Founded in 1846 and chartered in 1853, the Wisconsin State Historical Society is the oldest American historical society to receive continuous public funding. This website provides a host of online collections containing thousands of documents and images addressing Wisconsin's social, political, and cultural history, drawn from the Historical Society's collections.

Highlights include full-text access to 80 histories of Wisconsin counties, and 1,000 more articles, memoirs, interviews, and essays on Wisconsin history and archaeology first published between 1850 and 1920; thousands of articles from the Wisconsin Magazine of History; and hundreds of objects form the Society's Museum, including moccasins, dolls, quilts, ceramics, paintings, and children's clothing.

Other objects can be viewed at the website's Online Exhibits section, which includes objects from exhibits on Presidential elections, Wisconsin's Olympic speed skaters, the Milwaukee Braves, Jewish women, and family labor in Milwaukee after World War II.

The website also provides a vast collection of images available through Wisconsin Historical Images, including photographs, drawings, and prints relating to both regional history, as well as more national histories of 19th-century exploration, mass communications, and social action movements.

The largest public archive of Ulysses S. Grant correspondence to date, the collection includes letters, research notes, artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia. Topics cover Grant's childhood, military career, and experiences in the Civil War through his presidency and post-White House years.

The bulk of the collection is made up of 31 full-text searchable, digitized volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John Y. Simon, these volumes comprise thousands of letters spanning from 1837, just before Grant left for the Military Academy at West Point, to his death in 1885. The volumes also contain photographs, a chronology of the correspondence, and annotations.

In addition to the extensive Papers, the collection provides a sampling of digitized material from the U.S. Grant Association, including 14 multi-page compilations and 11 political cartoons from sources such as Harper's Weekly and Puck. Items include detailed, linked metadata to assist in tracking source provenance and connecting to related sources. Additionally, all items are keyword searchable and can be browsed by format, date, or title.

Political cartoonist Herbert Block's career spanned more than 70 years, over the course of which he produced more than 14,000 cartoons and won three Pulitzer Prizes in 1942, 1954, and 1979. He spent the majority of his career at the Washington Post, where he critiqued Democrats and Republicans alike, and covered topics from McCarthyism (a term he coined in a cartoon published in 1950) and the Nixon Administration to Chernobyl, the Vietnam War, and the Yugoslav Wars in the mid-1990s. This website presents 32 of his cartoons, relating to seven prominent themes in his work: the environment, ethics, extremism, voting, the Middle East, privacy and security, and war. Each cartoon is enlargeable and downloadable, and accompanied by a brief description of the context surrounding its creation and publication, as well as several sketches drawn by Herblock made in preparation for drawing the cartoon. Useful for those interested in U.S. political history and foreign relations, as well as the history of editorial cartoons.

This website provides access to more than 5,700 documents surrounding Wilson and Wilson's family's personal life and work, including letters, speeches, notes, political cartoons, newspaper articles, and personal papers. All documents are keyword searchable and browseable by several topics, including debate, health, League of Nations, Paris Peace Conference, sport, and World War I. Much of Wilson's personal correspondence is included here, documenting his discussions with correspondents such as his wives Ellen Axson Wilson and Edith Bolling Wilson, and personal aide Cary Grayson. Featured documents include several of Wilson's most famous speeches: "Peace Without Victory" on the eve of World War I, "Fourteen Points for Peace," and "Women's Suffrage Amendment" in 1918. Useful both for those interested in Wilson's life and work, as well as those interested in early 20th-century U.S. political and social history, and foreign policy.

[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This vast archive includes many documents and reports produced by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and published between 1817 and 1980, for a total of more than 355,000 items. These items include 48,000 maps, 9,000 illustrations, thousands of reports, and numerous records of committee hearings and floor proceedings. All items are full-text searchable and can be browsed by subject, such as education, economics, food and agriculture, health, Indian affairs, armed forces and conflicts, environment and natural resources, and social issues. Within each of these broad categories, there are hundreds of subject headings, such as "animal welfare" (83 items), "alien labor" (306 items), and "ordnance testing" (353 items). The "Indian Affairs" category, for example, presents thousands of items on agencies and organizations relating to Indian affairs, Indian reservations, treaties, names of Indian tribes, as well as documents relating to hundreds of laws and supreme court cases. There is also a bill number search, an alphabetical list of names of all acts of Congress, and a listing of all documents by U.S. Congress session. All documents can be downloaded in PDF format. In addition, a separate browse feature entitled "Serial Set Maps" facilitates access to thousands of maps from counties and cities across the country. Many of these date to the Civil War-era or later and include images of forts and depictions of field operations. Readex plans to expand coverage through 1994.

[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This archive provides full-text access to more than 350,000 issues of more than 700 newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia. The majority of the collection focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and sheds light onto a wide range of political, social, cultural, and economic issues in both cities and smaller communities. The New York collection, for example, boasts 157 titles. While 80 of these were published in New York City, the collection also includes newspapers published in Troy, Utica, Catskill, and Ithaca. Massachusetts (137 titles), Pennsylvania (84 titles), Connecticut (47 titles), and Vermont (41 titles) are also well represented, followed by New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Rhode Island. Keyword searching capabilities combined with extensive browsing options allow both experienced researchers and those largely unfamiliar with early American history to make good use of the resources available here. Browsing options include dates and eras, article types (including news; poetry/songs; advertisements; birth, death, and marriage notices; cartoons and illustrations; maps; letters; and election returns), languages, places of publication, and newspaper titles. Newspapers are displayed as full-page scans, enabled with detailed zoom capabilities, and can be downloaded in .pdf format.