This database consists of 26 collections from the holdings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first North American historical society, and the first library to devote its primary attention to collecting Americana. The collections focus on the Colonial Era, the Revolutionary War, and the Early National Period, with some collections extending into the Civil War era.
A standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. Data (1790-2000) include history, economics, government, finance, sociology, demography, education, law, natural resources, climate, religion, international migration, and trade. The database is fully searchable and downloadable.
Digitized manuscripts and archives from Harvard documenting a wide range of topics related to 17th- and 18th-century North America. These documents — written by the famous and the infamous, the well-known and unknown — reveal a great deal about the changing Atlantic world over two centuries.
Includes Church membership, burial, marriage, and baptismal records. Pew registers provide information about status within the community and social ranking within churches. Minutes and correspondence highlight religious thought, the church's stance on political and social events, the role of the church in black communities, and more.
This digitized collection focuses on the four earliest known censuses and inventories of Arkansas Post (1723, 1726, 1743, 1749) and provides evidence of the ancestors whose names are found on these historic rosters of the Lower Mississippi Valley.
Lists websites that contain digitized collections of early American history from cultural heritage associations in North America.
American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection - Five Series
This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
The collection documents the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. It provides access to American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912 in five series. Series 1 (1691-1820)
American Periodicals Series includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home and more.
This database contains manuscripts, artwork, and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers right up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century. It includes a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps and travel journals.
Black Life in America is sourced from more than 19,000 American and global news sources, including over 400 African American publications. At a time when social justice is a prevalent topic, this three-part collection is an invaluable resource for exploring issues of equity, race, and related topics. The collection includes two series: Series 1 1704-1877: Arrival in America through Reconstruction; Series 2 1878-1975: Jim Crow through the Civil Rights Movement.
Hispanic Life in America is a comprehensive digital archive of primary source documents related to Hispanic American life. Replete with material unavailable elsewhere, this two-series collection is sourced from more than 17,000 global news sources, including over 700 Spanish-language or bilingual publications, dating from 1704 to 2009. Series 1 1704-1942: Spanish colonialism through World War II. Series 2 1943-2009: Immigration, labor rights and civil rights.
Indigenous Peoples of North America integrates a collection of newspapers, manuscripts, drawings and sketches, photographs, maps, periodicals, monographs, reports, legal materials, organizational records, and population census records from the sixteenth century well into the twentieth century.
Topics of interest include trade and communication, Arctic exploration and tribes, the Iroquois Confederation, Canadian Catholic Indian missions, Indian removal, Indian wars and the frontier army, establishment of the Canadian Indian and Aboriginal Department, Indian delegations and Indian-federal relations, Canadian Indian treaty policy, government boarding and missionary schools and curricula, Dawes Severalty and the allotment system, dances and festivals, Alaskan Indian policies, Indian languages and linguistics, assimilation and the Indian New Deal, relocation, termination, and the Indian Claims Commission, water and fishing rights, civil rights, radicalism, poverty, and the American Indian movement.
North American Indian Thought and Culture brings together more than 100,000 pages including: autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files. Fifty-four volumes, representing 15,000 pages, are from the 18th and 19th centuries alone.
Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society brings together 100,000 pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The letters and diaries reveal, in each woman’s own hand, the details of the authors’ daily lives, their activities and concerns, and their attitudes towards the people and world around them.
Contains the early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry's 'Bars Fights', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
Black Thought and Culture is a collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery (SAS): A Transnational Archive, Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 is a collection devoted to the scholarly study and understanding of slavery from a multinational perspective.
Part 1: Debates
Part 2: Slave Trade
Part 3: Institution
Part 4: Emancipation
This database brings together documents and collections from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world, covering an extensive time period from 1490. Topics covered include the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today. It offers in-depth case studies in America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Cuba along with important material examining European, Islamic and African involvement in the slave trade. Material types include manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps, images and more.
Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries presents collections in the documentary record of American slavery, focusing on the industrial uses of slave labor. The materials selected include company records; business and personal correspondence; documents pertaining to the purchase, hire, medical care, and provisioning of slave laborers; descriptions of production processes; and journals recounting costs and income.
This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.
The database brings together data and stories about enslaved peoples from dozens of projects in the Americas and Europe. In addition to detailed stories of the lives of the enslaved, the site allows users to visualize larger relationships and movements, and connect the traces of people from one dataset to the next.
From the Table of Contents: pt. 2. Two communities, slave and free -- The first emancipation -- Free Blacks in the new republic -- Discrimination in the antebellum North -- The free Black community -- The cotton kingdom -- The slave community -- Nat Turner's rebellion, 1831-- pt. 3. Toward freedom -- Expansion of slavery, 1819-57 -- Runaways, kidnappings, and abolitionists -- Slavery and the Civil War -- Radical reconstruction, 1866-57 -- "Exodusters" --