History - United States & Canada: Internet Sites

Northwestern Community only (available only to Northwestern faculty, students, and staff)

• American Memory Collection
  Hosted by the Library of Congress, this is a rich array of historical collections from the National Digital Library. The Collection Finder lists collections by discipline.
  
  
• Avalon Project (Yale Law School)
  Includes full-text of selected documents in history, law, and diplomacy, ranging from pre-18th through the 20th centuries.
  
  
• California Digital Library
  Provides links to the Online Archive of California, which facilitates and provides access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California, as well as other collections about the history of California.
  
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Archives
  Archival radio and television clips dating back to the late 1950's.
  
  
• Chemical History in Chicago
  The chemhistory-chicago.org web site is a road map to the history of the Chicago Metropolitan area's academic and industrial chemical community from the mid-Nineteenth Century through the 1960's Timeline.
  
  
• Chicago Historical Society
  A Wide array of online resources concerning the history of Chicago.
  
  
• Chicago Imagebase
  Developed at the University of Illinois-Chicago, contains materials for the history of Chicago, including historical maps and a visual index of Robinson Fire Insurance Maps from the 1886 set. Note, that Northwestern has Microfilm of some Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (check NUcat for holdings), as does the Center for Research Libraries.
  
  
• Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA)
  Includes a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science, forestry, human nutrition, rural sociaology, and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance. Their evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series.
  
  
• Digital History
  A collaborative project of the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and others, this multimedia site includes a textbook, lectures, primary sources, etc.
  
  
• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
  A collection of sources on the history, literature and culture of the American south from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century.
  
  
• Dramas of Haymarket
  A joint project produced by Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, this project examines and interprets materials from Chicago Historical Society's electronic archive of holding on the Haymarket Affair -- See also the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection.
  
  
• ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online
  A comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world's largest microfilm library of the printed book. ECCO, when complete, will include digital versions of nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800; it will ultimately allow full-text searching of over 33 million pages of English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
  
  
• FBI: Electronic Reading Room
  Provides full-text versions of selected FBI files. Note that Northwestern has a very good collection of microfilmed FBI files. Please check NUcat for files which may not be available online.
  
  
• Florida Heritage Collection
  From the State University System (SUS) of Florida, this collection provides web access to materials about Florida's history, culture, arts, literatures, sciences and social sciences.
  
  
• Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
  A commemorative exhibition created by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.
  
  
• Indiana Historical Society: Digital Images
  Currently includes over 17,00 digital images
  
  
• Intute (formerly Humbul Humanities Web)
  Provides access to web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners.
  
  
• Lincoln / Net (Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project)
  This site presents historical materials from Abraham Lincoln's Illinois years (1830-1861), including Lincoln's writings and speeches, as well as other materials illuminating antebellum Illinois.
  
  
• Making of America (MOA)
  Primary resources for the study of the social history of the United States from the antebellum period through reconstruction. This is a collaborative project between University of Michigan and Cornell University. Access is available to Michigan's pages and to Cornell's.
  
  
• Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926
  Provides digital images on every page of 22,000 legal treatises on U.S. and British law published from 1800 through 1926. Full-text searching on more than 10 million pages provides researchers access to critical legal history in ways not previously possible.
  
  
• Mark Twain's Mississippi River [RealPlayer]
  Interactive maps, historic images, and audio content, hosted by Northern Illinois University.
  
  
• New York Public Library Digital Library
  Links to NYPL's growing digital collections, which currently include, among others, "African American Women Writers of the 19th Century;" "American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850;" and other collections. Also includes photographic collections.
  
  
• OhioLINK Digital Media Center, Historical & Archival Collections
  A very rich array of materials, including, for example, Oral Histories of the 1970 Kent State shooting and the E.W. Scripps Papers.
  
  
• Oral History Project in Labor History [pdf]
  Interview transcripts of oral histories compiled by Elizabeth Balanoff in the 1970s, hosted by Roosevelt University with a grant from the Illinois State Library.
  
  
• Rutgers Oral History Archives
  Oral history archives of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War.
  
  
• Southern Oral History Program
  The SOHP, at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has recorded over 2,900 interviews. Site includes online audio archives, among other things.
  
  
• Stanton and Anthony Papers Project Online
  Ongoing project to find and digitize all of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony papers that survive. Based at Rutgers, the project includes both manuscript materials and printed texts.
  
  
• Theodore Roosevelt Collection
  Includes works such as "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman", "The Rough Riders", "Through the Brazilian Wilderness", and "The Strenuous Life" from 1900 as well as an early biography of Roosevelt and a bibliography of Roosevelt's writings to 1920.
  
  
• University of Michigan Historical Mathematics Collection
  
  
• University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections
  Photographs, documents, etc. from the University of Washington Libraries, chiefly rare and unique materials. Collections include material on the Pacific Northwest; early Seattle; Alaska-Yukon Exhibition photographs; and similar material.
  
  
• Vietnam War Era Ephemera Collection 
  Online archive from the University of Washington; includes posters, handouts, and other printed ephemera. Divided into thematic categories (for example, race, socialism, etc.).
  
  
• Virginia Center for Digital History (University of Virginia)
  Includes the Valley of the Shadow Project, Virtual Jamestown, and a wealth of other digital resources about the history of Virginia.
  
  
• Voice of the Shuttle
  Listings of resources in a variety of disciplines
  
  
• Wisconsin History, Reference Maps
  From the Wisconsin Historical Society. This is a reference collection of thematic maps that offer spatial representations of different phenomena and occurrences throughout the state's history.
  
  
• Women Physicians, 1850s-1970s
  Created by the Drexel University College of Medicine, this website presents a set of primary documents which tell the story of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and the women trained at that College.
  
  
• Women Working, 1800-1930
  Part of the Harvard Open Collections Program, this database provides approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images focusing on women's role in the U.S. economy.
  
  
• World's Columbian Exposition of 1893
  
  
• World War I Document Archive
  An archive of primary documents, hosted by Brigham Young University. Includes transcribed documents as well as a photograph archive of over 1,800 photos.
  
  
• Yale-UN Oral History Project
  Yale University’s United Nations Studies Program has undertaken an oral history study to preserve the recollections of those involved in international political developments in which the United Nations has played a role. This resource contains transcribed interviews with key players, including United Nations officials and ambassadors from various countries, in major international events in the second half of the 20th century. Interview transcripts are divided into two groups, interviews done 1989-1991 and 1996-2002.

For further information, contact:

Harriet Lightman
Head, Academic Liaison Services
Subject Librarian for History, Economics, and Philosophy
Northwestern University Library
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208-2300
h-lightman@northwestern.edu
(847) 491-2920
Office Location: Room 2622, 2nd Floor, East Tower, Main Library