Access to Archival Databases

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Logo, National Archives
Annotation

The National Archives has created this vast database of electronic records (85 million records on the date visited) from federal agencies and from collections of donated historical materials. Search and browse functions extend throughout the database, and the collection can also be browsed by pre-set subject categories or by time spans. All records are electronic texts. There are no scanned images of documents, photographs, or microfilm.

A very small sampling of the records: Ships and passengers who arrived in New York during the Irish Potato Famine, 1846–1851; Red Cross records of WW2 Allied POWs; descriptive indexes of flood photographs from FEMA (1989–2004); helicopter air sorties flown in Vietnam (1970–1975); documentation from the Historic American Buildings Survey (1933–1997); and records about worker-initiated strikes and employed-initiated lockouts (1953–1981).

Official Documents
NARA
Text
General
All
Health & Medicine
Immigration
Labor
Mid-Atlantic
Midwestern States
Military History
New England
Politics
Southern States
Western States

History's Most Famous Duel

Description

Colonial Williamsburg's Mark Schneider describes the duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, resulting in Hamilton's death. Schneider also looks at the other aspects of duel etiquette and talks about several unusual duels, including a duel between a murderer and a dog.

Also check out this slideshow reenacting the duel between John Daly Burke and Felix Coquebert.

The Slave Trade

Description

Bill White, Executive Producer and Director of Educational Program Development at Colonial Williamsburg, discusses the range of the slave trade and its importance to the colonial and global economy, as well as Colonial Wiliamsburg's efforts to educate on the slave trade and slavery in general.

Historical Rivalry

Description

Jim Axtell, the College of William and Mary's William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities, discusses possible reasons why many people mistakenly believe that Plymouth was founded before Jamestown; and looks at what might be required for Jamestown to assume prominence in popular memory.

Maine Memory Network

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Photo, Percival Procter Baxter, Age 10, 1886
Annotation

This site has two primary goals: to serve as a resource center for Maine history, and to assist classroom teachers as they teach American and Maine history. The site provides a search engine for its 5,700 primary sources (photographs, artwork, and documents), while the 34 online exhibits cover subjects including the 20th Maine regiment in the Civil War, Irish immigration, and Maine during the Revolutionary War.

Particularly interesting is My Album, where visitors can select, save, and arrange photographs and add text. Albums can be viewed in a slideshow or shared with other visitors through email or by storing them in a publicly accessible folder (users must register and give personal information to use this feature).

In addition to the nine lesson plans for teachers, there is a Community Gallery, where visitors can view 15 exhibits created by elementary, middle, and high school students posted for public viewing.

Maps
Official Documents
Paintings and Prints
Photographs
Maine
Images
Colonization & Settlement, 1585-1763
Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present
New England

Causing the Civil War

Question

Was economic difference—manufacturing in the North and slave-driven agriculture in the South—the primary cause of the Civil War?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks have traditionally taught that incompatibility between northern and southern economies caused the Civil War. Everything else was tied to that economic difference, anchored by cotton.

Source Excerpt

Census data from 1860 shows farms, manufacturing, and cities in the North and the South, as well as the location of slaves and cotton in southern states, all of which challenge the notion of a purely agricultural South and industrialized North.

Historian Excerpt

The Civil War was fought for many reasons, not solely or even primarily because of the growing importance of cotton on southern farms. Moving away from economic differences and cotton as simplistic causes leads to a more accurate, and far more interesting, understanding of the causes of the Civil War.

Abstract

For years, textbook authors have contended that economic difference between North and South was the primary cause of the Civil War. The northern economy relied on manufacturing and the agricultural southern economy depended on the production of cotton. The desire of southerners for unpaid workers to pick the valuable cotton strengthened their need for slavery. The industrial revolution in the North did not require slave labor and so people there opposed it. The clash brought on the war.

Economic divergence is certainly one of the reasons for the Civil War, but neither the major one nor the only one. Many factors brought about the war. Focusing only on different economies would be like arguing that one professional football team will always win because it has taller players.

The true causes of the Civil War are downright intriguing and just as complex as the conflict itself.

A Train of Disasters: Puritan Reaction to New England Crisis of 1680-90s

Description

The Library of Congress Webcasts description:

"From the 1680-1690s, Puritan New England underwent political and cultural transformations that would eventually turn it from a Puritan 'covenanted society'—virtually independent of the mother country—into a much more open and secular royal province. The main political events that shaped the crisis and transformations alike are the establishment of a royal Dominion of New England in 1686 and its downfall in the bloodless Boston 'revolution' of 1689, King William's War with the French and their Algonquin allies and, most notorious of all, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Studying a group of texts, written by political and spiritual elite, Dmitry Galtsin focuses on how the Puritan colonies reacted to the turbulent decade, and how they saw it in a process of divinely ordained history."

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