In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson owned the largest personal book collection in the U.S. After the Capitol and Congressional Library burned during the War of 1812, Jefferson allowed Congress to purchase his collection, which totaled more than 5,000 works and became the core of the Library of Congress's current collection. This website provides basic information on, and several images of, 41 of these books. They are divided by themes designated by Jefferson: "Memory," "Reason," and "Imagination," corresponding roughly to history, philosophy, and fine arts. In addition, visitors can explore lengthy selections from three of these works through the "Interactives" section: Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and The Builder's Dictionary, an 18th-century handbook on building design and construction. This section features a powerful zoom function, allowing visitors to view the original text in detail, as well as a transcription function. Useful for those interested in political and intellectual culture in the early republic, as well as the history of the book.

Selected material from the papers of the great American composer, conductor, and music educator Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), including 85 photographs, 177 scripts from Bernstein's Young People's Concerts television programs, 74 scripts from Thursday Evening Previews, and more than 1,100 pieces of correspondence, with an emphasis on letters between Bernstein and his mentors Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, his family, and his teacher, assistant, and longtime friend Helen Coates. Users interested in Bernstein's renowned musicals can locate 27 letters on West Side Story, 12 on Candide, and nine pertaining to Trouble in Tahiti. Provides a finding aid for the complete collection, housed in the Library of Congress's Music Division; the 6,000-word essay, "Professor Lenny" by Joseph Horowitz, originally published in the New York Review of Books; a chronology of Bernstein's life; and a 27-title bibliography. With formerly obscure material concerning Bernstein's social activism, this collection will be of primary interest to those studying his musical works, ideas, and influences, and more generally 20th-century American music and musical theater.

This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.

This site, created by Professor Emeritus Leslie V. Brock, deals with the study of American colonial currency. During the colonial period, each colony issued its own paper money, which caused considerable conflict with Britain in the 18th century. This site contains five full-text 18th-century pamphlets on colonial economic and currency issues from 1720 to 1749; ten other contemporary writings about the economic situation in the colonies, including sermons, currency acts, and letters to Britain's Board of Trade, the governing body for colonial economic issues. The site also offers one article and excerpts from a book by scholars of colonial economy, and links to six other scholarly essays on similar topics. There are links to ten tables from Brock's book, Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates, as well as a very thorough bibliography of over 70 scholarly works on colonial economies. Additionally, the site offers a link to a site that provides images with roughly 100-word explanations of over 150 species of paper currency, lottery tickets, and fiscal documents from the 18th-century Anglo-American colonies and links to 14 other sources of information on monetary history. This is an ideal source for teaching and researching the colonial economies and money in 18th-century America.

This site, created by a graduate student at the University of Virginia, provides a useful introductory and historical overview for the persistent stereotype of "poor white trash," a subject not unknown but surely under-studied. An 8,000-word essay, divided into five sections—"media," "religion," "race," "lifestyle" and "work"—forms the core of the site, though readers will find a handful of illustrations and pictures in each section. "Media" is best developed and most interesting. There author Angel Price has written about "Lil'Abner" and other comic strips, television programs such as the "Dukes of Hazzard," and works of literature that have both fostered and refuted images of poor white men and women. A handful of primary documents are also presented here, including brief selections by 19th-century humorists Augustus Longstreet and Simon Suggs. Readers will find, too, the full text of historian Henry Nash Smith's classic book, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. The background text, which draws from 29 scholarly and popular sources, is uneven yet generally reliable, particularly useful for students unacquainted with the topic. The site is somewhat difficult to read, owing to a dark navigating bar at the bottom.

This website, maintained by graduate student Rick Gardiner, is a gateway to sites that contain well over 500 primary documents and literature that was "most relevant to the colonists' lives in America." The collection is arranged chronologically and divided into five time periods: 500 BC to 500 AD contains works by classical philosophers and poets such as Aristotle and Socrates, the Bible, and works by figures such as St. Augustine; 500 AD to 1500 contains such works as the Laws of William the Conqueror, Magna Carta, and English law treatises; 1500-1600 provides such documents as the writings of Martin Luther, letters by Christopher Columbus, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs; 1600-1700 contains a variety of colonial maps and charters, an indentured servant's contract, the works of John Smith of Jamestown settlement and John Winthrop of Plimouth Plantation, among other documents; and 1700-1800 contains such documents as the Virginia Slave Laws, William Byrd I's diary, and the works of Lord Bolingbroke.

Each chronological category divides the documents into 15 to 25 subject categories. While there is no keyword search, the site's chronological and subject divisions make it easily navigable, and it provides a wealth of resources for those particularly interested in political, cultural, religious, or constitutional early American history.

This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of U.S. history documents, offering more than 36,000 items and 2.3 million pages on all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century American life. It is comprised of a range of publications helpful for researching social, cultural, intellectual, and religious history, as well as political and military history, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, charters and by-laws, cookbooks, maps, narratives, novels, plays, poems, sermons, songs, textbooks, and travelogues. It is especially useful for the history of printing, as it contains an exhaustive list of printers, booksellers, and publishers active in this time period as well as images and the full-text of most of the books, pamphlets, and broadsides they helped create.

Users can browse the imprints by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching all aspects of 17th- and 18th-century North America.

This archive contains material related to "the causes, conduct, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War." The collection contains more than 220 books, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, and other printed material from 1830 to 1880. The entire archive can be browsed by author, date of publication, title, or subject. Abstracts of the titles are available. Using a built-in viewer, each document can be viewed in its original format (or downloaded in PDF form), and visitors can zoom in or out.

Visitors may browse issues of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, peruse the 1852 Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, or view dozens of Thomas Nast cartoons. Finally, visitors can also search the entire archive by keyword, subject, graphic element, or date. Visitors looking for comprehensive Civil War, Abolition, or Reconstruction sites will find more complete collections elsewhere; but this site's convenience, as well as its collection of early-19th-century tracts, make this a valuable resource.

This collection of primary and secondary sources explores the history of Spanish expansion into North America from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas; across the modern-day American West; and north to Alaska. There are more than 200 primary sources, including numerous texts, 118 maps, manuscripts, and first-hand accounts, all written between 1492 and 1898. Some of the highlights include La Florida del Inca, an account of the Hernando de Soto expedition through Florida and the southeastern part of North America, along with the Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth to San Diego, published in 1848 as a special report to the United States Congress. All documents are available in English and many of the documents are available in Spanish, as well. The collection is searchable by keyword and title and can be browsed. These documents are valuable for understanding Spanish-North American interaction.

The U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission demonstrated in 1900 that the mosquito transmitted yellow fever. This archive is an extensive compilation of 5,500 items related to the Commission's findings. Documents span from 1850 to 1966 and include correspondence, reports, photographs, and artifacts. The site is organized into sections pertaining to six key individuals: Walter Reed, Jesse W. Lazear, Henry Rose Carter, Jefferson Randolph Kean, Albert E. Truby, and Philip S. Hench. Each section includes an introduction (800 to 1,000 words) and is searchable by date, series, subject, or keyword.

In addition, there is a 4,800-word essay entitled "United States Army Yellow Fever Commission." The Walter Reed Series (1874-1936) and the Reed Family Additions (1877-1902) comprise Reed's original letters concerning his seminal work with yellow fever in Cuba. The Jesse Lazear Series and Henry Rose Carter Series, which span from the 1860s to 1930s detail the men's involvement with the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba and their careers in public health. The other series include personal and professional correspondence and research during the period of the Yellow Fever Commission's work in Cuba. A separate section entitled "Books" contains a first edition biography of Walter Reed and a 1941 version of Walter Reed, Doctor in Uniform, a biography for young adults. "Highlights" comprises a sampling of 30 unique documents, many of which comment on the importance of the Cuban American relationship. Those interested in exploring the history of medicine and science, social history, military history, public health policy, tropical medicine, and biomedical ethics will find this site of great interest.