This database is the most essential collection of written materials for historical research in American history from 1801-1819. It provides full-text access to nearly 4.5 million pages of 36,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints published in the U.S. during this period. Gazetteers, almanacs, juvenile literature, chapbooks, hymnals, campaign literature, novels, slave narratives, spelling books, school readers, treaties, maps, atlases, advertisements, diaries, autobiographies, and much more are all included. Most of these materials were originally detailed in the bibliography compiled by Ralph Shaw and Richard Shoemaker. This collection, long available on microfiche, is made available here as a digital, fully searchable online database. It complements Readex's other Early American Imprints series of material from the period of 1639-1800.

In 1851, Massachusetts passed the first law recognizing adoption as a legal and social operation. Since then, adoption has had a rich history in the United States, documented at this website through close to 200 reports, writings, letters, adoption narratives, and other documents. Users unfamiliar with adoption history might begin by exploring the detailed timeline that traces adoption history from 1851 to 2000, when Congress passed the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 eliminating the process of naturalization for international adoptions. Moving on to the Topics in Adoption History section, with in-depth explanations of orphan trains, proxy adoptions, infertility, child welfare, and eugenics, will help build historical context. The Document Archive and Adoption Science sections boast documents from the late 1800s to the present by notables such as Pearl Buck, adoptees searching for information on their biological parents, and court decisions on adoption throughout the 20th century.

Felix Frankfurter's 18,000-word article about the prosecution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists charged with murder and robbery in 1920 and put to death in 1927, is presented here. The piece reflects doubts entertained by many intellectuals about the highly controversial trial. Appearing in the March 1927 edition of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, it provided background as well as a careful analysis of the legal questions involved. Frankfurter concluded that "every reasonable probability points away from Sacco and Vanzetti."

The site includes links to seven additional Atlantic Monthly articles: two on the trial—Katherine Anne Porter's "The Never-Ending Wrong" and "Vanzetti's Last Statement: A Record" by W. G. Thompson, the lawyer for the accused—and five dealing more broadly with the American criminal justice system. The site, while limited, is useful for studying radicalism, the red scare, and 1920s America.

This site is designed to preserve and disseminate the history of the Supreme Court, from its first session in 1789 to the present. The main section presents the history of the Court, including a detailed timeline with biographical sketches of the chief and associate justices and the history of major decisions during the tenure of each Chief Justice. "How the Court Works" includes 17 short essays (150-700 words each) on the term of the justices, the types of cases they hear, and the role of the Chief Justice. In this section, users will find the text of opinions from 411 cases (130 from the Warren Court, 160 from the Burger Court, and 121 from the first seven years of the Rehnquist Court) heard by the Supreme Court between 1955 and 1993. There are also recordings of 10 sample cases, including Roe v. Wade. "Publications" features four articles, Historical Society yearbooks from 1976 to 1990, and six digitized volumes that include the memoirs of Henry Billings Brown. For students and instructors, the "Learning Center" is an excellent resource. It presents three cases for and about students and four landmark cases that illustrate the development of the Court's gender discrimination doctrine. There are also activities and lesson plans on key Supreme Court cases, for example Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. The site provides several quizzes, along with a multimedia presentation about President Franklin Roosevelt and the 1937 Supreme Court controversy. This material will be useful to anyone interested in studying the Supreme Court, the court's history, and various justices.

This teaching site was developed "to support the teaching of landmark Supreme Court cases, helping students explore the key issues of each case." The site features 17 pivotal Supreme Court cases, including Marbury v. Madison (1803), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Korematsu v. United States (1944), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and Roe v. Wade (1973). Each case offers a "resources" section featuring such material as teaching recommendations, background summaries, a link to the full-text majority opinion, and excerpts from the majority and dissenting opinions. An "activities" section contains short activities and in-depth lessons. The site also includes instructions for general teaching strategies, including moot court, political cartoon analysis, and website evaluation. The site also offers material on key concepts of constitutional law including federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances, equal protection of the laws, judicial review, due process, the commerce clause, and the necessary and proper clause. An excellent resource for teaching the legal history of these important Supreme Court cases and the issues surrounding them.

This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

These four collections of data and documents address Federal Indian policy in the late 19th century. The first set includes eight annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from the 1870s, along with appendices and a map. The second set, Allotment Data, traces the Federal "reform" policy of dividing Indian lands into small tracts for individuals—a significant amount of which went to whites—from the 1870s to the 1910s. This set includes transcriptions of five acts of Congress, tables, and an essay analyzing the data.

The third set includes 111 documents on the little-known Rogue River War of 1855 in Oregon, the reservations set up for Indian survivors, and the allotment of one of these reservations, the Siletz, in 1894. The fourth set provides the California section of an ethnographic compilation from 1952.

This is one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world. Reverend Samuel J. May, an American abolitionist, donated his collection of anti-slavery materials to the Cornell Library in 1870. Following May's lead, other abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain contributed materials. The collection now consists of more than 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, local anti-slavery society newsletters, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Materials date from 1704 to 1942 and cover slavery in the United States and the West Indies, the slave trade, and emancipation. More than 300,000 pages are available for full-text searching. Accompanying the documents are eight links to other collections.