Between 1850 and 1950, the population of New York City grew from just under 700,000 to more than seven million. This collection of 1,300 photographs documents the manifold changes that characterized New York City's urban environment in this 100 year period. The photographs are gathered from several collections: 1896 street views by Staten Island photographer Alice Austen, 1911 panoramas of Fifth Avenue, Washington Irving's home in the 1860s, 31 photo-lithographics of mid-1800s Hudson River mansions, the Sperr collection of 335 photographs taken between 1931 and 1942, and a general collection of photographs divided by city borough. Highlights include Austen's images of New York City laborers (organ grinders, bootblacks, police men, messenger boys) and of her home life among the State Island elite—both rare subjects for this period, and the Sperr collection's documentation of the construction of the Belt Parkway. Part of the New York Public Library's renowned digital library collection, this website is essential for those interested in U.S. urban history, architecture, the history of New York City, and the built environment.

An exhibition of 18 works by one of America's great artists, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), with annotations of 100-300 words on each image. Eakins, known for applying Paris-learned Beaux-Arts techniques to realistic depictions of his own Philadelphia milieu, often painted persons engrossed in everyday actions: sailboats racing and oarsmen rowing on the Schuykill River; surgeons overseeing students operating on patients; a concert singer performing; a baby playing; and coach horses trotting through Fairmont Park. Although most of the images —which date from 1871-1902—are reproductions of paintings, the exhibit also includes a preparatory drawing, a photograph of the artist's anatomical casts, and two photographic studies, one influenced by the pioneer motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. As the exhibition text notes, scholars have recently discovered that Eakins used projected photographs to create his works.

Also included are expressive portraits of Eakins' friends and contemporaries, including poet Walt Whitman, who wrote that Eakins was "not a painter, but a force"; controversial anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; and sculptor William Rush engaged in transforming a nude model into a mythic image. Valuable for students of the history of art and for those interested in realistic depictions of late 19th-century life and culture in Philadelphia.

More than 40 historical census reports, including decennial reports dating back to 1790, are available for download on this website as PDFs. Historical statistics address topics such as population totals by race, urban or rural status, educational attainment, and means of transportation to work, among others.

There are also histories of the 21 U.S. census questionnaires produced from 1790 to 2000, including instructions to census marshals dating back to 1820. Comparative tables show which censuses included specific questions on subjects, such as ancestry and mental disabilities, and whether respondents were deaf, blind, insane, feeble-minded, paupers, literate, or convicts. Additional information includes state and territorial censuses, mortality schedules produced for a number of 19th-century censuses, population at the time of each census, and supplemental censuses taken at various times on free and slave inhabitants, Indian populations, unemployment, and housing.

Because of the PDF format, the reports take a number of minutes to download. These materials are useful for those needing demographic information or researching the history of census taking and the development of census categories.

Currently provides more than 122 images of objects, documents, and photographs pertaining to the history of the town of Worthington, OH, founded in 1803 by a group of families migrating from western Connecticut and Massachusetts. The site creators plan to add more materials in the future, including digitized versions of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and oral histories. Users may search by subject, title, or keyword in bibliographic records—which include abstracts of up to 100 words for each item—or browse the collection by decade or 27 categories covering aspects of the social, economic, cultural, civic, and environmental history of the town. Includes links to 22 related sites. Useful for those studying local history.

Presents 470 audio excerpts of interviews and 3,882 photographs compiled in 1994 by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress during a study of occupational culture in Paterson, NJ. The project—sponsored by Congress—explores ways that the industrial heritage of Paterson, with manufacturing roots going back to the 18th century, still affects present-day community life and culture with regard to work practices and leisure activities. Audio files are available in three formats, accompanied by bibliographic records with word-searchable summaries and subject headings. The site includes five essays—from 2,500 to 5,000 words in length with photographs—by project fieldworkers on African American family businesses in Paterson; an ethnography of a single workplace—Watson Machine International, a manufacturing film established in 1845; business life along a single street—21st Avenue, home to Italian and Hispanic communities; a traditional Paterson food—the hot Texas wiener; and remembrances by retired workers.

Offers a 27-title bibliography, annotated links to 32 related sites, and a glossary of specialized terms. Valuable for those studying the intersection of labor and ethnic history, urban history, and the functioning of historical memory.

Provides approximately 1,350 life histories and youth studies created by the Virginia Writers' Project (VWP)—part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project—between October 1938 and May 1941. In addition, the site offers more than 50 interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the VWP's all-black Virginia Negro Studies unit in 1936 and 1937 and six VWP folklore studies produced between 1937 and 1942. The life histories—ranging between two and 16 pages in length—offer information on rural and urban occupational groups and experiences of individuals during the Depression, in addition to remembrances of late 19th-century and early 20th-century life. The youth studies investigate experiences of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who left school and include a survey of urban black youth. The ex-slave narratives, selected from more than 300 that were conducted for the project—of which only one-half have survived—provided research for the 1940 WPA publication The Negro in Virginia.

Interviews and studies were edited—sometimes extensively—at the Richmond home office. Each study includes a bibliographic record with notes searchable by keyword; for many records, notes are structured to include searchable data on age, gender, race, nationality, industrial classification, and occupation. The site includes a 2,300-word overview of the project. Valuable for those studying social, economic, and cultural life in Virginia during the Depression, in addition to early periods, youth culture, and the history of slavery.

Presents transcriptions of oral history interviews—with selected accompanying audio files—of five students who participated during World War II in Brooklyn College's Farm Labor Project.

The students, most of whom were children of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland and were committed to radical politics, journeyed upstate during the summer to work on farms in order to support the war effort. The site organizes excerpts of the words of the five interviewees—four women and one man—into four broad sections covering their background and youth, campus life, life on the farm, and life after the project.

These sections are further divided into 20 subsections covering such topics as family life, social influences, politics, working conditions on the farm, protests against a "capitalist" farmer, interactions with locals, and later life. Individual excerpts range in length from one sentence to 750 words. Audio files are provided for 23 of the excerpts.

The site also includes 12 photos from the project, a timeline, and a syllabus for an undergraduate-level course in Oral History Theory and Practice.

A second group of oral histories addresses the shutdown of Brooklyn College's newspaper during the McCarthy era as well as related biographies, contextual essays, and primary documents. The site will be valuable to those studying student life, radical culture, American Jewish history, and homefront experiences during World War II.

Provides two exhibits on black history in Hartford, CT. "A Struggle from the Start" charts stages in the life of the Hartford African-American community from 1638 to 1920. Structured in five chronological sections, each with three-to-four thematic subsections, a text of 21,000 words is punctuated with approximately 60 images of documents, photographs, illustrations, newspaper clippings, tables, paintings, and maps. This exhibit covers slavery, black codes, free blacks, Black governors in the early Republic period, black soldiers, the black bourgeoisie, the formation of the black community, black labor, black society, black churches, the "Talented Tenth" in Hartford, black painters Charles Ethan Porter and Holdridge Primus, black migration from the South, mass politics, and black community institutions. A second exhibit presents approximately 80 photographs from Hartford's African-American community covering the years 1870 to the 1970s. Valuable for those interested in studying African-American history from a community perspective.

This site presents more than 2,200 digital images of the Gary Works Steel Mill and the corporate town of Gary, IN. The "tour" includes 36 photographs with interpretive text documenting the creation of the steel mill and city life in Gary. The main body of the site contains thousands of digital images and users can search by keyword or browse by subject and date for various aspects of this planned industrial community. The subject headings include the steel mill and its workers; factories and furnaces; houses and office buildings; women, children, and welfare facilities; and work accidents. The "Contextual Materials" section is a good starting place for historians and researchers interested in the Industrial Revolution. It includes an approximately 2,200-word introductory essay, "The Magic City of Steel," by Steve McShane; four magazine articles dating from 1907 to 1913; six book excerpts, including the 1911 work by John Fitch, The Steel Workers; 14 pages from Raymond Mohl and Neil Betten's Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1950 and the Carl Sandburg poem, "The Mayor of Gary."

This section is rounded out by a nearly 80-item bibliography and links to additional information about Gary, steel making, and 30 archival collections. There is also a "Teacher's Guide" with ten primary and secondary school lesson plans and other online activities. A great site that is easily navigable for researchers, teachers, and students.

The 1,240-page Civil War-era diary of U.S. Patent Office examiner Horatio Nelson Taft is presented in both digitized images and word-searchable transcriptions. Taft's young children were regular playmates of the Lincoln sons until the death of Willie Lincoln. Taft's older son, a physician, attended to the President the night he was shot. The diary—kept daily from January 1861 to April 1862 and irregularly through May 1865—had been in the possession of Taft's descendants since his death and had remained virtually unknown to scholars until it was donated to the Library of Congress in 2000. Taft's perceptions of homefront life in Washington, D.C., as the war progressed, descriptions of White House happenings, and account of the death of the President will add to the historical record. The site includes a 2,000-word biographical essay on Taft and links to 23 related sites.