*History: United States-Primary Sources

Digitized and born-digital collections available through McDaniel College Archives.

Digital Maryland (previously Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage or MDCH), is a collaborative, statewide digitization program headquartered at the Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center in Baltimore. Its mission is to facilitate the digitization and digital exhibition of the historical and cultural documents, images, audio and video held by Maryland institutions.

"The State Archives serves as the central depository for government records of permanent value. Its holdings date from Maryland's founding in 1634, and include colonial and state executive, legislative, and judicial records; county probate, land, and court records; church records; business records; state publications and reports; and special collections of private papers, maps, photographs, and newspapers."

"Founded in 1844, the Maryland Historical Society ( MdHS ) is the state’s oldest continuously operating cultural institution. In keeping with the founders’ commitment to preserve the remnants of Maryland’s past, MdHS remains the premier institution for state history."

"The ongoing Maryland State Archives publication series, Archives of Maryland Online, currently provides access to over 471,000 historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland's government. Online access enables users to research such topics as Maryland's constitutions and constitutional conventions' proceedings, session laws, proceedings of the General Assembly, governors' papers, and military records. This project allows the Archives to place into electronic form and preserve for future generations records that are scattered among a number of repositories and that often exist only on rapidly disintegrating paper."

"Garrett, Allegany and Washington counties in Western Maryland have a rich and diverse history. View images from the collections of the libraries, historical societies and individuals in the three counties. There are photographs, newspaper articles and indexes, rare books and more."

Digitized historical newspapers published in Maryland.

Newspaper published in Westminster, MD from 1865-1972. Digital copies available from 1865-1922.

Sponsored by the Carroll County Public Library, the Carroll County Times Archive provides access to digitized copies of The Carroll County Times from 1911-2018. The database allows for full-text keyword searching as well as the ability to browse issues by date.

"This is a sortable and searchable list of free digital collections and resources related to Baltimore neighborhood history and architecture..."

"Founded in 1939, the Historical Society of Carroll County collects, maintains, and provides community access to materials relating to the history of Carroll County from the settlement period to the present."

"Columbia is a well-known example of the New Town Movement in the United States. Though it shares similarities with other planned communities like Reston (Virginia) and The Woodlands ( Texas), Columbia’s innovative approach to planning puts it in a league of its own. A six-month period of interdisciplinary meetings (also know as the Work Group) brought together experts in education, recreation, sociology, transportation and religion, as well as architects and engineers, to weigh in on ways to better its would-be residents’ quality of life. Columbia was also ahead of its time for the purposeful goal to be an integrated community at a time before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it illegal to discriminate in housing based on race, color, national origin or religion."

"The Digital Library of Appalachia compiles and records archival and historical resources pertaining to the southern and central Appalachian region’s culture."

Provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to Southern history, literature, and culture.

"The main purpose of the Historical Collections of the Great Lakes (HCGL) is to collect, preserve, and make available, historical materials documenting the Great Lakes region and connecting waterways. The HCGL consists of manuscript and archival materials (more than 2,000 linear feet and approximately 450 collections); books, pamphlets, and periodicals; marine architectural drawings, maps, and charts; and photographs."

"An online visual collection of historic images showcasing the Mississippi River region along the Iowa/Illinois border."

"Portrays the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's General Collections and Rare Books and Special Collections Division. The collection's 138 volumes depict the land and its resources; the conflicts between settlers and Native peoples; the experience of pioneers and missionaries, soldiers and immigrants and reformers; the growth of local communities and local cultural traditions; and the development of regional and national leadership in agriculture, business, medicine, politics, religion, law, journalism, education, and the role of women."

Photographs and images related to the American West.

"Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846–1869 is a collection of the original writings of 49 voyagers on the Mormon, California, Oregon, and Montana trails who wrote while traveling on the trail...Accompanying the original diary images and their searchable transcripts are 43 contemporary maps; seven trail guides; 82 photographs, watercolors and art sketches; four essays on the Mormon and California trails, maps and trail guides; suggested readings for further discovery; and brief biographies of 45 of the 49 diarists."

"BlackPast.org, an online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history."

"This website is a free, searchable directory for online history projects that can help further Black History research. This ongoing project was created to collect information about these digital Black History projects in order to benefit historians, genealogists, and family historians who are researching the lives of Black individuals and families."

"Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org; digitization of African American materials across University of Minnesota collections; and support of students, educators, artists, and the public through residencies, workshops, and events locally and around the country."

"The African American History Collection is comprised of individual letters, documents, and other manuscript items from the William L. Clements Library relating to slavery, abolition movements, and various aspects of African American life, largely dating between 1781 and 1865."

""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. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Emanuel Love, Lydia Maria Child, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington, among others."

"The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean."

"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."

"This digital library put together by the University of North Carolina Greensboro allows users to dive into the documents, photos, and stories of the American slavery experience.Entries come from petitions, wills, and other official documents."

"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries."

"In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience underscores and explains the extraordinary diversity of African Americans living in the United States today. For the first time in history all the components of the African Diaspora are gathered together. This site gives the opportunity to African descended peoples to trace their own histories and the histories of the other groups that form the African Diaspora. It is a resource for discovering their common and not-so-common histories and exploring future possibilities."

"The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond."

"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress."

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress 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. Many of Douglass’s earlier writings were destroyed when his house in Rochester, New York, burned in 1872.

"The Digital Harlem website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930. Most of the material relates to the years 1920, 1925, and 1930."

"Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States. His photographs — most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved — provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century."

"The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s."

"The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia."

"This documentary website tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation. The SNCC Digital Gateway portrays how SNCC, alongside thousands of local Black residents, worked for Black people to take control of their political and economic lives. It also unveils the inner workings of SNCC as an organization, examining how it coordinated sit-ins and freedom schools, voter registration and economic cooperatives, anti-draft protests and international solidarity struggles."

Digitized documents related to the history of the Black Panther party.

A comprehensive website on the life and legacy of Malcolm X

"American Black Journal, originally titled Colored People's Time, went on the air in 1968 during a time of social and racial turmoil. The collection includes interviews, round-table discussions, field-produced features and artistic performances featuring African Americans, many of who are among the nation's most recognized and controversial figures, and provides the visual and audio context of key debates and discussions surrounding African American history, culture, and politics."

"Curated from the hearts and minds of Black women, the Black Beauty Archives encompasses the history of our past, documents the present while imagining the future. Our mission is to preserve, document and celebrate the history of Black Beauty through cosmetics and beauty culture. Objects include rare vintage beauty ads, magazines, press photos, stamps and beauty tools. Exclusive oral histories from beauty professionals and creatives alike, are added to our collection on bimonthly basis. BBA will continue to add to these collections, expanding our archival holdings to reflect the dynamic aesthetics of Black Beauty."

"SAADA digitally documents, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans."

"The mission of the Japanese American National Museum is to promote understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience."

Archives containing documentary evidence of the Japanese internment during WW2

"A database featuring photographs and documents assembled from twelve collections of the Urban Archives of the Oviatt Library Special Collections and Archives. Funded as part of the Hispanics-Serving Institutions Grant of the State of California, these materials capture the history of Latino and Chicana/o people and culture in Southern California. These collections feature the arts, labor and immigration as important parts of the historical fabric of this community."

"The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s."

"The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America."

"The Onda Latina Collection consists of 226 digitally preserved audio programs including interviews, music, and informational programs related to the Mexican American community and their concerns from the radio series "The Mexican American Experience" and "A esta hora conversamos" the Longhorn Radio Network, 1976-1982."

The Cuban Heritage Collection contains digital manuscripts, photographs, letters, maps and other resources held by the University of Miami Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection.

"Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age encompasses historically important writings by prominent Puerto Rican political activists and historians dating from approximately seventy years before the Spanish-American war (1831) until some thirty years after it (1929)."

Valuable resource for primary sources for those studying topics of women's history and the United States

"The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection is a library of nearly 800 books and pamphlets documenting the suffrage campaign that were collected between 1890 and 1938 by members of NAWSA and donated to the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress on November 1, 1938."

A digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection.

"Colonial North America at Harvard Library provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of an ongoing, multi-year project. When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 650,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America."

"The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820."

France in America is a database from the Library of Congress cataloguing resources partaining to the French colonies in America

Important documents and histories surrounding the Salem Witch Trials

"The digital images of historical documents in this archive preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City. The letters, newspapers, broadsides, legal records, and maps presented here record events from the early years of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam through the British occupation of the city during the Revolution."

"With the first battles of the American Revolution occurring in the Boston area, one of the most important historical time periods represented in the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center's pre-20th-century holdings is the American Revolutionary War era, defined broadly as 1750 to 1800. This collection encompasses approximately 900 maps covering Boston and New England, as well as the remainder of eastern North America and the West Indies during this time period."

"The Massachusetts Historical Society presents the complete four volume set of Revolutionary-era Boston newspapers and pamphlets collected, annotated, and indexed by Harbottle Dorr, Jr., a shopkeeper in Boston."

"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."

"Pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, paintings, maps, and other print memorabilia about America from circa 1830 to 1880."

Rich and wonderful archive of the American Civil War including documents from the pre and post-war years.

"These collections consists of diaries and collections of letters from the Civil War era found in Special Collections and Archives. The diaries offer a unique look into the lives of common soldiers, spies and even a bodyguard of Abraham Lincoln. Letters include both private and official correspondence. Correspondents in the latter group include Rufus King and Ulysses S. Grant. Transcripts are provided for each handwritten page."

"The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) is a database containing information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, which will be amended over time."

Search or browse through a database of Union and Confederate soliders' letters

Guide to women and their roles during the Civil War from Duke University Libraries

"Emilie Davis was an African-American woman living in Philadelphia during the U.S. Civil War. This website is a transcription of Emilie’s three pocket diaries for the years 1863, 1864, and 1865."

"A collection of primary source documents related to the Korean War. Obtained largely from Russian archives, the documents include reports on Chinese and Soviet aid to North Korea, allegations that America used biological weapons, and the armistice."

Texas Tech University's collection of documents and artefacts surrounding the conflict in Vietnam

"This database contains leaflets and newspapers that were distributed on the University of Washington campus during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. They reflect the social environment and political activities of the youth movement in Seattle during that period."

"We've collected hundreds of photographs and documents cataloguing the history of protest and activism against war--particularly, the Vietnam War--among students, soldiers, and residents of the Pacific Northwest. The galleries are organized by theme and event."

"The American Presidency Project, non-profit and non-partisan, is the source of presidential documents on the internet."

Collection of videos of all programming since 1987

"A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation brings together online the records and acts of Congress from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention through the 43rd Congress, including the first three volumes of the Congressional Record, 1873-75."

"The Living Room Candidate contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. This innovation had a permanent effect on the way presidential campaigns are run."

The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history and strives to apply the lessons of history to the nation’s most pressing contemporary governance challenges.

"The Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA, or IHRC Archives) is an archives and library for the study of immigration, ethnicity, and race."

"Documenting voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression."

Database of primary sources curated by the American Jewish Historical Society

Our collections - Documents and Visual Stills - are associated with the cultural and social history of people with disabilities across the lifespan and diagnosis categories. The records here illuminate everyday practices, dominant ideologies, and alternative perspectives...Most, but not all, of the Collections' records were produced in the United States from 1800 to the present."

Duke University collection of advertisements from the 20th Century

"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."

"The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives."

"Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library’s extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet features over 420 trial narratives involving the crimes and passions of both renowned and ordinary people."