This website—a small portion of the larger Documenting the American South project—presents the full text of more than 130 works of literature by more than 75 authors, published between the mid-1600s and 1920. Notable works include the first history of Virginia, written in 1673 by House of Burgesses member Robert Beverley, poems by Edgar Allen Poe, Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up From Slavery, and several of Mark Twain's and Kate Chopin's works. Other works include collections of slave songs, sermons, and narratives published in the mid-1800s, including Frederick Douglass's famous narrative, several works addressing Ku Klux Klan activities, and many lesser-known works of fiction. Though there is no built-in search feature, all works are presented as lengthy text files and can be searched using a computer's "Find" function. Users new to Southern history may want to turn first to the "Introduction," which provides brief essays on many aspects of Southern history, literature, and culture, including early colonial-era literature, the genres of biography and autobiography, black literature, the Civil War, travel writing, folklore, and humor.

The 580 maps of more than 80 South Carolina towns and cities in this archive reveal urban landscapes and the locations of businesses, mills, colleges, depots, and other buildings between 1884 and 1923. The collection includes 232 unpublished, hand-drafted maps from the years 1899 to 1937. All maps are displayed with original color coding. Users can zoom in and out of maps and can pan right, left, up, or down to examine details. Every map is accompanied by bibliographic data. The full collection can be browsed or the user can choose to browse just the unpublished maps. The collection can be searched by city, year of publication, and county. The maps provide many details about mills and are particularly useful in revealing spatial relationships and location of railroad lines. There is also a link to the Union List of Sanborn and other fire insurance maps. An extremely useful resource for those researching the business or urban history of South Carolina in the decades around 1900.

Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.

Presents approximately 2,240 Civil War maps and charts and 76 atlases and sketchbooks. The materials, primarily Union and Confederate "reconnaissance, sketch, coastal, and theater-of-war maps which depict troop activities and fortifications," also include commercially-produced maps. Provides 210 maps and three atlases belonging to General William Tecumseh Sherman, and 341 maps and sketchbooks prepared by Confederate topographical engineer Major Jedediah Hotchkiss. A "Special Presentation" offers a 10,000-word essay illustrated with 17 photographs and maps on the history of mapping the war. Maps can be viewed with the Library of Congress's excellent map viewing software. Very useful for Civil War specialists and those interested in historical geography.

Examples of brass band music from the 1850s through the 19th century. "Bands of this kind served in the armies of both the North and the South during the Civil War, in the field as well as for the entertainment of the officers." Including both printed and manuscript music, the collection features more than 700 musical compositions, as well as eight full-score modern editions, 19 recorded examples of brass band music in performance, and a gallery of 37 photographs taken of bands during the Civil War.

Also provides a 10,000-word "Special Presentation" entitled, "The American Brass Band Movement: A Historical Overview," that includes 15 drawings and photographs. Useful primarily to music specialists, the site may also be of interest to those studying the popular culture of the Civil War era.

Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, was a legendary fiddler of traditional Virginia Appalachian folk tunes. In 1966 and 1967, folklorist Alan Jabbour recorded Reed's music, and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress makes 184 of these sound recordings available through this American Memory online exhibit. The sound recordings are accompanied by 200-250-word descriptions of the history and origins of each musical piece, along with information regarding the features, genre, instrumentals, performers, location, and date of each recording. The site also includes 19 pages of field notes and images and transcripts listing the songs, including bullet-point notes about Reed's life and musical contributions. There are 69 transcriptions of musical pieces with roughly 150-word descriptive notes on the tune histories and musical features. A 3500-word essay about Reed's life and influence on fiddle music includes eight photographs. A bibliography lists over 200 related scholarly and journalistic publications on Reed's music and folk music in general, and the site also includes a list of approximately 70 musical terms. This site is ideal for investigating American folk culture and music, as well as the 20th-century resurgence of fiddle music.

From 1937 to 1942, members of the Florida Writers Project, the Florida Music Project, and the Joint Center on Folk Arts of the Works Project Administration documented the wide variety of cultures throughout Florida through the folk songs and folk tales of the African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic peoples living in Florida. The American Memory Project at the Library of Congress now offers a selection of the multiformat ethnographic field collection that represents these diverse cultures. The online exhibit includes 376 sound recordings of folk songs such as blues, fishing boat and railroad gang work songs, children's songs, dance music, and religious music. Each recording includes descriptive information on the duration of the sound clip, where the piece was performed and the performers involved, brief (10-15 words) special notes about the piece, ethnic group(s) represented, language(s) in which the piece was performed, instrumentation, and when and where the piece was created.

The collection also includes 24 "life history" interviews of Floridians from specific ethnic backgrounds, 65 images and transcripts of correspondence, two recording logs, and 25 transcriptions of song texts. Two 2000-word essays on Florida folklife and the Works Project Administration in Florida help to contextualize the online exhibit. Also included are a bibliography of over 120 scholarly works, a list of 18 related websites, and a 1000-word guide to the ethnic and language groups of Florida. Visitors can browse this site by performer, audio or manuscript title, and geographic location. For those interested in folk life and culture, Florida history, and the variety of WPA projects during the New Deal, this easily navigable site is a good resource.

Designed as both an archive and an online exhibit, this site features 3,457 hand-drawn township maps of Illinois. When the government began surveying in 1803 what would later become Illinois, they divided the land into squares six by six miles (36 square miles) called townships. This site includes a 1,000-word introductory history describing the surveying process and introducing the methods and tools of surveyors. Also included here are the maps, available to researchers and the public. A 1,000-word narrative outlines the role of the United States Surveyor General, and traces the custody of these records through the years.

Visitors use a map of Illinois to locate the region and county of the plat they wish to view, and can pan left and right or zoom in and out. A legend helps users decipher early 19th-century symbols. In addition, the site links to an Illinois state website (Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales), where researchers can search for the first owners of plats. This site is a great place to view original, early-19th-century maps of Illinois.

Offers statistical national economic and financial data in the following 12 categories: interest rates; business/fiscal (including federal debt, receipts and outlays, employment cost index, productivity and cost, and inventories and sales); consumer price indexes; monetary aggregates; commercial banking; employment and population; gross domestic product and components; producer price indexes; exchange rates, balance of payments and trade data; reserves; and daily/weekly financial data. Much of the data was compiled monthly. Periods covered vary according to category; some statistics go back to 1901. Also provides historical and recent statistics for the states of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee. Useful for those studying business and economic history, and for social historians interested in employment trends.

Audio files and song transcriptions of more than 1,000 songs recorded in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas between 1956 and 1976 by Max Hunter, a traveling salesman. The complete collection of 1,594 songs is scheduled to be available by summer 2003. Includes lyrics for all included songs; musical notations for many songs with annotations providing information on how singers phrased certain notes; listings of the name of the singer, and location and date of the recording; and, where relevant, links to variant versions in the collection or similar songs in published sources. No information is offered for composer or lyricist. Users may browse singers and song titles or search titles using keywords. Users may also listen in three formats: RealPlayer, high quality AIFF, and in some cases MIDI. The archival collection includes additional material that may be available online in the future, including "fiddle tunes, jokes, stories, and what Max Hunter called 'visits,' or interviews with the people he was recording." As some of the songs include references to current events woven into verses of traditional lyrics--for example, a version of "Down in the Valley" taped in 1959 situates the singer in the Birmingham, Alabama, jail-- the collection should prove valuable for those studying American culture as well as folk music students.