Accessible Archives

Image
Image, Godey's Lady's Book, Accessible Archives
Annotation

These eight databases present more than 176,000 articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states.

Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1880), one of the most popular 19th-century publications, furnished middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion illustrations, and editorials. The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728–1800), a Philadelphia newspaper, is described as the New York Times of the 18th century. 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, DC, and Toronto between 1827 and 1876. American County Histories to 1900 provides 60 volumes covering the local history of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809–1870 has been partially digitized, with 25,000 records available. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819–1870 addresses industrialization in a rural area settled by Quaker farmers.

Puck Building

Description

In this podcast from the Bowery Boys, Greg Young narrates the history of New York's Puck Building, built to house the offices of the turn-of-the-century periodical Puck Magazine.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

Image
Image for Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
Annotation

The complete facsimile and transcript versions of the March 1925 Survey Graphic special "Harlem Number," edited by Alain Locke, is presented here. Locke later republished and expanded the contents as the famous New Negro anthology. The effort constituted "the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community" of the 1920s.

The journal is divided into three sections: "The Greatest Negro Community in the World," "The Negro Expresses Himself," and "Black and White—Studies in Race Contacts." The site also includes essays by Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson; poems by Countee Cullen, Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes; and quotations from reviews of the issue.

Making of America

Image
Image for Making of America
Annotation

Also see the Cornell University branch of the project here.

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 19th century. The websites present full-text access to 32 journals, including literary and political magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The list includes specialized journals as well, such as Scientific American, Manufacturer and Builder, Ladies Repository, and the American Missionary. The websites also offer an abundance of novels and monographs.

A recent addition provides 249 volumes on New York City, some from the early 20th century. At present, the two collections remain separate and must be searched individually. The institutions plan to integrate their sites, however, and to include material from other major research libraries. Access to many "Making of America" texts is also available through the Library of Congress American Memory site, "The Nineteenth Century in Print".

American Transcendentalism Web

Image
Image for American Transcendentalism Web
Annotation

This comprehensive collection presents texts by and about the major figures of American Transcendentalism, a New England intellectual movement that began in the mid-1830s and lasted into the late 1840s. The movement has had a much longer legacy, however, in American literature, philosophy, religion, and political and social reform. Some materials are available on the website; others are provided through links.

Eleven major authors are featured—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Dr. William Ellery Channing, his son William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Amos Bronson Alcott, Jones Very, Christopher Cranch, Orestes Brownson, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Texts are also retrievable according to themes and genre. Resources include more than 100 selections from The Dial, a journal created by the Transcendentalist Club in 1840 that lasted for four years, and informative essays that provide an historic overview.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

Image
Image for Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
Annotation

Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.

The Local Machine

Description

The Democratic political machine was a favorite target of political cartoonists in the late 19th century. Josh Brown of the American Social History Project looks at one particular cartoon about New York's notorious Boss Tweed.

This feature is no longer available.