In 1939, John Lomax, Curator of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, and his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax, embarked on a 6,500-mile journey through the South. During their travels, they recorded more than 700 folk tunes that now are available as audio files on this website. Genres include ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, spirituals, and work songs.

The site also presents field notes containing personal information on some of the more than 300 performers the Lomaxes recorded, notes on geography and culture, and excerpts from correspondence. More than 50 letters to and from the Lomaxes, 380 photographs, a bibliography of 22 works, and a map are also offered. The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject as well as title, song text, and performer.

Covering more than 200 jazz bands and musicians active from 1895 to 1929, this website offers biographical information, photographs, and audio and video files. It includes more than 200 sound files of jazz recordings by well-known artists, such as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Django Reinhardt, as well as many by dozens of lesser-known musicians.

The files are annotated with biographical essays of varying length, discographies, and bibliographic listings. Listings are available for 20 short jazz films made in the late 1920s and early 1930s as well as two video files. Twenty essays and articles about jazz before 1930 come from published liner notes, books, journals, or jazz fans.

Scanned images of more than 18,000 pieces of sheet music, including covers, published prior to 1923 are presented on this website. The collection, compiled by an American musicologist, covers the period 1780–1980 but focuses on 19th-century popular music, especially songs relating to military conflicts, presidents, romance, transportation, and songs from the minstrel stage.

Users may search for songs on hundreds of topics such as drinking, smoking, fraternal orders, the circus, and death, or look for composers, song titles, or other catalog record data. Descriptions by the collector of significant songs in 38 topical categories are also available. These materials are useful for studying 19th- and early 20th-century popular culture, especially depictions of ethnicity, gender, and race.

Embracing 12 digitized collections, five exhibits, and six student projects, this website contains a wealth of primary documents. Collections include two websites related to advertising—Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850–1920 and Ad*Access—in addition to a collection of health-related ads from 1911 to 1958 in Medicine and Madison Avenue.

George Percival Scriven: An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899–1901 presents a firsthand account by a U.S. officer of life during the occupation. Civil War Women offers correspondence and a diary relating to three American women of diverse backgrounds. African-American Women presents letters by three slaves and a memoir by the daughter of slaves. The Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters presents 10 revealing letters written in 1873 by Mrs. Bryant to her husband concerning medical and private matters.

Historic American Sheet Music includes more than 3,000 pieces published between 1850 and 1920. Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement offers more than 40 documents from 1969 to 1974. William Gedney Photographs and Writings provides close to 5,000 prints, work prints, and contact sheets from the 1950s to the 1980s. Urban Landscapes present more than 1,000 images depicting urban areas.