* American Studies & Ethnicity 

The sites on this page are subdivided into categories:
General (these span more decades than the other subdivisions)
Pre-Colonial and Colonial Era
Revolution and Early Republic
Antebellum Era
Civil War

General

American Journeys This collaboration between the Wisconson Historical Society and National History Day 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.

Archives of Maryland Online This resource provides access to over 471,000 historical documents concerning the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland's government.

Bethlehem Digital History Project The BDHP provides access to primary source materials, transcriptions, translations and contextual information relating to the early history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741 – 1844.

Do History This project, currently run by George Mason University, examines the use of primary source materials in reconstructing history, using documents concerning Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived from 1735-1812, as a case study.

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920 Duke University Libraries' The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 (EAA) presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States.

Historic Landscapes This site, developed by Case Studies in Public History at Georgia State University, provides images and information on landscape as historical and cultural phenomenon, including: Low Country Plantations; Landscape of Slavery; South Carolina Low Country; Preserving Historic Landscapes; and more.

Papers of George Washington This University of Virginia site provides access to papers from 1744-1799 and includes a range of other materials relating to George Washington.

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection The over 10,000 items in this Cornell University collection include pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, newsletters, and other ephemera documenting anti-slavery efforts at the local, regional, and national levels, beginning in 1700.

South Carolina Historical Society Online Archives Provides primary source materials concerning the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; Plantations; African Americans in the 1920s; and World War II.

University of Washington Library, American History to 1865 This site provides a wealth of links to information and primary sources concerning US history in this period.

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Era

Cultural Readings: Colonization and Print in the Americas Sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Cultural Readings presents a range of primary source materials that convey the process of colonization, chiefly from the European colonizers' perspectives, but also from that of Native Americans; it also includes scholarly essays.

First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820 Part of American Memory, this resource consists of 15,000 pages of original historical material documenting the land, peoples, exploration, and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century.

Plymouth Colony Archive Project This University of Virginia project provides historical analyses and original source documents concerning the Colony's existence in the period of 1620-1691.

Salem Witch Trials This "documentary archive and transcription project," a collaboration between several scholars and institutions, provides primary source material concerning these 1692 trials.

Virtual Jamestown A collaborative project between Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia, Virtual Jamestown is a digital research, teaching, and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and the "Virginia experiment."

Revolution and Early Republic

American Revolution Digital Learning Project This site, created by the New York Historical Society, provides access to resources including newspapers from most of the colonies, broadsides, diaries, letters, maps, and family papers.

Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress 1789-1791 Part of the George Washington University's Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 1789-1791 project, this searchable online exhibit provides access not only to primary materials, but also to a teachers' guide and other resources.

Discovering Lewis and Clark A "hyperhistory in progress," this collaboration between many scholarly and other institutions provides primary source and other materials concerning the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789 This collection, presented by American Memory, includes excerpts from Congressional journals, resolutions, proclamations, committee reports, treaties, and early printed versions of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition This site provides searchable full text of the Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark journals (Gary E. Moulton, ed.), as well as images, audio files, Native American perspectives, and other texts.

Antebellum Era

Jesuit Plantation Project A collaborative project of students and faculty in Georgetown University's American Studies program, this site provides documents concerning Maryland's Jesuit Plantations from 1650-1838.

Lincoln/Net This Northern Illinois University site presents primary source materials from Lincoln's Illinois years (1830-1861) and other resources for study of antebellum Illinois.

Mexican-American War and the Media This Virginia Tech site provides links to transcriptions of newspaper articles, indexes, images, bibliographies, timelines, and official documents related to the 1846-1848 war.

Secession Era Editorials Project A project of the Furman University Department of History, this site provides editorials of the partisan press in antebellum America, currently including those concerning the Nebraska bill debates, Dred Scott, John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry, and the attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks.

Civil War

American Civil War Homepage This site, which started as a class project at the University of Tennessee, is a gateway to online resources about the Civil War, and includes many primary documents as well as other resources.

Civil War Images of Northern Virginia This site, created by George Mason University's Library, Special Collections, provides images of wood engravings, lithographs, chromolithographs, photolithographs, and more; many stem from the time of the Civil War, and most depict Civil War battles and military maps.

Civil War Women This Duke University Library site features primary source documents and links to other resources concerning women in the Civil War.

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Searchable full-text edition of this 1953 collection of speeches, correspondence, and more, compiled by the Abraham Lincoln Association.

Confederate Broadside Poetry Collection This Wake Forest University collection consists of over 250 poems written by Southerners and Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.

Crisis at Fort Sumter This site, developed by Tulane University, uses text, images, and sound to reconstruct policy decisionmaking during from the time of Lincoln's election to the battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Crisis of the Union This "electronic archive of documents about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the US Civil War" published by the University of Pennsylvania provides a wealth of primary source materials, including pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, paintings, and maps, about America from around 1830 to 1880.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project This site offers sample documents from the Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 project developed at the University of Maryland.

A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln This collaboration between the Chicago Historical Society (CHS) and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, with text by Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, Director of Historical Documentation at the CHS, examines slavery; free and slave-based economies; and the legacy of the Civil War as destruction and as catalyst.

North Carolina Civil War Image Portfolio The North Carolina Collection provided by the University of North Carolina presents images from woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs--most of these were made by people accompanying Union forces, or were made from sketches and other information they provided.

Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War This site, developed by Edward L. Ayres at the University of Virginia, provides a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, church and census records, newspapers, and speeches, to document one Northern and one Southern community during the Civil War era.