In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson owned the largest personal book collection in the U.S. After the Capitol and Congressional Library burned during the War of 1812, Jefferson allowed Congress to purchase his collection, which totaled more than 5,000 works and became the core of the Library of Congress's current collection. This website provides basic information on, and several images of, 41 of these books. They are divided by themes designated by Jefferson: "Memory," "Reason," and "Imagination," corresponding roughly to history, philosophy, and fine arts. In addition, visitors can explore lengthy selections from three of these works through the "Interactives" section: Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and The Builder's Dictionary, an 18th-century handbook on building design and construction. This section features a powerful zoom function, allowing visitors to view the original text in detail, as well as a transcription function. Useful for those interested in political and intellectual culture in the early republic, as well as the history of the book.

This site, part of the Library of Congress American Memory project, features over 1,500 full-text images of 19th-century books digitized by the University of Michigan as part of the "Making of America" project. Books in the collection primarily date from 1850 to 1880 and cover such subjects as education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, science and technology, and poetry.

The collection is divided into seven general themes: Civil War, Slavery and Abolition, Religion, Education, Self-Help and Self-Improvement, Travel and Westward Expansion, and Poetry. Each section opens with a 200-word descriptive essay, and each book featured on the site is accompanied by notes on the author, full title of the work, date and place of publication, and the publisher.

The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject, author, and title. The site is ideal for exploring late 19th-century literature and popular culture.

The full-text versions of more than 40 works by Jack London (1876–1916), a prominent early 20th-century writer who was also involved in the socialist movement, are available here. Materials include famous fiction, such as The Call of the Wild (1903), and lesser-known works, such as War of the Classes (1905), a collection of speeches London delivered on behalf of socialism. The website includes 20 novels, 19 short story collections, two collections of essays, three plays, and six additional published nonfiction works. The website is keyword searchable. In addition to providing the writings of Jack London, there is plenty of biographical and historical information about London and his times. Outside resources are suggested, divided into those suitable for students and those for teachers. Combining London's original works with other contextual materials provided by the site could be valuable for studying early 20th-century American literature and journalism and its relation to radical political and social currents of the time.

An ambitious attempt to digitize 19th-century American fiction as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography, American Fiction, 1815–1875, this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. At present, the website offers close to 3,000 texts by 1,456 authors. These include the well known, such as Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain as well as hundreds of less well-known authors. Topics include slavery, reform, education, politics, love, children, and war. Close to 800 have been fully edited and SGML-encoded so that users may access chapter and story divisions through table of content hyperlinks. The remaining texts can be read either as facsimiles of original pages or in unedited transcriptions. The ability to perform single word and phrase searches on all material in the database—whether fully encoded or not—is powerful.

The cultural impact of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the focus of this well-designed exhibit. Three galleries offer images and explanatory text.

"'To Please a Child': L. Frank Baum and the Land of Oz" examines various aspects of the book, including W.W. Denslow's artwork, Baum's original copyright application, and an early review of the book appearing in the October 1900 issue of The Literary Review. "To See the Wizard: Oz on Stage and Film" looks at two of the most famous productions of Baum's book, the 1902–1903 stage play that became one of Broadway's greatest successes and the classic 1939 MGM movie, including color posters and a full-page color advertisement placed in the September 1939 issue of Cosmopolitan "To Own the Wizard: Oz Artifacts" examines Oz-related novelties, including the Wizard of Oz Monopoly game by Hasbro, a Wizard of Oz stamp, and "The Royal Bank of Oz" rebate check from MGM.

These full-text transcriptions and page images of 163 "Sunday school books" address religious instruction for youth published in the U.S. between 1815 and 1865. Materials include texts used by Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and other denominations and are searchable by subject, author, title, and keyword.

Books are categorized according to nine types: "Advice Books, Moral Tales"; "Animals, Natural History"; "Child Labor, Orphans, Poverty"; "Death, Dying, Illness"; "Holidays"; "Immigrants"; "Slavery, African Americans, Native Americans"; "Temperance, Tobacco"; and "Travel, Missionaries." There are 67 author biographies and an essay on Sunday school books. This collection offers valuable materials for studying antebellum culture, American religious history, print culture, and education.