Visitors to this site can view 76 portraits of prominent Americans, drawn from the Gallery's collections. The paintings are arranged in chronological order, from the 1720s to the 1990s. Featured artists include famous 18th and 19th century portraitists Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent, as well as more abstract 20th century artists like Marguerite Zorath and Alex Katz. The wide variety of subjects includes Benjamin Franklin, popular music icon Michael Jackson, 20th century dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and Cherokee statesman Sequoyah. A brief (200-250 word) biography of the subject accompanies each portrait, along with the artist's name (if known), the year painted, the medium, and accession information. For those interested in American portraiture from colonial times to the present, this site provides a sampler of changing styles and subjects.

This site provides access to almost 8,000 documents publicizing and promoting some of the 4,500 performers who appeared on the Chautauqua circuit. Circuit performers included international cookery experts, Helen Keller, Jiujutsu masters, lecturers on Korea in the 1950s, and 12 different yodeling troupes. The pamphlets were printed between 1904 and the early 1960s, but many are undated. Each document, from one to 20 pages, is illustrated and can be viewed either by individual pages or downloaded as a PDF file. A 1,000-word essay introduces visitors to the Chautauqua phenomenon. Visitors may search the site by subject, keyword, or name. The site also contains finding aids for a larger collection of Chautauqua materials housed at the University of Iowa and links to four other sites about Chautauqua and four sites about the history of entertainment in the U.S. A bibliography of 12 books and articles on the history of Chautauqua is provided, but the site does not provide any background information about the performers. The site will be a delightful resource for historians of popular culture, entertainment, publicity, and the Chautauqua circuit.

A collection of 10 essays on "the modern American city as a space of representation," using New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the years between the 1870s and 1930s as focal points for interdisciplinary explorations. The essays, originally presented at the 1999 conference "New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Cultures and Representation," run from 3,000 to 12,000 words in length, include approximately 100 photographs and address topics such as the urban novel, Harlem sidewalk photographs, urban perception in the fiction of W. D. Howells, urban electronic history, how the physical redefinition of Chicago in the 1890s "presaged and enabled the virtual city of a century later," and how public art in New York and Los Angeles represented the cities and their inhabitants.

The 3Cities Project, based in the departments of American and Canadian Studies at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham, has also produced the electronic book City Sites, which offers an additional 10 multimedia essays on New York and Chicago (see separate "History Matters" entry for a detailed description of this component site).

Highly theoretical and intellectually challenging, these sites will be valuable to those studying urban history, human geography, cultural representations, and societal consequences of the transformation to modernity in American cities.

This American Memory website traces the history of the Upper Midwest (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) from the 17th century to the early 20th century, through 138 volumes drawn from the Library of Congress General Collection and the Rare Books and Special Collection Division. Selected works include first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, and colonial archival documents that depict the region's land and resources, cross-cultural encounters, experiences of pioneers and missionaries, soldiers, immigrants, reformers, growth of communities, and development of local culture and society. Each work is available in full-text transcription or page image, and is accompanied by notes giving the title, author, publication information, and a 300–350 word summary of the contents.

The site also offers a 2,000-word essay on the history of the Upper Midwest that covers the discovery, exploration, settlement, and development of the region from pre-contact to the early 20th century; a regional map dated 1873; links to more than 40 related websites; and a bibliography of nine related works, three of which are ideal for younger readers. The site can be searched by keyword and browsed by author, subject, and title. For those interested in the history of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region, this site offers some informative resources.

This American Memory site features more than 47,000 pieces of sheet music, drawn from the Music Division of the Library of Congress, registered for copyright from 1870 to 1885. The collection includes popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books, instructional materials, and band and orchestral music. Each featured work includes notes on the publisher, composer, publication, subjects, medium, and images of the music, from the cover through the score. Some selections also include transcripts of the lyrics.

Three special presentations feature selected portions of the collection. "A Decade of Music in America, 1870–79" offers a lengthy (5,000-word) essay on the most important themes, composers, musicians, and performers of that decade. It features more than 50 links to the works of key figures such as John Philip Sousa and Will S. Hays, and audio clips and lyrics of popular works like George Frederick Root's "Grandfather's Clock" and James M. Bland's "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny."

The presentation entitled In Performance—Choral Works from the Collection offers 12 audio files of music selected to represent the typical style of four-part writing for hymns and other choral pieces of that era. The audio files were recorded for the online collection in 1998 by the "Music for the Nation" Singers, a group of Library of Congress staff members. An image of the cover, a brief (150-word) description of the piece's theme and background, and information on the composer accompanies each of these selections.

Greatest Hits, 1870-1885: Variety Music Cavalcade is a listing of the most popular works for each year between 1870 and 1885, with information on the composer, date of composition and publication, and links to more information and audio clips when available. Annual lists, ranging from 5 to 12 entries, come from Julius Mattfield's "Variety Music Cavalcade" 1620–1969: A Chronology of Vocal and Instrumental Music Popular in the United States (1971).

The site also boasts an 18-work bibliography of scholarly works on music in this period. Though the time period covered in this online collection is rather narrow, the selection and variety of music represented is enormous; and the site provides an exhaustive introduction into the music of the period as well as a glimpse into the popular culture of the late 19th century.

This American Memory site records the mapping of North America and the Caribbean from 1750 to 1789 through images of maps in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Most items on the site are also included among the 2,000 images in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections of the Library of Congress, compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee (1981).

Currently the site contains roughly 500 images. Maps and charts will be added to the online exhibit gradually. Selected images include original manuscript drawings by famous mapmakers like Samuel Holland, John Hills, and John Montresor; maps from the personal collections of men like Admiral Richard Howe and the Comte de Rochambeau; and large groups of maps by three major 18th-century London publishers: Thomas Jeffreys, William Faden, and Joseph Frederick Wallet des Barres.

The online collection allows visitors to compare editions, styles, and techniques of mapmakers from Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Italy, and the United States; and to follow the development of specific maps from the manuscript sketch to the finished, printed version. Each image is accompanied by descriptive notes (100–150 words) and a list of the medium, date and place of publication, condition, call number, and repository. The site also includes a 1,500-word essay on mapmaking during the American Revolutionary era and links to 12 other American Memory sites containing related materials.

Visitors can browse this site by geographic location, subject, creator, and title, and can search the site by keyword. This site is ideal for students and teachers interested in mapmaking in the 18th century and in exploring how maps helped to illustrate American culture.

Although he was not the first president to be filmed for motion pictures, Theodore Roosevelt was the first to have his life chronicled through extensive use of the then-new medium. This site, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, offers 104 films depicting events in Roosevelt's life, from the Spanish-American War in 1898 to his death in 1919. The Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection provided 87 of the films and the remainder came from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recording Sound Division.

The films include scenes of Roosevelt with world figures, politicians, monarchs, friends, and family members. The films are not accompanied by lengthy explanatory text; they include only a brief, 10–15 word caption describing their contents.

Special presentations on this site include: a film chronology offering a timeline with 150–200 word outlines of each period in Roosevelt's life covered in film; a text-based timeline from Roosevelt's birth in 1858 to his death in 1919; "T.R. on Film," a roughly 750-word scholarly essay; four sound recordings, with transcriptions, Roosevelt made for Edison company in 1912 in which he stated his progressive political views; and an image of "Theodore Roosevelt: The Picture Man," a 2,000-word article from a 1910 The Moving Picture World magazine.

See also the 250-word description of the collection, a 15-work selected bibliography on Theodore Roosevelt and motion pictures, and links to four related websites. A "Learn More About It" section includes 12 other Library of Congress special presentations and related collection sites for those who wish to learn more about Roosevelt and his times. This site is a good resource for learning about Theodore Roosevelt and the United States around the turn of the 20th century.

This colorful Library of Congress American Memory site brings together selected items from two American Folklife collections, the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection and the "All American Quilt Contest" series, sponsored by Good Housekeeping magazine and Coming Home, a division of the direct mail retailer Land's End.

The Blue Ridge Collection consists of 229 photographs and 181 interviews recorded in 1978 with six Virginia and North Carolina quiltmakers. These items illustrate the art of quiltmaking within the context of daily life in Appalachia. The Quilt Contest materials, from contests held in 1992, 1994, and 1996, include images of approximately 180 prize-winning quilts from across the U.S. The quilts represent a wide variety of styles, traditions, and materials used in the practice of the craft.

The exhibit is divided into three sections. Speaking of Quilts offers an essay (2,000 words) on the making of these two collections and the tradition of quiltmaking. Blue Ridge Quilts features the audio files of interviews and photographs of the six Appalachian quilters practicing their craft, along with a 500-word biography of each featured quiltmaker. Each audio clip is accompanied by brief (150-word) descriptive notes. The Quilt Contest section includes a roughly 2,000-word essay describing the contests and featuring a gallery of images of 180 prizewinning quilts.

The site offers a handy glossary of more than 50 terms and a selected bibliography of approximately 60 monographs and periodicals related to the history and craft of quiltmaking. It can be searched by keyword and browsed by quiltmakers and subjects. This beautiful site is useful for students researching American and Appalachian culture, not to mention those who simply love the art of quiltmaking.

This site, part of the Library of Congress American Memory project, features over 1,500 full-text images of 19th-century books digitized by the University of Michigan as part of the "Making of America" project. Books in the collection primarily date from 1850 to 1880 and cover such subjects as education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, science and technology, and poetry.

The collection is divided into seven general themes: Civil War, Slavery and Abolition, Religion, Education, Self-Help and Self-Improvement, Travel and Westward Expansion, and Poetry. Each section opens with a 200-word descriptive essay, and each book featured on the site is accompanied by notes on the author, full title of the work, date and place of publication, and the publisher.

The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject, author, and title. The site is ideal for exploring late 19th-century literature and popular culture.

Part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, this site offers full-text transcriptions of 23 popular 19th-century periodicals digitized by the Cornell University Library and the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. Among the periodicals on this site are literary and political magazines, as well as journals like Scientific American, Manufacturer and Builder, Garden and Forest, and the North American Review.

Each periodical is accompanied by very brief (10–15 word) notes on the name and location of the publisher and the years and volumes covered. Each periodical's full text is searchable by keyword and phrase.

A special presentation offers roughly 750-word essay on the historical background of Garden and Forest by Sheila Connor, the Horticultural Research Archivist at the Arnold Arboretum. There are also links to five related American Memory resources. The site's broad sampling of periodicals provides an easily navigated source for articles and editorials on a number of 19th-century political, cultural, and social issues.