II.
- American Journeys
Contains more than 18,000 pages
of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the
sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain
men in the Rockies 800 years later.
- American Memory Collection from the Library of
Congress
- The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life
in the Americas: A Visual Record
The thousand images in this collection
have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them
dating from the period of slavery.
- BoondocksNet.com
Contains severals large collections of political cartoons, historical
advertisements, and primary sources covering imperialism. Includes
(but is not limited to):
- Historical Graphics Gallery
Exhibits of political cartoons, photographs, and wartime posters
and advertising.
- Political Cartoons and Cartoonists
The development of political cartoons
from the beginning of the 19th century through the first decades
of the 20th, with cartoons by Thomas Nast and Honoré Daumier
and portrayals of Theodore Roosevelt, Uncle Sam and woman suffrage.
- Brooklyn Daily Eagle
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published
from 1841 to 1955, then revived for a short time from 1960 to
1963.
This site covers the period from October 26, 1841 to December
31, 1902, representing half of the Eagle's years of publication.
This period includes all of the years for which there is no index
as well as the eleven years during which an index was published.
Approximately 147,000 pages of newspaper in various digital formats
are contained in this online repository. Access can be gained
either by date of issue or by keyword searching.
- California
Digital Newspaper Collection
Currently covers newspapers published between 1900-1910: the
San Francisco Call, the Amador Ledger, the Imperial Valley Press,
and the Los Angeles Herald.
- Cartoons, Political
Links page that will take you to hundreds of historical political
cartoons.
- Combined Arms Research Library (CARL)
Digital Library
Digital images of documents from the Command and General Staff
College at Fort Leavenworth.
- Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers
and the Second World War
During the Second World War, the
staff of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper
kept its own monumental record of the war. This collection of
more than 144,000 newspaper articles, manually clipped, stamped
with the date, and arranged by subject, includes news stories
and editorials from newspapers, mostly Canadian, documenting
every aspect of the war.
- Digital
and Multimedia Center at Michigan State University
Includes materials on American Cookbooks,
American Radicalism, Catechism of the Steam Engine, Comic Art,
Early French Material, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fables, Fencing,
Indian Cessions, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, MSU Student Radicalism,
Nomenclature of British Insect, Occult Philosophy, Osteopathy,
Robert C. Kedzie, Speculum, Sunday School Books, Temperance,
the Captives of the Amistad, the Masses, Veterinary Medicine,
and Women & Botany.
- Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political
Cartoons by Dr. Seuss
- ECO: Early Canadiana Online
Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is
a digital library providing access to 2,009,084 pages of Canada's
printed heritage. It features works published from the time of
the first European settlers up to the early 20th Century.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital
Archives
- Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection
The Gilmer maps are an extensive
group of Civil War maps, including both manuscript maps and printed
maps with manuscript annotations and engineers' drawings of military
construction.
- Historic
Government Publications from World War II
- Historical Picture Collections
- Images of American Political History
A collection of over 500 public domain images of American political
history.
- Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties
Compiled and edited by
Charles J. Kappler, this historically significant, seven volume
compilation contains U.S. treaties, laws and executive orders
pertaining to Native American Indian tribes. The volumes cover
U.S. Government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883
(Volume II) and U.S. laws and executive orders concerning Native
Americans from 1871-1970 (Volumes I, III-VII).
- The
Internet Archive
A digital library of cultural artifacts
in digital form. Includes texts (out of copyright), movies, live
music and audio files. All can be downloaded and all are free.
- Internet Library of Early Journals
A digital library of 18th and 19th Century British journals,
including the Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Note and Queries,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and The
Builder.
- Letters
from World War One and Two
Primary source website dedicated to databasing as much mail from
soldiers of world war one and two as possible and making them
freely available online. Site contains hundreds of letters, envelopes,
stamps, photos and miscellanous items.
- Lewis & Clark: A Journey
Celebrates the bicentennial of the
expedition by providing resources for education and research
from the collections of the University of Cincinnati Libraries
and beyond.
- The Library of Virginia Digital Library Program
The Digital Library Program transfers
rare and unique Virginia materials into an integrated, user-friendly
electronic research environment. Since its inception in 1995,
the Program has digitized more than 2.2 million original documents,
photographs, and maps, and produced more than 80 fully-searchable
databases, indexes, and electronic finding aids.
- The Living Room Candidate: Presidential
Campaign Commercials, 1952-2004
Includes not only television commercials for the 1952-2004 period,
but also web-based advertising for 2004.
- The LOUISiana Digital Library
Click the "Collections"
link to see everything that is available. Contains several searchable
collections, including "The American Missionary Association
and the Promise of a Multicultural America: 1839-1954,"
"French Colonization of Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase
Map Collection," "From Diversity, Strength: A People's
History of Louisiana, 1800-1815," "Siege of Port Hudson
Louisiana 1863," "John H. Randolph and Family Letters,"
and "Norman (E. B. and N. Philip) Collection of Steamboat
Photographs."
- Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History Project
Provided by the Scripps Library
at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. A collection of over
1,150 interview transcripts from the LBJ Presidential Library
in Austin, Texas, may be viewed online in .pdf format. Each interview
is fully searchable.
- Making of America at the University of Michigan
This collection contains images
of 8500 books and over 50,000 articles with 19th century imprints.
The site has a powerful search engine that lets you search the
text of all of the books and articles. This site focuses on monographs
in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history,
sociology, science and technology, and religion, although there
are many articles available as well.
- Making of America at Cornell University
This collection provides access
to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with
19th century imprints.The site has a powerful search engine that
lets you search the text of all of the books and articles. This
site focuses on the major journal literature of the period, ranging
from general interest publications to those with more targeted
audiences (such as agriculture).
- National
Archives
- National Security Agency/Central Security
Service Declassification Initiatives
NSA/CSS periodically releases declassified documents or indexes
to these documents to the public. Specific initiatives provide
documents on the Gulf of Tonkin, USS Liberty, VENONA, Korean
War, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy Assassination and
the Truman Memorandum.
- The National Security Archive at The
George Washington University
National Security Archive Electronic
Briefing Books provide online access to critical declassified
records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy,
diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and more.
- New York Public Library Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access
to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed
rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including
illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare
prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera,
and more.
- The Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital
Document Collection
- The
Online Archive of California
Brings
together historical materials from a variety of California institutions,
including museums, historical societies, and archives. Over 120,000
images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories;
and 8,000 guides to collections are available.
- Online Collections from the Manuscript Reading
Room of the Library of Congress
Includes the Abraham
Lincoln Papers, Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the
Consumer Economy, 1921-1929, The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the
Library of Congress, The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers,
1862-1939, African American Odyssey exhibition (digital images),
The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920, The George
Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, By Popular Demand:
Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s, Poet
at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt
Whitman Collection, and Words and Deeds in American History:
Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First
100 Years.
- The
Open Library
The Open Library website was created
by the Internet Archive
to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online. The
vision is to create free web access to important book collections
from around the world. Books are scanned and then offered in
an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're
in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and
printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee
by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The
books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.
- Operation
Iraqi Freedom Documents
Provides access to unclassified documents and media captured
during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
- Public Domain Torrents
A collection that describes itself
as "movies that made history... sort of."
- Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library at Duke University
Digitized collections posted here
include, Medicine and Madison Avenue; Emergence of Advertising
in America: 1850-1920; William Gedney Photographs and Writings;
Ad*Access, Historic American Sheet Music; Emma Spaulding Bryant
Letters; The Urban Landscape Digital Image Access Project; Documents
from the Women's Liberation Movement; George Percival Scriven:
An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899-1901; African-American
Women; Civil War Women; Duke Papyrus.
- Truman Presidential Library Digital Archives
Includes materials on the Decision
to Drop the Atomic Bomb, Recognition of Israel, the Marshall
Plan, the Truman Doctrine, Desegregation of the Armed Forces,
the 1948 Campaign, the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
- Turning the Pages
Digital images of great books and manuscripts from the British
Library.
- United States Military Academy Map Library
Digital representations from the
six atlases and nearly one thousand maps in the History Department's
collection, encompassing not only America's wars but global conflicts
as well.
- University of Michigan Digital Library
Production Service
DLPS provides access to over 200
text, image, and finding aid collections that collectively provide
access to over a million digital objects. Some are restricted
to University of Michigan users but many are public. Some highlights:
- University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
Offers a wide array of digitized materials. SELECTED highlights
include:
- Utah Digital Newspapers
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