In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson owned the largest personal book collection in the U.S. After the Capitol and Congressional Library burned during the War of 1812, Jefferson allowed Congress to purchase his collection, which totaled more than 5,000 works and became the core of the Library of Congress's current collection. This website provides basic information on, and several images of, 41 of these books. They are divided by themes designated by Jefferson: "Memory," "Reason," and "Imagination," corresponding roughly to history, philosophy, and fine arts. In addition, visitors can explore lengthy selections from three of these works through the "Interactives" section: Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and The Builder's Dictionary, an 18th-century handbook on building design and construction. This section features a powerful zoom function, allowing visitors to view the original text in detail, as well as a transcription function. Useful for those interested in political and intellectual culture in the early republic, as well as the history of the book.

The Platte River begins in the Rocky Mountains and flows the length of central Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri River to the east. This website provides 40 diverse documents about the history, geology, and hydrology of the Platte River, ranging in date from an 1843 report by the U.S. Secretary of War entitled "An Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains," to a 302-page report published in 1993 by the Nebraska Geological Survey entitled, "Flat Water: A History of Nebraska and Its Water." The majority of documents date to the 1970s, many of which were published by government agencies such as the Missouri River Basin Commission or the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, detailing investigations into ground water usage and water resources management. There are also several documents on legal issues surrounding water rights and outdoor recreation. These materials are accompanied by 13 links to websites offering information about water resources, including the University of Nebraska's Water Center and Water Sciences Laboratory, as well as the Missouri River Basin Project, created to plan for the conservation and use of Missouri River water resources. Especially useful for those interested in the history of development projects surrounding water resources.

[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.

Funded by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as a project of the U.S. Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, this exhibit focuses on depictions of slaves on Confederate currency. The project treats currency as a way to interpret the culture and identity of the southern people during the Civil War. The site offers over 70 images of Confederate Currency printed by individual southern states and provides roughly 500-word narratives of the general history and economic environment of the Confederate states as background to the interpretation of the images. The images are grouped both by state of origin and thematically, in seven categories that describe the kinds of activities that slaves are depicted performing on the money: Individuals with Cotton; Individuals with Assorted Tasks; Field Scenes; Stylistic Scenes; Post-Civil War Scenes; Sugar Plantations; and Transportation. There are 15-20 word captions with each image describing the currency on which the image appeared. There is a list of ten Web links and a bibliography of over 50 scholarly books and articles on the Confederate economy and currency. This site is useful for researching the economic history of the southern states as well as for learning about southern identity during the Civil War.

Curated by Carl Smith, Professor of English and American Studies at Northwestern University in a collaborative effort with the Chicago Historical Society, this rich site provides an online exhibit commemorating one of the most notorious incidents in late-nineteenth-century labor history, the Haymarket Affair. On May 4, 1886, two workers were killed in a struggle between police and locked-out union members at the McCormick Reaper factory. On May 5, 1886, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a group of Chicago policemen sent to control the ensuing protest, killing seven. This site is an online exhibit of selected materials from the Chicago Historical Society's Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. Organized in the form of a drama, the site contains a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue, all arranged chronologically.

The prologue, "Whither America," covers the period between Chicago's Great Fire in 1871 through 1880, with emphasis on the railroad strike of 1877 and other developments in the radicalization of American workers. Act I, "Subterranean Fire," discusses the widening class divisions and resulting rising level of violence in America. Act II, "Let Your Tragedy be Enacted Here," recounts the demonstrations of 1886, the protestors' meeting, and the bombing. Act III, "Toils of the Law," covers the legal proceedings beginning with the "red scare" and police "witch hunt" following the bombing and continuing through the sentencing of the convicted anarchists in October 1886. Act IV, "Voice of People," relates the legal and public appeals ending with the executions of 1887. Act V, "Raising the Dead," moves from the funerals of the executed men to Governor John P. Altgeld's pardon of the surviving defendants in 1893.

The epilogue, "Drama Without End," deals with the contested heritage of Haymarket, including centennial events in 1986. Each part consists of a 500-word interpretive essay and topical sections including a total of over 50 visual materials, such as images of artifacts, photographs, and engravings of the people involved in the Haymarket Affair, and over 30 facsimiles of selected manuscripts and printed materials. Each "Act" contains a final section that includes full-text transcriptions of documents from the Haymarket Digital Collection. The site also includes virtual tours of the Haymarket area and of Forest Home Cemetery, where a monument to the convicted men is located, and audio recordings of contemporary labor songs. This site is beautifully contextualized, well-presented, and easy to navigate. It contains a keyword search engine as well as a table of contents.

Selected material from the papers of the great American composer, conductor, and music educator Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), including 85 photographs, 177 scripts from Bernstein's Young People's Concerts television programs, 74 scripts from Thursday Evening Previews, and more than 1,100 pieces of correspondence, with an emphasis on letters between Bernstein and his mentors Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, his family, and his teacher, assistant, and longtime friend Helen Coates. Users interested in Bernstein's renowned musicals can locate 27 letters on West Side Story, 12 on Candide, and nine pertaining to Trouble in Tahiti. Provides a finding aid for the complete collection, housed in the Library of Congress's Music Division; the 6,000-word essay, "Professor Lenny" by Joseph Horowitz, originally published in the New York Review of Books; a chronology of Bernstein's life; and a 27-title bibliography. With formerly obscure material concerning Bernstein's social activism, this collection will be of primary interest to those studying his musical works, ideas, and influences, and more generally 20th-century American music and musical theater.

This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.

This collection presents 1,305 pieces of sheet music composed by and about African Americans, ranging chronologically from antebellum minstrel shows to early 20th-century African-American musical comedies. Includes works by renowned black composers and lyricists, such as James A. Bland, Will Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bert Williams, George Walker, Alex Rogers, Jesse A. Shipp, Bob Cole, James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, and Eubie Blake. A "Special Presentation: The Development of an African-American Musical Theatre, 1865-1910" provides a chronological overview that allows users to explore "the emergence of African-American performers and musical troupes, first in blackface minstrelsy, and later at the beginnings of the African-American musical stage in the late 1890s."

In addition, sheet music can be studied to examine racial depictions, both visually, on sheet music covers, and in lyrics; styles of music, such as ragtime, jazz, and spirituals; and a variety of topics of interest to popular audiences, including gender relations, urbanization, and wars. Includes a useful 80-title bibliography and 15-title discography. Much of the material is disturbing due to its heavy dependence on racial caricatures; however, students can gain insight into racial attitudes through an informed use of this site.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act (1867), which prohibited a president from unilaterally removing any officials for whom Senate approval was required for appointment. Part of Professor Douglas Linder's Famous American Trials website, this exhibit examines Johnson's impeachment trial and his narrow escape from conviction and removal from office. Linder provides a 1500-word account of the trial and includes a chronology of events in Johnson's presidency, from his election as Abraham Lincoln's vice president in 1864 to his death in 1875. The site includes background information on the process of impeachment, such as the relevant articles of the United States Constitution and James Madison's notes on the framers' Constitutional Convention debates over the impeachment process.

The site also includes full-text verions of the Articles of Impeachment against Johnson, the Senate's rules of procedure for the impeachment trial, and the Senate trial record, including all arguments, documentary evidence, testimony, and the final vote. There are also excerpts from the Congressional Globe of the opinions of six senators, both for and against impeachment, and a map that shows the regional splits in the votes for and against impeachment. The site also provides links to the Harper's Weekly account of the trial, including biographies of 28 key figures in the trial, 90 editorials, 47 news articles and briefs, 47 illustrations, 27 political cartoons, and one illustrated satire. A brief bibliography includes six scholarly books, one video, and two internet sites with information on the Johnson impeachment trial. The Harper's Weekly section also provides a link to a "Teaching Impeachment" exercise in which students can simulate an impeachment trial. This rather complicated role play exercise requires considerable research and strong analytical skills, but would be accessible for very advanced high school and survey classes. This is an ideal site for researching constitutional history, Reconstruction, and the presidency.

Since 1831, the Virginia Historical Society has been collecting materials documenting the lives of Virginians. This website provides information for researchers and the broader public interested in visiting the Society's headquarters in Richmond, including a collections catalog, finding guides to specific collections, and information about physical exhibitions. The website also includes significant digital holdings. While only five percent of the collection has been digitized, this represents more than 5,000 items, grouped into 14 digital collections. These collections include maps, drawings, paintings, postcards, prints and engravings, 19th century photography, as well as topical collections on African Americans, the Civil War, the Retreat Hospital in Richmond, Virginia's manufacturing of arms, the 1852 Virginia General Assembly Composite Portrait, the Reynolds Metal Company (forthcoming), the Garden Club of Virginia (forthcoming), and selections from the Society's ongoing exhibition, The Story of Virginia. The entire collections catalog is keyword searchable, and includes an option to limit the search to digitized materials.