History of Twentieth-Century America

Founded by Alan Lomax, this organization aims to stimulate cultural equity through preservation, research, and dissemination of the world's traditional music. Also includes videos of dance and song performance, and photography.

A collection of digitized primary source documents from the American South sponsored by the University Library of UNC-CH. It offers documents from a variety of university libraries covering the Colonial era into the 20th century.

"The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings which date from the late-1960s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements... Our collection includes weekly news, poetry, music programs; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; numerous voices from behind prison walls; diverse activists; and pamphlets, journals and other materials from many radical organizations and movements."

The Internet Archive is a non-profit website offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. It is the library of the U.S. Congress and home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Search their website for digital collections.

Online collections from the Library of Congress. Includes many of the American Memory collections.

"The Medical Heritage Library(MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine."

Digital collections of cultural heritage objects by Clemson University and the National Park Service.

"Project STAND is a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country; to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities." There are African American, Asian American, Latinx, LGBTQ, and women's rights collections.

Supported by the United Nations, this portal gathers digitized primary sources of every type from worldwide repositories, including many national museums and libraries.

"Discover historic programs of publicly funded radio and television across America" through a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH.

Google has digitized thousands of books and magazines and made them searchable. Use this advanced search interface for precise searching. You may be able to access the full text of books that are out of copyright. If an item is only available in "snippet view" or "limited preview," you may be able to obtain that item from our own collection or via Interlibrary Loan.

"During World War II, the US Army administered more than 200 surveys to over half a million American troops to discover what they thought and how they felt about the conflict and their military service... Browse and search over 65,000 pages of uncensored, open-ended responses handwritten by servicemembers, view and download survey data and original analyses, read topical essays by leading historians, and access additional learning resources."

Database of declassified CIA documents.

Official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. Back volumes are in process of digitization, with some searchable content available back to the 1950s and up to the mid-1970s, and links to browsable volumes since 1861. JMU has some volumes in print and/or on microform.

"The National Security Archive's continually growing collection of Electronic Briefing Books (EBBs) provide timely online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and much more. Updated frequently, the EBBs represent just a small sample of the documents in our published and unpublished collections."

Available online from Hoover to Obama. From the Office of the Federal Register and National Archives and Records Administration.

A platform that provides access to digital collections of primary sources from libraries, archives, and museums from across the United States.

This multifaceted tool places art works from the Metropolitan Museum's collection within geographical and chronological context. It has excellent thematic essays (background information) that cover the historical eras and cultures that produced the works of art (the primary sources), along with maps and key events from each place and time period.

"The Social Welfare History Image Portal brings together photographs, pamphlets, artifacts and documents chronicling the history of the nation's response to human need. This history includes the work of volunteer organizations, reform movements, social workers, and government legislation and systems."

"American Panorama is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps."

Provides historical information on county boundaries within each state, access to PDF volumes from the print series, and interactive boundary maps. Developed at the Newberry Library.

Access to digitized maps from the Library of Congress.

Access to maps from research libraries around the world. You may search a place and a time period to find high-resolution maps.

A searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company from the collections of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress. Digital maps are in color.

"The ArcGIS Online US Geological Survey (USGS) topographic map collection now contains over 177,000 historical quadrangle maps dating from 1882 to 2006."

A collection of cover-to-cover magazines in color. Includes Life magazine.

"An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century."

From the National Archives, "this website provides full access to the 1950 census images, including population schedules, enumeration district maps, and enumeration district descriptions."

"The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides, free of charge, aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for the United States between 1790 and 2015."