History: United States History

Guides created by the Reference Section of the Library of Congress to primary sources by subject. Many of these primary sources have been digitized to view online.

"Bartleby.com publishes a diverse and intelligent nonfiction corpus, including many works of political and social history." Find such classics as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, among others.

American Journeys 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.

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920 comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920.

The New York State Library holds a wealth of first hand descriptions of the Native American experience in New York. These resources span four centuries, beginning with the Dutch colony of New Netherland and continuing to the close of the American frontier in western New York and beyond.

The digital images of historical documents in this archive preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City.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.

The New York State Library holds an extensive collection of material on the American Revolutionary War in print, microform, and online formats. This material consists of troop rosters and other details extracted from muster and pay rolls, Loyalist records, colonial New York State history documents, military bounty land records, diaries, orderly books, personal papers of participants and broadsides.

In cooperation with the University of Virginia Press, the National Archives have launched Founders Online, a free online tool that brings together the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. The nearly 120,000 fully searchable documents come from published volumes as well as unpublished sources, with more to be added over time.

The Internet Modern History Sourcebook is one of series of history primary sourcebooks. It is intended to serve the needs of teachers and students in college survey courses in modern European history and American history, as well as in modern Western Civilization and World Cultures.

Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

"Immigration to the US, 1789-1930 is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression. Concentrating heavily on the 19th century, Immigration to the US includes more than 2,200 books, pamphlets, and serials, totaling over 400,000 pages; more than 1,800 archives and manuscripts selections, totaling over 9,600 pages; over 100 individually cataloged maps; and more than 7,800 photographs. By incorporating diaries, biographies, and other writings capturing diverse experiences, the collected material provides a window into the lives of ordinary immigrants."

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 from Harvard University.

Search the collection of digitized magazines and journals from the1840's through the 1890's . (Use the browse tab/option to search through a specific title)

This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940.

This digital collection contains materials related to the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina from the 1950s to the 1970s, including letters, speeches, reports, booklets, photographs, news clippings, court records, and proposed legislation. Some of the topics covered include: school desegregation and busing, voting rights, and civil rights protests and demonstrations.

The materials in the "Women, Marriage and the Law" collection were selected for inclusion in the "Studies in Scarlet" Project, organized and partially funded by the Research Libraries Group. The project created a "virtual collection" of digitized primary and secondary documents valuable for researching the legal, historical, and cultural aspects of marriage and other personal relationships in the United States and the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1914.

This collection of declassified estimative products is the first such release by the Central Intelligence Agency of documents exclusively on the Vietnam war. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) commissioned Lloyd Gardner, the renowned American scholar on the Vietnam war, to prepare an introductory essay providing historical context for the documents.

Online Exhibits from the National Archives

The National World War II Museum is home to thousands of oral histories and hundreds of thousands of photographs.

The Hanover Historical Texts Collection makes available digital versions of historical texts for use in history and humanities courses.