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).

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.

A 1981 reference to an unusual pneumonia in Los Angeles, California, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention marked the beginning of public discussion of the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, known as AIDS. More than 350 selected New York Times articles from 1981 to 2001 related to the AIDS epidemic are available on this website. Materials also include nine articles specifically related to the course of the epidemic's devastation in Africa.

There are nine videos, six multimedia presentations, five fact sheets, and four in-depth reports on such subjects as HIV medications, AIDS in New York City, HIV and teens, women and AIDS, the Federal response to the crisis, and the history of AIDS. The in-depth reports cover a diverse range of people affected by AIDS, including those of different ethnic backgrounds, and cover a wide range of locations within the U.S., including rural and urban areas.

Close to 3,000 life histories from 1936–1940, compiled and transcribed by the staff of the Folklore Project, are presented here. They are part of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA). Documents represent the work of more than 300 writers from 24 states. The histories, usually between 2,000 and 15,000 words in length, take the form of narratives, dialogs, reports, and case histories. Drafts and revisions are included. A typical history may offer information on family life, education, income, occupation, political views, religion, mores, medical needs, diet, and observations on society and culture.

"Voices from the Thirties,” illustrated with photographs of the project's staff at work, interviewees, and their environment, provides contextual information on the creation of the collection. This multifaceted site offers firsthand accounts on subjects such as slavery, 19th-century American folk cultures, and the social history of the Great Depression.

These printed materials are representative of the public campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League from 1893 to 1933. A six-page history of the League and the Temperance movement and six biographical essays of movement leaders provide context. Facsimiles of 89 fliers produced by the League advocate temperance with arguments that include the effect of alcohol on puppies and German Emperor William II's opinion of drinking. A periodical section reproduces three covers, three sample articles, and one complete 1912 issue of American Patriot, a temperance magazine, and one cover of American Issue.

Other material includes 14 wet and dry maps of the U.S. produced by the League, three temperance anthems, transcriptions of nine anti-alcohol stories, and 12 pro-temperance cartoons. In addition, six entries from the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, published between 1925 and 1930, offer the Temperance perspective on communion wine, whiskey production, and alcohol use in China.

Significant European migration into the Ohio River Valley occurred from the mid-18th century to the early 19th century and this website presents approximately 15,000 pages of related materials. Resources include books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, journals, letters, legal documents, images, maps, and ledgers. The site includes a special presentation with a 6,500-word essay on contested lands, peoples and migration, empires and politics, Western life and culture, and the construction of a Western past.

Materials address encounters between Europeans and native peoples, the lives of African American slaves, the role of institutions such as churches and schools, the position of women, the thoughts of naturalists and other scientists, and activities of the migrants, including travel, land acquisition, planting, navigation of rivers, and trade. These are valuable resources for studying early American history, cross-cultural encounters, frontier history, and the construction of the nation's past.

Currently this website presents full-text, searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. All were published between 1806 and 1989. Evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences. Fields of study covered include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, forestry, nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.

Types of materials include memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, newspapers, almanacs, agricultural periodicals, governmental publications, and archives of families, communities, and corporations. Users can search by author, title, subject, or keyword, then access the title page, table of contents, index, or pages of the text. These resources are valuable for studying the profound social, cultural, and economic effects of shifts in the history of American farming.

This collection of approximately 152,000 documents written by or to George Washington is the largest set of original Washington documents in the world. It includes correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, journals, account books, military records, reports, and notes from 1741 through 1799. Although the site is searchable by keyword, many documents are available only as page images rather than as transcribed text and the handwriting can be difficult to read. Transcripts, however, do exist for all diary pages and for selected documents.

The site includes a timeline with links to relevant documents; essays on Washington's diaries, letterbooks, and career as a surveyor and mapmaker; and an essay entitled "Creating the American Nation."

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.