HIS300 American Beginnings Research Guide

Primary resources thematically organized with notes and discussion questions. Historical documents, literary texts, and works of art.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later. Produced by the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Digitized collections of primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more millions of digital items from several hundred of the Library of Congress' historical collections.

The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World. A project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

Provides digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Organized by time period. From the Yale Law Library.

A collection of exploration and colonial documents, including important journals of exploration, reports of New World settlements, early political tracts on self-governing. Also included are narratives on colonial life and slavery and indentured servitude. Contains context, biographical info, and critical analysis for each document.

Offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. Contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners.

Written by Elizabeth Donnan (1883-1955). Published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. 4 volume set.

First hand accounts of events throughout the history of the world. Image rich.

A digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, will make some 55,000 documents of the early War Department many long thought irretrievable but now reconstructed through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public.

Online sources divided into United States and World History

Primary goal of the project: Ensure that slave houses, irreplaceable pieces of history, are not lost forever.

Dedicated to identifying, cataloging, and digitally preserving endangered archival materials documenting the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic World. Hosted at Vanderbilt University,

Has information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the principal sponsor of the project, and it is an Emory University Digital Library Research Initiative.