LibGuides: History Subject Guide: ...Around the Web

Sources on the African American Experience

African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection [Library of Congress]
"African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of particular importance in African-American history.
Black Abolitionist Archive [University of Detroit Mercy]
From the 1820s to the Civil War, African Americans assumed prominent roles in the transatlantic struggle to abolish slavery. In contrast to the popular belief that the abolitionist crusade was driven by wealthy whites, some 300 black abolitionists were regularly involved in the antislavery movement, heightening its credibility and broadening its agenda. The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files.

African American Experience (AAE)
Contains reference titles, slave narratives, images, primary sources and vetted websites.

Newspapers and Periodicals

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collections
Includes digitized images of American magazines and journals. Five series are: 1 (1691-1820), 2 (1821-1837), 3 (1838-1852), 4 (1853-1865), 5 (1866-1877)
American Periodicals Series
Digital images of American magazines and journals dating from 1741 to 1900. They allow researchers to see the original typography, drawings, graphics, etc., as originally published.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Chronicling America provides information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages from 1836-1922. Use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Print Materials: Broadsides, Pamphlets, Ephemera, Etc.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Digitized books, pamphlets, broadsides, and other imprints from 17th- and 18th-century America.
Early English Books Online
Contains titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement.
Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)
Consisting of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
A guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750.

Isiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project
This site offers a comprehensive overview of the broadsides collected by Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), a Bostonian. Each broadside includes a brief explanation of its content; many ballads contain political and social commentary.
Cornell University Making of America Collection
The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
Home Economics Archive: Harper's Bazaar
Contains digitized back issues of Harper's Bazaar, an American monthly women's fashion magazine, from 1867-1900.
Feeding America
Feeding America is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries' collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions.

Politics: Policymaking, Elections, Cartoons, and Commentary

Georgian Papers Programme
The GPP is a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837.
The Quill Project
Using the records of the processes that have created constitutions, treaties, or legislation, Quill offers a recreation of the contexts within which decisions were made, visualizations allow the process of negotiation to be understood and explored, and commentary on specific points of interest.
Digital Paxton
The “Paxton” in Digital Paxton refers to a little-known massacre in colonial Pennsylvania. This site isn't only a digital collection dedicated to understanding that massacre, but also a window into colonization, print culture, and Pennsylvania on the eve of the American Revolution.
Avalon Project
Digital documents, including more than two dozen medieval sources, relevant to the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government.
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.
Mapping Early American Elections
Explore how Americans voted for their legislators during the formative era of American politics, 1788–1825. Mapping Early American Elections provides interactive maps and tables of U.S. Congressional elections during the First Party System, contextual essays, open access data, and tutorials.
A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825
A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data involves all offices from the Federal to the local levels including Presidential elections, town clerk elections and everything in between.
Political Cartoons at the JCB Library
A database of graphic political cartoons which includes the complete collection of over 500 political cartoons held by the Library. The subject matter focuses primarily on British responses to political events in the late-eighteenth century Atlantic world.
Political Cartoons at the Billy Ireland Library
BICLM hosts several digital exhibits of political cartoons including perspectives on the American Civil War, works by Thomas Nast, the Yellow Kid, and cartoons by Anne Mergen, who for two decades was the only woman editorial cartoonist in the United States.
Center for the Study of the American Constitution
The Center for the Study of the American Constitution (CSAC) is a non-profit, non-partisan center dedicated to serving scholars, educators, and students who are interested in the American Constitution in its historical context. The Center is home to The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.
Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791
This exhibit provides an overview of the work of and issues faced by this seminal Congress, which was a virtual second sitting of the Federal Convention, fleshing out the governmental structure outlined in the Constitution and addressing the difficult issues left unresolved by the Constitution.
Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774 to 1789
Contains 277 documents relating to the work of Congress and the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Items include extracts of the journals of Congress, resolutions, proclamations, committee reports, treaties, and early printed versions of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Letters of Delegates to Congress
The twenty-six volumes of the Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789 aims to make available all the documents written by delegates that bear directly upon their work during their years of actual service in the First and Second Continental Congresses, 1774-1789.
Online Library of Liberty: American Revolution and Constitution
The Online Library of Liberty is particularly strong in its collection of material covering the American Revolution, the creation of the Constitution, and the Early Republic. This reflects the interest the Liberty Fund has in the ideals of individual liberty and limited government and the belief that these ideals motivated the men and women who took part in the creation of the American Republic.
Lapidus Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution
The Sid Lapidus '59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution features 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.
Lincoln/Net
Lincoln/Net presents materials from Lincoln's Illinois years (1830-1861), supplemented by resources from Illinois' early years of statehood (1818-1829). Thus Lincoln/Net provides a record of Lincoln's career, but it also uses his experiences as a lens through which users might explore and analyze his social and political context.