Exploring Historical Fiction
Make the Lewis and Clark expedition and life on the Oregon Trail come alive with these suggestions!
World War and Literature
Can you suggest any literature covering World War I to World War II that my 10th-grade world history class can read?
The Standardization of American English
Why is colonial written English so different from the version we use today?
Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman
Can you trust a biography? Historian Tiya Miles analyzes an 1869 biography of abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Is reading a piece of historic literature once enough? Not if you want to get the most out of literary sources.
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia
There’s far more to West Virginia than stereotypes suggest. Why not take some time to explore the state?
Puerto Rico Encyclopedia/Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico
Connect with your ELL students with this bilingual Puerto Rico Encyclopedia!
Yale Digital Commons
A wheeled pull toy depicting Nixon with a crown? If you’re looking for a unique object to bring up in class, start with the digital commons.
Comic Books in the History Classroom
Comic books as primary sources? Bring superheroes into the classroom with these six historical themes.
Children and Youth in History
Bring history home to young students with sources they can relate to—and prompt older students to think about the construction of concepts like “child” and “teenager.”
Virginia Memory
Are you a Virginia educator teaching VA state history? My your task easy! Explore the Library of Virginia’s 70 collections of digitized primary sources.
Keep Your Top Eye Open
Boston abolitionists on the lookout for slave-catchers in 1851.
Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History
Slavery, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement—you have to teach these topics, so check out these essays to enrich your curriculum!
Picturing the American Revolution
Looking for a creative way to teach the American Revolution to struggling readers? Check this out!
Martha Ballard
Learning about the life of a midwife in 18th-century Maine through her diary and other sources.
Causation: The War of 1812 and the Star-Spangled Banner
A great way for students to learn more about the War of 1812 and our nation’s emblem: the Star-Spangled Banner.
Forming Lesson Plans Around State Mandates
How do you teach the effects of WWI on art and literature? Transforming a content standard into a solid lesson plan.
Deciphering Primary Source Documents
Create scaffolding and careful preparation of documents to promote student understanding of primary sources.
New England Puritans
Trying to build a New Jerusalem on the coast of Massachusetts.
Yo, Ho, Ho and a . . . Bushel of Oysters?
Shellfish pirates stole from the rich to feed themselves—and make a little money on the side.
When Whales Lit the World
Up to the 20th century, whalers provided oil for the industrial revolution. How much do you know about these iron men and wooden ships?
Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection
Read the books and poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, internationally famous African American writer.
Missouri Digital Heritage
Missouri teachers looking for primary sources, look no further. Explore this portal for resources from libraries, universities, archives, and heritage sites throughout the state.
National Endowment for the Arts
Watch videos on jazz and opera history, courtesy of the National Endowment of the Arts.
Thomas Jefferson's Library
Basic information and several images of 41 books once in Thomas Jefferson’s library.
Library of Southern Literature
Full texts of more than 130 works of literature by more than 75 Southern authors.
Frederick Douglass's Autobiographies
Use autobiographies to deconstruct views of slavery and historical heroes.
Narratives of Slavery
One institution, two very different perspectives. An expert contrasts records.
Bartleby, Great Books Online
A collection of American and European literary classics, made available free of charge.
Jewish American History on the Web
An impressive website for the study of Jews and Judaism in the United States.
Classics in the History of Psychology
Explore the subject of psychology through this full-text archive of classic works in the field.
Knowing Poe
Introduce your students to one of America’s great masters of horror.
American Women's Dime Novel Project
What was the turn-of-the-century woman’s “beach read”?
Worthington Memory, Online Scrapbook
Explore the history and development of a small town. The online scrapbook provides an uncanny lens into town life.
Encyclopedia Britannica: The 1911 Edition
Find out what people thought of everything from ablation to vinegar in 1911.
Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time
You’ve read his words, but do you know who he was? Explore the man behind those epic stories.
Lesson Plans Library
Hundreds of lesson plans, right at your fingertips. Incorporate them in the classroom.
Thomas Jefferson Papers
What did Thomas Jefferson read?
Brief Timeline of American Literature, Music, and Movies
Explore film, music, and literature in its social context and chronology. Understand the cultural dynamics that lent themselves to the media.
Today in History Web Resources
Need to check a date? Have students report on their birth dates? Try here.
The Capital and the Bay, ca. 1600-1925
What picture have people painted of the Washington, D.C. in written works?
Regional Oral History Office
Explore California oral histories, or learn to conduct your own interviews.
Hall of Black Achievement Gallery
Meet 30 influential African Americans who contributed across a wide variety of fields.
James Fenimore Cooper Society
Teenagers in love? By the author of The Last of the Mohicans?
The 19th Century in Print: Periodicals
What magazines do you read? What did people read in the 1800s?
The 19th Century in Print: Books
What were people reading around the time of the Civil War?
Florida Heritage Collection
Explore Florida state, regional, and local history.
New Perspectives on the West
Peruse lesson plans about the West on this companion site to a Ken Burns documentary.
The History of Sanitary Sewers
Few engineering feats are so overlooked by history as the creation of sewers worldwide.
Children's Books Online
For story time or personal research, peruse historical children’s books.
American Memory Learning Page
Try lesson plans based on the Library of Congress’ American Memory collections.
The Zora Neale Hurston Plays
Read 10 unpublished Hurston plays based on her anthropological studies of the U.S. South.
Democracy in America: Alexis de Tocqueville
Visit this website to learn more about the United States during the time of Tocqueville’s landmark tour and book.
Project Muse: Journals OnLine
A database of history journals as well as journals in related fields.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Offers full access to the Encyclopedia Britannica; non-subscribers can access article abstracts.
The Alexis de Tocqueville Tour: Exploring Democracy in America
Everything you never knew you wanted to know about Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip through the United States. You’re welcome!
Magic, Illusion, and Detection in Turn of the Century America
Learn about American culture at the turn of the 20th century.
Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers and Artists of Color
Learn about all of America’s most famous female writers of color with this comprehensive website.
Women in America: 1820 to 1842
Peruse this website to explore comments made by Tocqueville, Beaumont, and others on the early 19th-century American woman.
Library of Congress: Webcasts
Access more than 500 webcasts from the Library of Congress.
Portal to Texas History
Texas educators, looking for primary resources on state history? Search this portal for thousands of images and documents drawn from Texas-based archival collections.
Walt Whitman Archive
Get to know the life, mind, works, and criticisms of poet Walt Whitman.
Dickinson Electronic Archives
Learn about Dickinson’s family through their own writings and wider critical response to her poetry.
Dolley Madison Digital Edition
Read Dolley Madison’s personal correspondence from her youth through her widowhood.
America: History and Life
Peruse bibliographies and abstracts of scholarly articles, reviews, and dissertations in U.S. and Canadian history.
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Uncover novels, readers, hymnals, almanacs, diaries, maps, treaties, and more from between 1801 and 1819.
American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900
Explore American life through advertisements, literature, poetry, Civil War envelopes, and more!
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage
Explore the history of Maryland, from Edgar Allen Poe to the War of 1812.
Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Discover the life of pragmatist and education reform advocate John Dewey (1859-1952).
Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Harned Walt Whitman Collection
Experience personal accounts of Civil War hospitals and read poetry drafts in Walt Whitman’s journals.
Red White Blue & Brimstone: New World Literature and the American Millennium
Texts throughout U.S. history have featured imagery from the Book of Revelations, including the the documents on this site.
Summer Reading: Clearinghouse Staff Recommendations, Part I
Clearinghouse staff recommend books for summer reading.
Seeking U.S. History Books for 9th and 11th Graders
Look for school districts and teachers’ shared lists.
Quoting Economic Policy
Milton Friedman and Herbert Hoover are excellent sources.
Premonition of Death
Accounts of Abraham Lincoln’s dream of a presidential assassination vary, and so do the interpretations.
Literature and Culture of the American 1950s
Explore the cultural, intellectual, and political trends of the 1950s in a diverse array of primary and secondary sources.
The Jack London Online Collection
From White Fang to short stories and speeches, read more than 40 works by renown author Jack London.
Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls
Cover art and full texts from dime novels preserve the popular culture of an industrializing U.S.
Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875
Digitizing 19th-century American fiction, this site offers close to 3,000 texts by 1,456 authors.
Willa Cather Archive
Read the annotated works of author Willa Cather (1873–1947), including O Pioneer! and My Antonia.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
With over 300,000 pages available for full-text searching, this is one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world.
Race and Place
Discover connections between race and place in this archive documenting the effects of Jim Crow on a Virginia town.
Emma Goldman Papers
Learn more about Emma Goldman, radical and feminist activist, through this collection of primary and secondary sources.
American Radicalism Collection
From the Ku Klux Klan to the IWW, examine 129 historical documents from radical organizations.
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition
More than 1,800 primary sources provide a window into the Temperance Movement and Prohibition.
African-American Experience in Ohio: From the Ohio Historical Society
Take a look through more than 30,000 items relating to African American life in Ohio between 1850 and 1920.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
Delve into the complex history of slavery and the law with this collection of primary sources.
Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
Read the life histories of a range of U.S. citizens, compiled by the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project.
Thomas Paine National Historical Association
Explore the life and works of one of the most famous revolutionaries—Thomas Paine.
Making of America
Provides more than 1.5 million pages of text in an effort to digitize more than 11,000 volumes and 100,000 19th-century journal articles.
Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
Documents the birth of the conservation movement through published works, manuscripts, images, and motion picture footage.
Edgar Allan Poe
Annotated materials about Poe published during his lifetime.
American Transcendentalism Web
Presents texts by and about the major figures of American Transcendentalism.
Readex Digital Collections
This site offers a cornucopia of documents spanning four centuries of American history.
ProQuest Information and Learning
From newspapers to scholarly journals, ProQuest has whatever you need!
Kentuckiana Digital Library
Collects photographs, texts, and oral histories drawn from 15 Kentucky colleges, universities, libraries, and historical societies.
Documenting the American South
Nearly 1,400 documents covering Southern life from the 18th to early 20th centuries.
Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
Searchable facsimiles of 1,850 monographs and 288 journal volumes related to agriculture in the U.S. between 1806 and 1989.
Colonial Connecticut Records, 1636-1776
Explore the 15-volume Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from April 1636 to October 1776.
Africans in America
Trace the history of Africans in America through Reconstruction, with 245 images, maps, and documents.
Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read
Examines 19th-century children in America: what they read, what was written about them, and what was written for them.
North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920
Explore all of the known published slave narratives, to better understand the experience of slavery and the culture that slaves created in the nation.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
Offers 45 mini-monographs on U.S. women’s history, each organized around an analytical question concerning a social movement.
Florida State Archives Photographic Collection
Presents more than 137,000 photographs of Florida on specific localities from the mid-19th century to the present.
Map Collections: 1500-2003
16th-century to present-day maps, focusing on Americana and cartographic treasures.
Disability History Museum
Explore the experiences of those with disabilities through documents and images dating from the 18th century to the present.
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale
We’re off to see the wizard! Discover the cultural impact of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture
Explore Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the American cultural phenomenon it was.
Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in 19th-Century America
Provides full-text transcriptions and page images of 1815–1865 Sunday school books addressing religious instruction for youth.
Mark Twain in His Times
Focuses on Mark Twain’s life and career, including creation of his popular image, marketing and promotion of his texts, and live performances.
Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
Commemorates the 1871 Great Chicago Fire with an array of primary sources.
California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California, 1849-1900
40,000 written pages and more than 3,000 illustrations provide accounts of California history from the Gold Rush to the end of the 19th century.
Digital Library of Georgia
Examines the history and culture of the state of Georgia, presenting an extensive range of primary sources.
Alexander Street Press
Databases of digitized firsthand accounts and literary works document periods in American history, the experiences of minorities, and other topics.
Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
150 oral history interviews and 16 collections of documents address the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
Take a closer look at the Civil War with this extensive database that offers a comparison of two Shenandoah Valley counties—Augusta County, VA and Franklin County, PA.
Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive
Peruse more than 1,700 texts written by or to Thomas Jefferson—from correspondence to books and papers.
Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Presents the complete text of the Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, along with supplementary secondary sources.
Geography of Slavery in America
Provides transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants between 1736 and 1803.
Do History: Martha Ballard's Diary Online
Explore the diary of midwife Martha Ballard and the creation of two modern historical studies based on the diary.
Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
Showcases more than 1,230 images depicting the enslavement of Africans, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and slave life in the New World.
Accessible Archives
Presents articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, and books, with a focus on the Mid-Atlantic region.
Our Documents
Presents 100 milestone documents in American history, from the Richard Henry Lee Resolution of June 7, 1776, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Documents in Law, History, and Government
Houses more than 3,500 full-text documents addressing the legal, economic, and political history of the U.S.
Archive of Early American Images
Collects more than 4,000 images from books created in Europe between 1492 and 1825.
Archival Research Catalog (ARC)
Access over than 78,000 digital government resources—from textual records to sound recordings and everything in between!