Providing access to social science data for member colleges and universities, this website presents data that covers a range of sociological and political areas. Issues include census enumerations; urban and community studies; conflict, violence, and wars; economic behavior; legal systems; legislative bodies; mass political behavior and attitudes; and organizational behavior.

While much of the site emphasizes the late 20th century, data sets such as "Historical and Contemporary Electoral Processes" and "1790–1960 Censuses" will be useful for historical research. Searching is available according to a controlled vocabulary of names, subjects, and geographical terms. There are 10 special topic archives with data geared to health, education, aging, criminal justice, and substance abuse and mental health concerns. A "data use tutorial" and links to related sites may be useful.

This collection of more than 100 primary texts, essays, biographical sketches, obituaries, book reviews, and partially annotated links explores the cultural, intellectual, and political trends of the 1950s. Organized alphabetically and according to lesson plans, this eclectic collection of readings is structured around a few landmark texts and topics, including McCarthyism and anticommunism, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960), William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), feminism, Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), and conformity in universities.

Materials include substantial excerpts from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (1959) and the Encyclopedia of the American Left, in addition to retrospective analyses of the postwar period.

More than 2,300 covers of American "dime novels," and their British counterparts, the "penny dreadfuls," are available on this website. In addition, the full text of nine books and a series entitled Secret Service (1899–1912) are available.

The site offers "guided tours" with images and essays of approximately 1,500 words on print processes and dime novel covers. The full-text selections include stories featuring such heroes as Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Deadwood Dick, Fred Fearnot, and Calamity Jane. A full-text search is available only for those affiliated with Stanford University.

The site provides basic information on each title and indexes books according to subject, genre, setting, intended audience age and gender, and type of graphic material. Subject indexing of cover iconography is especially valuable. Listings are organized according to depictions of ethnicity/nationality, occupation, types of places, types of sports and recreations, types of violence, and types of gestures and actions classified according to gender of character portrayed.

The papers of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), more than 4,600 items, are presented on this website. Materials include family papers, general correspondence, laboratory notebooks from 1891 to 1893 and 1910, scientific notebooks, blueprints, journals, articles, lectures, and photographs.

Writings address a range of subjects, including the telephone, deaf education, experiments with aeronautics, and other inventions. There are more than 100 letters to and from Helen Keller, family correspondence, and material on life in Washington, DC and Nova Scotia, where Bell had a summer home and conducted experiments. Ten "collection highlights," including notebook pages, document his first success with the telephone, essays on Bell's career and on the telephone, an annotated timeline, a 19-title bibliography, and a list of related sites.

These scanned images come from more than 2,700 pieces of sheet music published between 1852 and 1900 in California. The website also includes more than 800 illustrated covers, 48 audio selections, eight video clips of singers, and a handful of programs, posters, playbills, periodicals, catalogs, broadsheets, books on music, and maps. More than 350 items contain advertising.

Explanatory essays of 1,000 to 2,000 words in length provide general information on music from more than a dozen ethnic cultures, and with reference to specific topics, including buildings, composers, dance, disasters, gender, mining, performers, politics, product ads, railroads, and sports. Provides 14 links to additional sheet music collections and reference sources. These resources are valuable to those studying popular culture, California history, music history, advertising, and depictions of ethnicity, gender, and race in 19th-century America.

This bilingual website (English and French) explores the history of the French presence in North America from the early 16th century to the end of the 19th century through more than 360 manuscripts, books, maps, and other documents. Each thematic presentation—"Exploration and Knowledge," "The Colonies," "Franco-Indian Alliances," "Imperial Struggles," and "The French and North America after the Treaty of Paris"—includes a title exhibit and additional exhibits that highlight particular items in the collection. Materials can also be browsed in the collections section.

A timeline (1515–1804) organizes events in French America by explorations, colonization and development, and conflicts and diplomacy, and places them in the context of events in France. Additionally, there are eight descriptive maps that show various Indian groups in contact with the French and the changes in political boundaries in North America from before 1763 to the era of the Louisiana Purchase.

This large, attractive site provides high-quality material on American history for historians and teachers. The collection contains more than 60,000 "rare and important" American historical documents, images, and objects from 1493 to 1998; about 10,000 of these are available online. Authors include George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln.

Each week an annotated, transcribed document is featured, and an archive contains 80 past featured documents. "Treasures of the Collection" offers 24 highlighted documents and images. Six online exhibits cover topics such as Alexander Hamilton, the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln, and topics such as freedom and battles. Podcasts with historians address issues such as Presidential history and the Great Depression. Additional resources include links to historical documents, published scholarship, and general history resources on the web.

These facsimile images of measured drawings, photographs, and written documentation cover 35,000 significant historic sites dating from the 17th to the 20th century. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) started in 1933 as a work relief program and became a permanent part of the National Park Service the following year to document "our architectural heritage of buildings," in the words of project founder Charles E. Peterson. The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) was established in 1969 to similarly survey engineering works and industrial sites.

For each structure, the site provides from one to ten drawings, from one to 30 photographs, and from one to 50 pages of HABS text detailing the structure's history, significance, and current physical condition. The collection displays building types and engineering technologies from a farmhouse to a pickle factory, from churches to the Golden Gate Bridge.

A collection of business plans and planning information, this archive documents the "Birth of the Dot Com Era." Documents can be browsed (free registration required) by alphabetical listing of companies, document type, market sector, or market audience, or the archive can be searched by company name. An advanced search option is also available.

Currently, there are 2,445 companies in the archive with one or more documents and more than 3,400 archived documents. Each company record includes a brief description of the company, historical information on the company (if available), and related documents. "What We Can Learn" offers three articles on the kinds of observations we can extract from the dot com boom and bust. "Research Corner" offers tips on using the archive in the classroom, announcements, and other project news. Of particular interest are the entries on guidelines and recommendations for studying companies and for using the archive.