These documents, exhibits, photographs, and essays tell the history of 26 prominent 20th-century scientists, physicians, and experts in biomedical research and public health. The site is divided thematically into "Biomedical Research," "Health and Medicine," and "Fostering Science and Health." The collections include published and unpublished items, such as books, journals, pamphlets, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audiotapes, video clips, and other materials. Each exhibit includes introductory narratives and biographies of each scientist and a selection of noteworthy documents. The collections are particularly strong in cellular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, with attention to health and medical research policy, application of computers in medicine, science education, and the history of modern science.

The Social Security program and the institutional history of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and its contribution to the welfare of the American public are presented on this site. It contains a vast collection of oral histories, audio recordings, and primary documents of the SSA. The audio and video clip section includes radio debates on the merits of the Social Security program taped during 1935, Lyndon B. Johnson's remarks on the passage of the Medicare bill in 1965, and Ronald Reagan's remarks at the signing of the Social Security Amendments of 1983. Also available are Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon's recorded telephone conversations that reference Social Security and Medicare. Another notable feature is the 37 oral history interviews conducted by SSA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Additional oral history collections are featured, providing information about the 1977 creation of Health Care Financing Administration and policy issues involving the Medicare and Social Security programs.

This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

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.

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.

Thomas Jefferson outlined three motivating factors in his instructions to Lewis and Clark: a search for navigable rivers to span the continent; a quest for Edenic beauty and riches; and the competitive desire to acquire a continental empire. These 180 documents and artifacts interpret 19th-century westward exploration from this perspective. The range of materials is striking. In addition to maps, plans, and charts, the site offers images (sketches, watercolors, etchings, and engravings), texts (letters, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and books), and tools (surveying and medical instruments, cooking utensils, armaments). The exhibit opens with an examination of the "imperial mentality" common to Virginia's aristocratic class in the late 18th century and then focuses on the Lewis and Clark journey. It ends with the subsequent expeditions of Zebulon Pike, Stephen H. Long, Charles Wilkes, John Charles Fremont, and the mid-19th century transcontinental railroad plan that supplanted the search for a water route.

This eclectic collection of more than 2,200 items spans the 17th to the 20th centuries. Visitors can search material from nine sections and visit 14 exhibitions. "A Crisis of the Union" presents 224 pamphlets, broadsides, clippings, paintings, and maps on the Civil War. A collection devoted to Theodore Dreiser presents correspondence, various editions of the novel Sister Carrie, an early manuscript for Jennie Gerhardt, and scholarly essays. Approximately 4,000 photographs from singer Marian Anderson's papers are complemented by more than 40 audio and video recordings. A collection on the history of chemistry emphasizes the pre-1850 period with monographs and more than 3,000 images of scientists, laboratories, and scientific apparatus while another exhibit emphasizes the ENIAC computer. Other collections on the birth of the University of Pennsylvania, early sheet music, and Jewish music and history are also available. See also "Cultural Readings: Colonization and Print in the Americas" [ID].