American Studies & Ethnicity *

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Dates covered: 1492-1969

Login required A digital archive of manuscript materials from the holdings of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) in New York. Includes organization and institutional records and papers, as well as autobiographies, letters, notebooks, and scrapbooks dating from the 17th to the mid-20th century. Also includes full-text searchable books and pamphlets from the Soble and Rosenbach collections at the AJHS and supplemental resources including biographies, a chronology, interactive maps, scholarly essays, a selection of American Jewish Year Book articles, links to related websites, and a visual resources gallery that draws from two collections of photographs: the Baron de Hirsch Fund Records collection and the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work (New York) Records.

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Contains approximately 7,000 interrogations of members of the crew of ships taken during the American Revolutionary War and Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (ca. 1775-1784). It shows images of each interrogation (of two, three, sometimes even six or more pages). Answers to the fourteen most researched questions are transcribed and stored in a searchable database.

Orderly Books were the controlling document of day-to-day life in the military, most notably during the Revolutionary War. These are handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817. The content in Orderly Books provides detailed accounts of troops’ daily lives, documenting everything from court martial cases to the price of necessities charged by locals. Provided by EBSCO and the New-York Historical Society.

This website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:

Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

Login required This portal for slavery and abolition studies brings together documents and collections from dozens of libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today. It also includes significant coverage of US court records from the local, regional and Supreme Court level.

Login required (from Alexander Street) Contains indexed, searchable information on over 4 million soldiers and thousands of battles, together with over 16,000 photographs

Contains content written by over 2,000 authors and includes approximately 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and memoirs as well as biographies.

Comprised of over 110,000 pages, this database focuses on the Civil War as it was fought from 1861 to 1865 and represents both Northern and Southern perspectives. It Includes a variety of primary source documents, such as, letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs, illustrations, artifacts, scrapbook journals, family portraits, and maps featuring hand-colored details of troop movements and local landmarks. Provided by EBSCO.

Includes 65,000 pages from 49 confederate, union, abolitionist, and British presses periodicals, including 15 campaign newspapers, most of which are illustrated.

Login required Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera provides over 1400 images from the fields of battle, politics, and general society, enabling researchers to experience the events, both monumental and mundane, of the war that tested and defined the core meaning of America

Revolution and Protest Online explores the protest movements, revolutions, and civil wars that have transformed societies and human experience from the 18th century through the present. Organized around more than thirty events and areas, representing a variety of time periods, regions, and topics, this collection will include at completion 175 hours of video, 100,000 pages of printed materials.

Login required Provides access to the full run of eight newspapers from 1840-1865 and nearly 2000 pamphlets from the Slavery and Anti-Slavery Pamphlets and Civil War Pamphlets collections

Provides access to an extensive collection of primary source documents--including songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera--that reflect the social and cultural politics of the late 19th century. In addition there are video interviews with scholars and topical critical essays covering such themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage.

Login required (from Gale) Over 24,000 pages from twenty-five titles of relocation camp newspapers, from 1942-1945.

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Login required These two Proquest History Vault modules include primary source materials from the late the 19th century to the late 20th century:
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records Contains records of federal government agencies, covering some of the major events of the civil rights movement including: Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955; the Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis in 1957; the March on Washington in 1963; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery March; and much more.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part One includes personal papers and records of civil rights organizations. This module covers many of the same events that are covered in the Federal Government Records module as well as other aspects of African American life in the 20th century, including religion, sports, and education.

Login required (in Proquest’s History Vault) Includes news reports from the Associated Press Saigon Bureau on South Vietnamese and U.S. military and political activity in Vietnam from 1953 to 1972. These documents are organized chronologically.

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