This site features 35 hours of folk and popular music sound recordings from several European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-speaking communities. The Work Projects Administration California Folk Music Project collected these 817 songs, in 12 languages and representing 185 musicians, in Northern California between 1938 and 1940. The collection also includes 168 photographs of musicians, 45 scale drawings and sketches of instruments, and numerous written documents, including ethnographic field reports and notes, song transcriptions, published articles, and project correspondence.

Organized by folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell, sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, and cosponsored by the Archive of the American Folk Song, this was one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document folk and popular music of such diverse origin in one region. In addition to folk music of indigenous and immigrant groups, the collection includes popular songs from the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast eras, medicine show tunes, and ragtime numbers. In addition, short essays describe the California Folk Music Project and the ethnographic work of Sidney Robertson Cowell. This collection is an excellent resource for learning about ethnographic research practices as well as about cultures of various California ethnic groups.

A collection of textual and audio documents concerning "arguably the most important Supreme Court case ever on freedom of the press." The case revolved around the 1971 decision to lift prior restraint orders instigated by the Nixon Administration to prohibit publication of the government's secret historical collection of documents labeled "United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967." These quickly became known to the world as the "Pentagon Papers." Includes 10 recently released audio files and transcripts of Nixon Administration telephone conversations and meetings; Supreme Court briefs (including some material originally kept secret) and opinions; audio files and transcripts of oral arguments before the Court; appellate court documents; and excerpts from memoirs by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and H. R. Haldeman. Also provides a 4,500-word commentary on the documents. Valuable for those studying American political and legal history and the Vietnam War.

A selection of more than 16,000 items relating to the performing arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is offered on this website. Materials include books, clippings, photographs, drawings, music, manuscripts, moving images, posters and lobby cards, programs, and recorded sound.

Diverse types of material on specific performers—such as Ruth St. Denis, Loie Fuller, and Isadora Duncan—have been selected to allow focused study. More than 2,400 entries are available for photographs (entries often contain multiple images) as well as 21 large format clippings scrapbooks, each with more than 100 pages. The website also presents 16 full-text books and video clips from nine early motion pictures, including a nine-minute clip featuring renowned dancer Anna Pavlowa in Lois Weber's The Dumb Girl of Portici (1914).

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 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.

Cylinder recordings were the first commercially produced sound recordings. This extensive collection of more than 6,000 cylinder recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1890 to 1928) allows visitors to explore this era of sound recording that is often overlooked in the study of American musical history.

Users can browse the collection by performer, title, label, or year of release or they can search the collection by keyword, author, title, subject, or year. Recordings stream online and are available for download. The project overview describes the technical issues involved in the project, explains variations in recording quality, and provides a warning about the potentially offensive "dialect recordings" and why they were included. There are also links to thirty-six related websites.

This collection documents the development of vaudeville and other popular entertainment forms from the 1870s to the 1920s. Materials include 334 English and Yiddish playscripts and 146 theater programs and playbills. Sixty-one motion pictures range from animal acts to dance to dramatic sketches. Ten sound recordings feature comic skits, popular music, and a dramatic monologue.

The website also features 143 photos and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of magician Harry Houdini and an essay with links to specific items entitled "Houdini: A Biographical Chronology." Search by keyword or browse the subject and author indexes. The site is linked to the Library of Congress Exhibition Bob Hope and American Variety", that charts the persistence of a vaudeville tradition in later entertainment forms.

More than 40 million pages from more than seven million tobacco industry documents are presented on this website. Documents were made public as a stipulation of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement to settle multiple lawsuits. Index records, prepared by tobacco companies, can be searched by full-text.

Documents range from the 1930s to 2002, though most were created since the 1950s, and deal with industry concerns such as marketing, sales, advertising, research and development, manufacturing, and expansion of business to developing countries. There are 80 links to related sites and promises to include more documents in the future. This project offers an abundance of material for studying the history of smoking, advertising, and 20th-century American business practices.

These materials—early motion pictures from 1891 to 1918, 81 sound recordings from 1913 to 1920, and related materials, such as photographs and original magazine articles—document Thomas Edison's impact on the history of American entertainment. Edison's inventions included the phonograph, the kinetograph motion picture camera, and the kinetoscope motion picture viewer.

Sound recordings are accessible by title and according to six genres: instrumental selections, popular vocals, spoken word, spoken comedy, foreign language and ethnic recordings, and opera and concert recordings. Films are organized by title, chronologically, and according to genres, including actualities (nonfiction films), advertising, animation, drama and adventure, experimental, humorous, trick, and reenactments. Actuality subjects include disasters, expositions, famous people, foreign places, the navy, police and fire departments, railroads, scenic America, sports and leisure, the variety stage, and war. Special pages focus on the life of the inventor and his contribution to motion picture and sound recording technologies.

Offering 16 separate databases of digitized materials, this website provides firsthand accounts (diaries, letters, and memoirs) and literary efforts (poetry, drama, and fiction). Twelve databases pertain to American history and culture.

"Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment" offers primary sources documenting cultural interactions from 1534 to 1850. "The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries" draws on more than 400 sources and supplies a day-by-day chronology with links to documents. "Black Thought and Culture" furnishes monographs, speeches, essays, articles, and interviews. "North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories" covers 1840 to the present. "North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950" provides full-text letters and diaries from more than 1,000 women—totaling more than 21,000 documents and approximately 120,000 pages—written between 1675 and 1950.

Five databases present American literary writings: "Latino Literature"; "Black Drama"; "Asian American Drama"; "North American Women's Drama"; and "American Film Scripts Online." In addition, "Oral History Online" provides a reference work with links to texts, audio, and video files. While the databases include previously published documents, many also contain thousands of pages of unpublished material. In addition to keyword searching, the databases provide "semantic indexing"—extensive categorical search capabilities.