American History on the World Wide Web

General Sites

• The Library of Congress hosts an excellent, themed site, American Memory, with many primary texts.
• The Historical Documents section at the US National Archives has a good range of political and legal texts. The site can also help you to plan research trips to Washington.
• The National Archives also maintains the 'Our Documents' web site.
• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting offers an introduction to many possible research topics. It also offers links for further research.
• The University of Virginia's American Studies site offers another vast archive of primary texts. See especially (but not only) its Hypertext Library.
• AmDocs provides a wide range of historical documents, divided by theme and put into chronological order. Well worth a look.
• Cornell University and the University of Michigan have collaborated on the massive 'Making of America' collection of primary texts (good to 1900 or so): Cornell (mostly for journals); Michigan (mostly for books).
• The Avalon Project at the Yale University Law School offers a broad selection of documents with an emphasis on law, diplomacy and institutional politics.
• The Brooklyn Public Library has made the entire run from 1841-1902 (including pictures!) of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle available.
• Voice of the Shuttle remains the most comprehensive site for research in the arts and humanities, broadly considered.
• Footnote.com is a commercial site that offers free trials and reasonably inexpensive one–month memberships. It has a lot of very useful material.
• The New York Times offers another commercial site which gives access to the entire content of the paper. Articles since 1987 are free, but there is a charge for earlier material. As above, a trial subscription is available.
• The Lancaster University Library has a very good index guide to American Studies resources held on campus.
• The American Studies Research Portal offers an excellent guide to collections that deal with the USA in UK libraries and museums. It also has a good collection of links to on–line sources.

More Specialised Sites

• The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy has a wealth of material for the study of drugs, drug laws and drug culture. This complements the holdings in our library, which are among the best in the United Kingdom.
• The Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era maintain an extensive set of links for the study of US history, 1865-1920.
• Oxford University Press maintains an excellent site for African-American history. 
  
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project is housed at Stanford University.
• The George Eastman House offers a wide range of American photography.
• Luminous Lint offers another outstanding photography site.
• The Smithsonian American Art Museum has an excellent site for American art.
• Likewise, the Smithsonian has a great site on Native American History and Culture.
• A site is maintained by The Drawing Center, with text by Janet Catherine Berlo, in New York City. It offers an introduction to the visual culture of the Plains Indians. It also offers samples of the drawings themselves and goes well with Berlo's books, which are available in our library.
• The Web of American Transcendentalism, anyone?
• The Illinois State Library funds a comprehensive site on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
• For all things related to the New Deal and the 1930s in general, see Columbia University’s New Deal Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm

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