Created as a companion to a National Public Radio (NPR) documentary on segregation in the South, this website presents thirty audio excerpts from oral history interviews, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and 130 photographs. Materials are arranged in six thematically-organized sections that address legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site’s creators, notes, the interviews display a "marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow." Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The website presents sixteen photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. Also available are audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than ninety additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to nine related sites, and a bibliography.

This is one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world. Reverend Samuel J. May, an American abolitionist, donated his collection of anti-slavery materials to the Cornell Library in 1870. Following May's lead, other abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain contributed materials. The collection now consists of more than 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, local anti-slavery society newsletters, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Materials date from 1704 to 1942 and cover slavery in the United States and the West Indies, the slave trade, and emancipation. More than 300,000 pages are available for full-text searching. Accompanying the documents are eight links to other collections.

Over 6,000 documents from more than 150 FBI files, declassified due to Freedom of Information Act requests, are available here. No contextual information is available concerning individual documents, although file headnotes identify the person or event profiled in short one-sentence to one-paragraph descriptions. Documents, some of which are available in PDF format, have been organized into twenty categories—ranging from Popular Culture to Foreign Counterintelligence, and the Gangster Era to Unexplained Phenomena (such as UFOs and animal mutilations). Although the collection covers a variety of topics, many documents have been heavily censored and are barely legible. Cases from the first half of the 20th century include: the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s; the 1932 Bonus March; the Black Legion of the 1930s; the Young Communist League, 1939–41; and the Daily Worker in the late 1940s and 1950s. More recent cases include the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964; SNCC, beginning in 1964; the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 and 1965; a Black Panther Party chapter beginning in 1969; the Watergate break-in of 1972; the white hate group Posse Comitas in 1973; the Weather Underground in the 1970s; and the Gay Activists Alliance of the 1970s.

More than 1,500 items pertaining to the Civil War are available on this website, such as letters, newspapers, photographs, sketches, etchings, and posters. Manuscript materials include items from the papers of social reformer William Oland Bourne; a newspaper created by Confederate prisoners; three letters by Walt Whitman; and 32 letters by a nurse at a Federal prison camp hospital.

The site contains sketches dealing with the New York City Draft Riot of 1863; drawings of army life by artists working for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper; and a Confederate prisoner's sketchbook. Additional materials include 731 stereographs and more than 70 albumen photographs; approximately 500 envelopes with decorative materials; 29 caricatures by a German immigrant in Baltimore sympathetic to the Confederacy; and 304 posters, most of which were used for recruiting purposes.

These materials examine Depression-era migrant work camps in central California. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) managed the camps that were primarily inhabited by migrants from the rural areas of Oklahoma and nearby states. The collection of materials include 371 audio recordings of songs, interviews, and camp announcements and transcriptions of 113 songs. Print and image materials include 23 photographs, newspaper clippings, and 11 camp newsletters.

Additional materials address the role of the ethnographer, including a Works Progress Administration folk song questionnaire; the field notes and correspondence of Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, the original collectors of the materials; and two published magazine articles by Todd. Topics range from camp court proceedings and personal narratives to square dances and baseball games. The website also includes a bibliography, a background essay, and an essay on the recording expedition. This is a valuable site for the study of Depression-era migrants, their folk traditions, and the documentary impulse of the period.

Willa Cather (1873–1947) wrote 12 novels and numerous works of short fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and is known for her intensive examination of life in the midwestern U.S. This extensive archive is dedicated to her life and work. At its core is a collection of all of her novels, short fiction, journalistic writing, interviews, speeches, and public letters published before 1922. All materials are fully searchable. Notably, both O Pioneers! and My Antonia are accompanied by extensive scholarly notes, historical context, and introductory material. Accompanying her published materials is a collection of 2,054 of Cather's letters (again annotated and fully searchable), more than 600 photographs of Cather and important people and places in her life, audio of Cather's Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, and a short video clip of Cather. Several scholarly articles and a text analysis tool are also available.

This website contains 129 pamphlets, documents, and newsletters produced by or relevant to radical movements. Groups represented by one to 30 documents include the American Indian Movement; Asian Americans; the Black Panthers; the Hollywood Ten; the Ku Klux Klan, the IWW, and the Students for a Democratic Society. Additional situations covered include the Rosenberg case, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro Boys. Additional topics include birth control and the events at Wounded Knee. This is a small but useful resource on radicalism, political movements, and rhetoric.

An ambitious attempt to digitize 19th-century American fiction as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography, American Fiction, 1815–1875, this collection of texts is a work-in-progress. At present, the website offers close to 3,000 texts by 1,456 authors. These include the well known, such as Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain as well as hundreds of less well-known authors. Topics include slavery, reform, education, politics, love, children, and war. Close to 800 have been fully edited and SGML-encoded so that users may access chapter and story divisions through table of content hyperlinks. The remaining texts can be read either as facsimiles of original pages or in unedited transcriptions. The ability to perform single word and phrase searches on all material in the database—whether fully encoded or not—is powerful.

The collection includes more than 30,000 items relating to African American life in Ohio between 1850 and 1920, including personal papers, association records, a plantation account book, ex-slave narratives, legal records, pamphlets, and speeches. More than 15,000 articles from 11 Ohio newspapers and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, perhaps the oldest African American periodical, are included. Also provides more than 300 photographs of local community leaders, buildings, ex-slaves, and African American members of the military and police. Materials represent themes such as slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, African Americans in politics and government, and religion. Items include an extensive collection of correspondence by George A. Myers, an African American businessman and politician, as well as prominent political speeches.

This wealth of materials—more than 26,000 images in 4,100 collections—comes from 330 archives, libraries, and museums. Together, they document Ohio life, culture, and history from prehistoric times to the recent past. Currently the site provides 2,786 visual items; 768 historical objects, artifacts, or buildings; 106 natural history specimens; 809 published works; and 691 collections of unpublished material. Users can browse or search by word, place, and subject. Displayed materials are presented chronologically on scrapbook pages with 10 selections per page. "Learning Resources," with 22 categories, offers essays of up to 2,000 words illustrated with relevant material. Topics include African Americans, agriculture, American Indians, arts and entertainment, business and labor, civil liberties, daily life, education, immigration and ethnic heritage, government, religion, science and technology, sports, and women.