University Archives & Special Collections

This category includes maps that depict individual buildings to panoramic views of large urban areas. These maps record the evolution of cities illustrating the development and nature of economic activities, educational and religious facilities, parks, street patterns and widths, and transportation systems.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection focuses on 16th through 21st century maps of North and and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps including pocket, wall, children's and manuscript maps. The online selection is an expanding cross section of images designed to highlight the depth and breadth of the collection. The digital images and associated descriptive data are copyright Cartography Associates. The physical map collection is housed at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University.

The National Map’s Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC) is a digital repository of USGS 1:250,000 scale and larger maps printed between 1884, the inception of the topographic mapping program, and 2006. The National Geospatial Program (NGP) is accurately cataloging and creating metadata to accompany high-resolution, geo-referenced digital files representing the legacy lithographic maps. These maps are either no longer available for distribution in print or are being replaced by the new generation of US Topo maps.

Discover 37,080,103 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

Variety of collections on American History, World Cultures & History, Performing Arts, Local History & Folklife, and much more, in a variety of formats.

Digital Collections is the National Library of Medicine's free online repository of biomedical resources including books, manuscripts, still images, videos, and maps. The content in Digital Collections is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. Digital Collections provides unique access to NLM's rich historical resources, as well as select modern resources.

Our digital collections include over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts (available in either our Digital Library or as part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library) as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs.

Many of our physical collections have not yet been digitized. Some of the resources listed below - such Trade Literature and Art and Artist Files - are portals for searching the inventories of those collections.

Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Thanks to a major gift from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library launched a five-year effort to add rare and unique items from the Library's vast African-American collections to the National Digital Library.

This guide is not comprehensive, but it highlights a diverse collection of free websites of primary sources for the study of the war. These websites include digitized newspaper archives for both the Union and Confederate sides of the struggle, collections of letters and diaries, digitized photographs, maps, and official records and dispatches from the battlefields.

The Civil War Letters Collection was created with the CONTENTdm software's innovative new program, JPEG 2000, which enables materials to be displayed in a higher quality, more usable online format. This new software includes pan and zoom capabilities which allows the user to move in and out of the image and move across the image to display the details. In addition, transcriptions were provided to allow for easier interpretation of the letters. The letters and other materials in this collection were scanned using a Microtek ScanMaker 9600XL saved as TIFF files, manipulated in Adobe PhotoShop to achieve the best and clearest possible digital image and loaded into the Contentdm JPEG 2000 software and linked with descriptive metadata.

From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these “Colored Conventions” brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture. These are arranged below in alphabetical order. Click on any collection to access an index of materials limited to that collection. To view an index of all materials in this digital library choose "Authors," "Titles," or "Subjects" from the navigation bar at the top of this page. Some materials are cross-referenced in multiple collections.

Most of the items presented here are documented in Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress, compiled by Richard W. Stephenson in 1989. New selections from 2,240 maps and 76 atlases held by the Library will be added monthly.

The War Memorabilia Collection provides a wide scope of the major wars that involved the United States Military up to World War II. Included are records pertaining to the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), Civil War (1861-1865), Spanish-American War (1898), Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1941-1945). Particularly significant items include World War II 16 mm newsreels films for selling U.S. war bonds; 15 World War II scrapbooks of newspaper clippings; Don C. Eckels' World War I memorabilia pertaining to American Expeditionary Forces servicemen in France from 1918-1919; the Durkee and Blackdon family letters covering military and personal family matters from 1771-1802 and 1862-1893, which were donated by Miss Florence Durkee of Brea, California in 1973.

From the LOC: Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.

While treaties between Indigenous peoples and the United States affect virtually every area in the USA, there is as yet no official list of all the treaties. The US National Archives holds 374 of the treaties, where they are known as the Ratified Indian Treaties. Here you can view them for the first time with key historic works that provide context to the agreements made and the histories of our shared lands.

This guide is for archival resources relating to Indigenous communities of present-day California at The Bancroft Library. Before contact (the meeting of Indigenous peoples and Europeans), this land was home to many dozens of groups of Native peoples with different languages and ways of life. Many of these tribal communities are alive and thriving today. Over the last 100+ years, The Bancroft Library has collected and received resources relating to these specific communities in the way of written descriptions of language, belief systems, and customs; first person-narratives from Native individuals; descriptions of the treatment and experience of Indigenous people in the Mission system; records from Intertribal Organizations; photographs of tribal communities, artistic, and cultural items; and much more. This guide will provide a more accessible way to locate items related to specific California language families, tribes, and communities, as well as materials to support cultural and linguistic preservation and revitalization. Please note, that while we have organized thousands of resources in this guide, it is not exhaustive and does not include pictorial materials or all secondary sources related to Indigenous communities held at The Bancroft Library. Pictorial materials and additional selected secondary sources will be added at a later date.

North American Indian Thought and Culture brings together more than 100,000 pages, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find. The project integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files for the first time. The result is a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them.

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, and employed such photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans. The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic.

It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of 1918 has been overlooked in the teaching of American history. Documentation of the disease is ample, as shown in the records selected from the holdings of the National Archives regional archives. Exhibiting these documents helps the epidemic take its rightful place as a major disaster in world history.

The Library of Congress collections contain stories of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic as told by ordinary people, documented by folklorists, linguists, and others as they collected personal histories and folklore. Several of these are available online and a selection will be presented here, with links at the end under “Resources” where more can be found. You may also be interested in a recent webcast from the Library of Congress, “John M. Barry on ‘The Great Influenza,'” April 7, 2020.

The GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity.

The mission of the Lambda Archives of San Diego is to collect, preserve, and share the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in San Diego, Northern Baja California and the Imperial County region.

The LGBT Community Center National History Archive is a community-based archive that collects, preserves and makes available to the public the documentation of LGBTQ lives and organizations centered in and around New York. Through our collections, we enable the stories and experiences of New York’s LGBTQ people to be told with historical depth and understanding.

NARA's holdings include:
-- 1778 documentation of the expulsion of a gay officer, Lt. Frederick Enslin from the U.S. army during the Revolutionary War
-- Personnel records of former federal employee Walt Whitman
-- Patent applications of Alan Turing, the British mathematician widely considered the father of the computer age, and subject of the docudrama Codebreaker and feature film The Imitation Game;
-- Court filings from pioneering DC political activist Frank Kameny protesting his dismissal from government service because he was gay.
-- A letter to President Carter from Harvey Milk, one of the first openly-gay elected officials in the United States;
-- The legislation that overturned the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy.
-- The Defense of Marriage Act and the Supreme Court decision which overturned it.

The LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive collects and preserves online content which documents LGBTQ+ history, scholarship, and culture in the United States and around the world. Sites include domestic and international non-profit organizations, journalism and news external link, creative works and expressions, historical records, and more. Collection priorities include primary sources, first-hand accounts, coverage of significant events, and essential artifacts of cultural memory. This collection seeks to illuminate LBGTQ+ voices, from margin to center.

Mapping the Gay Guides believes that mapping Damron’s guidebooks can offer valuable insight into the queer world beginning in the 1960s and into the present. Our research team has begun turning the thousands of listings within the guides into usable, functioning data to allow researchers to make connections between historical queer communities. Mapping this data allows us to display the distribution of locations and explore the growth of the queer communities over time.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries is the largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world.

A-Z Databases: History: Newspapers. Requires CSUF faculty/student log in credentials.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

This database contains over 1 million historical newspaper pages from Stars and Stripes, the independent daily newspaper of the U.S. military.

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, and employed such photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans. The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

The Look Magazine Photograph Collection is a vast photographic archive created to illustrate Look Magazine and related publications produced by companies founded by Gardner Cowles. The cataloged portion of the collection totals some four million published and unpublished images made by photographers working for Look, most dating 1952-1971. With its coverage of U.S. and international lifestyles, celebrities, and events, the collection offers insight into the magazine's photojournalistic documentation of aspects of society and culture--particularly American society and culture--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Cowles Communications donated the bulk of the archive to the Library of Congress in 1971, after Look magazine ceased publication.

Stereographs consist of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, usually when viewed through a stereoscope. The Prints & Photographs Division's holdings include images produced from the 1850s to the 1940s, with the bulk of the collection dating between 1870 and 1920. The online images feature cities and towns around the world, expeditions and expositions, industries, disasters, and portraits of Native Americans, presidents, and celebrities.

Link to more than 500 political prints made in America during the 18th
and 19th centuries. Search the entire collection by subject or click on the terms “political cartoons” or “caricatures.”

A comprehensive compilation of resources for political cartoons. Please note that the links on this page are not maintained by our librarians.

These resources are meant to assist teachers in preparing lesson plans for teaching with cartoons.

Collection of contemporary political cartoons, updated daily.

CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS OF SEVEN MAJOR SHAPERS OF THE UNITED STATES:
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Over 185,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.

The collection represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean. Most of the items presented here are documented in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee in 1981. The bibliography contains approximately 2,000 maps and charts. Over the next several years many of the maps and charts in this bibliography will be added to the online collection each month.

The War Memorabilia Collection provides a wide scope of the major wars that involved the United States Military up to World War II. Included are records pertaining to the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), Civil War (1861-1865), Spanish-American War (1898), Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1941-1945). Particularly significant items include World War II 16 mm newsreels films for selling U.S. war bonds; 15 World War II scrapbooks of newspaper clippings; Don C. Eckels' World War I memorabilia pertaining to American Expeditionary Forces servicemen in France from 1918-1919; the Durkee and Blackdon family letters covering military and personal family matters from 1771-1802 and 1862-1893, which were donated by Miss Florence Durkee of Brea, California in 1973.

From early topographical sketches and pioneers’ accounts, to photographs of Buffalo Bill and his ‘Wild West’ stars, explore the fact and the fiction of westward expansion in America from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Browse a wide range of rare and original documents including printed books, journals, historic maps, broadsides, periodicals, advertisements, photographs, artwork and more.

Comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920. Also included is the thirty-two-volume set of manuscript sources entitled Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, published between 1904 and 1907.

Meeting of Frontiers is a project, originally funded by the United States Congress, devoted to the theme of the exploration and settlement of the American West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

The one hundred and eighty-eight photographs sent by John C.H. Grabill to the Library of Congress for copyright protection between 1887 and 1892 are thought to be the largest surviving collection of this gifted, early Western photographer's work. Grabill's remarkably well-crafted, sepia-toned images capture the forces of western settlement in South Dakota and Wyoming and document its effects on the area's indigenous communities.

Portrays the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's General Collections and Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

This collection includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

The Schlesinger Library holdings date from the founding of the United States to the present and include more than 3,200 manuscript collections, 100,000 volumes of books and periodicals, and films, photos, and audiovisual resources for research on the history of women in America: Women's rights and feminism; Health and sexuality; Work and family life; Education and the professions; and Culinary history and etiquette.

Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000 is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history generally and at the same time make those insights accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools. The collection currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.Those subscribing to this collection can access the online version of Notable American Women and the database on Commissions on the Status of Women.

On August 18, 1920, Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women across the country the right to vote. This historic moment was largely the result of the work of activists and organizations advocating for universal voting rights. This set of primary sources—photos, advertisements, maps, and other documents—sheds light on that struggle toward the Nineteenth Amendment.