Some Online Collections of Primary Sources

            This listing below draws on the 900 annotations in our History Matters website ( http://historymatters.gmu.edu ) as well as History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History Online written and edited by Alan Gevinson, Kelly Schrum, and Roy Rosenzweig (Bedford, 2004). More details and a searchable database of good quality history sites is available at History Matters . Some of the sites listed below are gated, subscription sites that you need to access through the GMU library ( http://oscr.gmu.edu/sql/subdb.php?Arts_&_Humanities ). All of these should offer interesting possibilities for proposing a digitally based research project. The richest collection is the first, American Memory, which offers more than 100 different primary source collections.

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital LibraryLibrary of Congress, American Memory http://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html

This expansive archive of American history and culture features more than eight million items beginning in 1490. Currently this website includes material from 120 collections, some from libraries and archives around the world. Strengths include the early republic, with documents and papers on the Continental Congress, U.S. Congress, early Virginia religious petitions, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln's papers and Mathew Brady photographs; and exploration and settlement of the West. Collections offer papers of inventors, such as Alexander Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Samuel F. B. Morse, and the Wright Brothers, and composers, such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. The website also features New Deal-era documentation projects, such as Farm Security Administration photographs, Federal Writers' Project life histories, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and Man on the Street interviews following the Pearl Harbor attack. Entertainment history is amply represented with collections on the American Variety Stage, Federal Theatre Project, early cinema, and early sound recordings. African American history, ethnic history, women's history, folk music, sheet music, maps, and photography also are well documented.

Documenting the American South
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Libraries
http://docsouth.unc.edu

Nearly 1,400 documents address aspects of life in the South from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The database features seven major projects. "First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920" offers 140 diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives. North American Slave Narratives ] furnishes about 250 texts. The "Library of Southern Literature" makes available fifty-one titles in Southern literature. "The Church in the Southern Black Community, Beginnings to 1920," traces "how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life." "The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865" documents non-military aspects of Southern life.

Making of America University of Michigan                                                Cornell University
http://moa.umdl.umich.edu                                          http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa

Together, these two websites provide more than 1.5 million pages of text in a collaborative effort to digitize more than 11,000 volumes and 100,000 journal articles from the nineteenth century.

Ad*Access
Digital Scriptorium, Duke University
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess

This well-developed website presents images of more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in newspapers and magazines in the United States from 1911 to 1955

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
http://www.umi.com/proquest/ {Access via GMU Library page}

ProQuest's Historical Newspapers series offers an enormous body of primary sources, including access to the following: The New York Times (1851-2001), The Washington Post (1877-1988), The Wall Street Journal (1889-1986), The Christian Science Monitor (1908-1991) and The Los Angeles Times (1881-1984).

HarpWeek
HarpWeek, LLC
http://app.harpweek.com {access through GMU library}

A subscription-based website that presents full-text images and transcriptions from Harper's Weekly beginning with its first issue in January 3, 1857, and running through 1912.

North American Women's Diaries
Alexander Street Press
http://www.alexanderst.com {access through GMU library}

North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 provides full-text letters and diaries from more than 1,000 women--totaling more than 21,000 documents and approximately120,000 pages--written between 1675 and 1950.

Accessible Archives
http://www.accessible.com {access via GMU library}
Accessible Archives Inc., Malvern, PA

This subscription-based website currently provides seven databases containing more than 176,000 articles from nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states. The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective includes "major articles" from The Charleston Mercury , The New York Herald , and the Richmond Enquirer . African American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes runs from six newspapers published in New York, Washington, D.C., and Toronto from 1827 to 1876.

Archival Research Catalog (ARC)
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
http://www.archives.gov/research_room/arc

In addition to providing a catalog for those planning to visit NARA, ARC offers approximately 124,000 digital images of governmental textual records, photographs, and maps.

Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875
Committee on Institutional Cooperation; Indiana University Digital Library Program
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2

An ambitious attempt to digitize "every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875," this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. At present, the website offers close to 3,000 texts by 1,394 authors.

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
David Rumsey, Cartography Associates
http://www.davidrumsey.com

This private collection presents more than 8,800 historical maps of North and South America.

New York Public Library Picture Collection Online
New York Public Library
http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco

This eclectic collection offers 30,000 images from books and periodicals, as well as original photographs, prints, and postcards, mostly dating from before 1923

Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935
Jim Zwick
http://www.boondocksnet.com/ail98-35.html

This comprehensive website offers important texts on American imperialism and its opponents. Materials include 800 essays, speeches, pamphlets, political platforms, editorial cartoons, petitions, and pieces of literature, such as Mark Twain's anti-imperialist writings.

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920

John W. Hartman Center and Duke University Digital Scriptorium

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa

These 9,000 advertising items and publications date from 1850 to 1920.

Performing Arts in America, 1875-1923

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

http://digital.nypl.org/lpa/nypl/sitemap/sitemap.cfm

A selection of more than 16,000 items relating to the performing arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is offered on this website.

SIRIS Image Gallery: Selections from Archives Center
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
http://sirismm.si.edu/siris/acahtop.htm

This site presents four collections of nearly 30,000 images from the Smithsonian's vast holdings, with a link to more than 90,000 additional images in the Institution's other archives.

New Deal Network
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College, Columbia University
http://newdeal.feri.org

This database offers more than 20,000 items relevant to the New Deal.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital ArchiveUniversity of Southern Mississippi Libraries and Center for Oral History
http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh

These 150 oral history interviews and sixteen collections of documents address the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Internet Moving Images Archive
Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives, and Internet Archive
http://webdev.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php

This website offers films from a privately held collection of twentieth-century American ephemeral films--produced for specific purposes and not intended for long-term survival. The website contains more than 2,800 high-quality digital video files documenting various aspects of twentieth-century North American culture, society, leisure, history, industry, technology, and landscape.

Vietnam Center
Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University
http://www.ttu.edu/~vietnam

This massive website offers 234 audio oral histories (120 have been transcribed) with U.S. men and women who served in Vietnam. In addition, more than 545,000 pages from more than 63,000 documents regarding the Vietnam War are available in the Virtual Vietnam Archive , which also offers video interviews.

Freedom of Information Act, Electronic Reading Room
Federal Bureau of Investigation
http://foia.fbi.gov/room.htm

Thousands of documents from more than 150 FBI files, declassified due to Freedom of Information Act requests, are available here

National Security Archive
Thomas S. Blanton, Director
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv

Despite its official sounding name, this is a non-governmental institution. Founded in 1985 as a central repository for declassified materials obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the Archives offers 100 "Briefing Books," each providing government documents and a contextual narrative on national security history and issues, foreign policy initiatives, and military history. A companion, subscription-based site (http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/ ) includes more than 40,000 of the most important declassified documents regarding U.S. policy.

Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia
Jerry Goldman, Northwestern University
http://oyez.itcs.northwestern.edu/oyez/frontpage

These audio files, abstracts, transcriptions of oral arguments, and written opinions cover more than 3,300 Supreme Court cases. Materials include 2,000 hours of audio of arguments in selected cases starting in 1955 and all cases since 1995.