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.

This image resource site contains 30,000 digitized images from books and periodicals, as well as original photographs, prints, and postcards, mostly dated before 1923. There are cartoons and illustrations from the well known Harper's Weekly and Century Magazine, as well as images from the Library of Congress Prints and Photograph division. In addition many of the vibrant images of Native Americans were collected from the Department of War Indian Gallery. Covering more than 12,000 subjects, the site features images of Jamestown settlers, Pocahontas and John Smith, American presidents, 19th-century New York architecture, slave life, American and European women's costumes, streetcars and trains, and even insects and snakes.

Bibliographical information accompanies each image, and users may also save images of interest in their own "gallery" for viewing or purchase. Thumbnail sketches enlarge for full-page viewing. Searchable by keyword or by browsing a variety of indexes, the collection is a useful visual resource for teachers and researchers.

This site contains more than 3,500 scanned and digitized maps divided into two indexes—historical and contemporary. The historical maps index contains several sections. The most voluminous section, "Alabama," is divided into time periods, geological features, Alabama counties, rivers, and state highways. Another section indexes 13 other southeastern states, including Texas, the Carolinas, and Florida. There are also maps of the Western Hemisphere, North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, some dating before 1700.

An especially valuable feature of the historical index is the "Special Topics" which contains maps of the Civil War, including the battles in Gettysburg and Antietam, railroad routes, and ten Native American maps, mostly illustrating the boundaries of Cherokee territories. The contemporary map index is divided into eighteen themes, including education, housing, politics, federal expenditures, climate, and recreation. There are more than 100 world maps of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific. Users will also find links to the University of Alabama's Department of Geography and the publications of the Cartographic Laboratory. Created for educators and the business community, this is valuable resource for those researching the history of Alabama or contemporary themes in Alabama, the United States, and the world.

These 9,000 advertising items and publications date from 1850 to 1920. Selected items illustrate the rise of consumer culture in America and the development of a professionalized advertising industry.

Images are grouped into 11 categories: advertising ephemera (trade cards, calendars, almanacs, postcards); broadsides for placement on walls, fences, and buildings; advertising cookbooks from food companies and appliance manufacturers; early advertising agency publications created to promote the concepts and methods of the industry; promotional literature from the nation's oldest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson; early Kodak print advertisements; Lever Brothers Lux (soap) advertisements; R.C. Maxwell advertising company images; outdoor advertising; scrapbooks; and tobacco ads.

Each category contains a brief overview, and each image is accompanied by production information. The site, searchable by keyword or ad content, includes a timeline on the history of advertising from the 1850s to 1920. This easy-to-use collection is ideal for researching consumer culture and marketing strategies.

The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, unofficially known as the Centennial Exhibition, was held in Philadelphia in 1876 and was attended by more than nine million people. This website presents 1,500 images, including photographs, lithographs, engravings, maps, scrapbooks, and albums, searchable by keyword or subject, on this event.

"Exhibition Facts" provides statistics, a summary of the fair's significance, photographs of buildings erected by foreign nations, and images of sheet music. A timeline traces the fair's lifespan from the 1871 Act of Congress that created its planning commission to the removal of exhibits in December 1876. A bibliography lists more than 130 related works and 17 websites. "Tours" features an interactive map of the fairgrounds. "Centennial Schoolhouse" offers activities, including excerpts from a 17-year-old boy's diary. This website provides revealing images of the event that introduced America "as a new industrial world power."

More than 30,000 photographs of Colorado towns, landscapes, mining scenes, and American Indian tribes, taken between 1860 and 1920, are featured on this website. Approximately 4,000 images deal with the mining industry, including labor strikes, while 3,500 photographs depict Indian communities from more than 40 tribes west of the Mississippi River.

Special presentations include a gallery of over 40 photographs depicting the dwellings, children, and daily lives of Native American women; more than 30 images of buildings, statues, and parks in Denver built in conformance with the turn-of-the-century "City Beautiful" movement; and 20 World War II-era photographs of the Tenth Mountain Division, ski troops from Colorado who fought in Italy. Each image in these special exhibits is accompanied by a brief description. There are also biographies of three Western photographers.

More than 2,300 covers of American "dime novels," and their British counterparts, the "penny dreadfuls," are available on this website. In addition, the full text of nine books and a series entitled Secret Service (1899–1912) are available.

The site offers "guided tours" with images and essays of approximately 1,500 words on print processes and dime novel covers. The full-text selections include stories featuring such heroes as Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Deadwood Dick, Fred Fearnot, and Calamity Jane. A full-text search is available only for those affiliated with Stanford University.

The site provides basic information on each title and indexes books according to subject, genre, setting, intended audience age and gender, and type of graphic material. Subject indexing of cover iconography is especially valuable. Listings are organized according to depictions of ethnicity/nationality, occupation, types of places, types of sports and recreations, types of violence, and types of gestures and actions classified according to gender of character portrayed.

The papers of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), more than 4,600 items, are presented on this website. Materials include family papers, general correspondence, laboratory notebooks from 1891 to 1893 and 1910, scientific notebooks, blueprints, journals, articles, lectures, and photographs.

Writings address a range of subjects, including the telephone, deaf education, experiments with aeronautics, and other inventions. There are more than 100 letters to and from Helen Keller, family correspondence, and material on life in Washington, DC and Nova Scotia, where Bell had a summer home and conducted experiments. Ten "collection highlights," including notebook pages, document his first success with the telephone, essays on Bell's career and on the telephone, an annotated timeline, a 19-title bibliography, and a list of related sites.

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.