American History Online, a project of the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and the University of Illinois, provides scholars with access to distributed historical digital library collections. OVer 360 collections are currently accessible through this search and browse portal, and over 416,000 items - representing over 70 percent of all materials in these collections - are from the 20th century. The primary source materials available through this portal include photographs and cultural materials, books and pamphlets, journal articles, maps, short music videos, data sets, political cartoons and posters, and oral histories.
The African American Women Writers of the 19th Century site is an online collection of 52 full-text works. Users can browse the books by author, title, or literature type (fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essays). Each work is (unfortunately) presented in a rather cramped frame, navigated with a table of contents on the left side. The site also includes a helpful introductory essay, technical notes, a discussion of editorial methods, a citation list, and an internal search engine. [Internet Scout Project]
American Memory is a large-scale project of the Library of Congress to make available multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections. 140 historical collections are now available through this site, including over seven million digitized items (e.g., maps, pamphlets, sheet music, photographs, broadsides, films, sound recordings, notebooks, periodicals and manuscripts). American Memory currently includes 44 collections focused on the period from 1800 to 1849.
Drawing on the holdings of the New York Public Library (in particular the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection), and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this online exhibit is devoted to offering a number of historically significant maps of the Mid-Atlantic region up to 1850. The site begins with a brief essay on the nature of the items featured on the site and continues with three other sections - Basics of Maps, Maps Through History, and Geographical Areas. The Basics of Maps section provides a valuable introduction to the various aspects of cartography and the basic layout of maps. Maps Through History draws the user's attention to the importance of nautical maps of the area, most notably those of the Hudson River and charts of the North Atlantic. The final section, Geographical Areas, has a selection of important maps beginning with early maps of New York City neighborhoods and finishing with a survey map of the tidewater region of Virginia completed by Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson.
This site "contains a slightly expanded and fully searchable version of the print publication 'American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States' ... with added illustrations and links to existing digitized material located throughout the Library of Congress Web site." Includes books, maps, manuscripts, music, images, and other research materials. Browsable and searchable. From the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress. [Librarians' Internet Index]
The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Andrew Jackson. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Jackson such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Jackson and a bibliography containing selected works for both general and younger readers. http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/presidents/jackson/index.html
For educators, students, and persons looking for information about any period in American history will find the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Web site an excellent resource containing thousands of helpful materials ranging from the colonial period to the present day. The web site website serves as a gateway to American history online with rich resources for educators. For the era covered in this course, see especially "Slavery and Abolition" under "History by Era."
The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals represents a special collaboration among the Library of Congress and the libraries of the University of Michigan and Cornell University to make accessible a wide-ranging digital library of nineteenth-century American printed materials. It will comprise primary documents of American history reflecting the broad domains of social and political history, education, psychology, sociology, religion, and science and technology as they developed throughout the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras (1850-77). The collection also has special riches to offer readers interested in such areas as the nation's westward expansion, its poetry, the growth of professional forestry and landscape design, or Americans' abiding fascination with self-improvement. In the words of Wendy Lougee, assistant director of the University of Michigan Library, such thematic breadth makes it possible "to trace the evolution of ideas and customs that shaped American culture." [Internet Scout Project]
Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is an independent research library that was founded in 1812. Its rather impressive collections document the life and spirit of America from the colonial period until the end of Reconstruction in 1876. The Society's holdings include books, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, music, and local histories. The site offers some online exhibits drawn from the Society's holdings, including "Visions of Christmas", which exhibits the holiday-themed artwork of such individuals as Thomas Nast and Louis Prang. Finally, visitors can also read about various fellowship opportunities offered by the AAS, along with information about tours of the AAS for the general public. [Internet Scout Project]
"It is considered very indelicate for ladies and gentlemen to sit down together on the grass," was the response given to Frances Trollope in Cincinnati in 1829 when she proposed a picnic party to a female friend. This is just one example of the experience of women in the new republic as recorded by eighteen European travelers to the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, now brought together by the American Studies Group of the University of Virginia. These combined travelogues "form a more complete and varied picture of the life of American women than can be gleaned from the text of [Alexis de Tocqueville's] Democracy in America alone." In addition to Trollope, excerpts from the works of Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Gottfried Duden are among those gathered here. The writings are organized both chronologically and topically, allowing readers to compare the writing of several authors on a given subject. In addition, a brief introduction to each author gives some background for their travels to the United States. [Internet Scout Project]
Electronic Resources Librarian
Reference and Information Services Office, Room 107g
David and Lorraine Cheng Library
William Paterson University
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ 07470