LibGuides: Social Studies: U.S. History

Online Resources & Tools

Information Literacy
by Mallory Cornett Last Updated Jul 26, 2022 883 views this year

American Panorama
“Hisotical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.”
American Social History Project
"Based at The City University of New York Graduate Center, ASHP/CML produces print, visual, and multimedia materials that explore the richly diverse social and cultural history of the United States."
Avalon Project
Documents in law, history, and diplomacy from the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Library
Best of History Websites
"Links to over 1200 history-related web sites that have been reviewed for quality, accuracy, and usefulness"
Digital and Online Resources in North American/US Histories, c. 1491-1865
"a basic, up-to-date list of digital and online resources pertaining to key topics in U.S. history through 1865"
Digital History
"The materials on this Web site include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, supplemented by primary sources on
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slavery, Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multmedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a database of annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images."
Directory of Open Access Journals
"DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals."
HathiTrust Digital Library
"A partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future"
History Matters
"Designed for high school and college teachers and students, History Matters serves as a gateway to web resources and offers other useful materials for teaching U.S. history."
Library of Congress
"The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office."
Mapping History (University of Oregon)
"Designed to provide interactive and animated representations of fundamental historical problems and/or illustrations of historical events, developments, and dynamics."
National Archives
"Our Mission is to provide public access to Federal Government records in our custody and control. Public access to government records strengthens democracy by allowing Americans to claim their rights of citizenship, hold their government accountable, and understand their history so they can participate more effectively in their government."
The New Immigrants
Free iTunes app. "An extraordinary collection of 100-plus primary and secondary sources and images related to the second wave of wave of U.S. immigration in The New Immigrants NYC 1880-1924."
Online Archive of California
"The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions,
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including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses."
The Public Domain Review
"an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas" in the public domain
Smithsonian Collections Search Center
"Search over 14.0 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 3.0 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts."
StoryCorps
"StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world."
SweetSearch
"SweetSearch leverages Google to search only a fully vetted "whitelist" of websites. The original index was created by 50+ librarians, educators and researchers who collectively invested over 100,000 hours in finding the best resources."
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
"The Voyages website is the most comprehensive source of data currently available on the trans-Atlantic slave trade."
Visualizing Emancipation
Digital Humanities Project. "The University of Richmond's time lapse mapping of emancipation events from 1861 to 1866"

Primary Sources

AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History
Primary sources categorized by year.
American Memory (Library of Congress)
"Free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience."
American Rhetoric
“Index to and growing database of 5000+ full text, audio and video (streaming) versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two."
Colonial North America at Harvard Library
"When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 470,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America."
Digital Public Library of America
"DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.
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All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format."
Documenting the American South
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.
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Currently, DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs."
Founders Online
"Freely available online, the historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America"
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
"More than 70,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World to soldiers’ letters from World War II and Vietnam."
Google Arts & Culture
"Discover exhibits and collections from museums and archives all around the world. Explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail, from hidden gems to masterpieces. Search Collections and Museum View Only to 'walk through' the virtual space."
History Is A Weapon
Open access to current and historical works from The Diario of Christopher Columbus (1492) to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
"A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use."
Making of America (Cornell University Library)
"Making of America (MOA) represents a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and make accessible through digital technology a significant body of primary sources related to the development of the U.S. infrastructure."
New York Public Library Digital Collections
"A living database. Explore 746,647+ items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections."
Our Documents
"100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965."
Papers of Abraham Lincoln Digital Library
"The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing online all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809-1865)."

Databases and Topics

American Revolution
Boston Tea Party
British Colonialism
Civil War
Reconstruction
and more
Video Tutorials for U.S. History in Context
Learn how to navigate the database and use tools for bookmarking, citation, downloading to Google Drive, and more.

Library Materials

Library Catalog
Gale eBooks
Project Gutenberg
Offers over 57,000 free eBooks
ACLS Humanities E-Book
"a digital collection of over 5,400 seminal books in the humanities and related social sciences"

Alexander Hamilton, Revolutionary by Martha Brockenbrough
Call Number: 973.4092 BROCKENBROUGH
ISBN: 9781250123190
Publication Date: 2017-09-05
The Battle for North America by Francis Parkman; John Tebbel (Editor)
Call Number: 971.01 PARKMAN
ISBN: 1842124161
Publication Date: 2001-12-31
The Collected What If? by William H. McNeill; Robert Cowley (Editor); Stephen E. Ambrose; Caleb Carr; David McCullough; John Lukas; John Keegan; James Bradley; Cecelia Holland; Alistair Horne
Call Number: 355.48 COWLEY
ISBN: 9780399152382
Publication Date: 2006-06-01
The Early Republic by John R. Vile
ISBN: 9781440843457
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
In the Shadow of Liberty by Kenneth C. Davis
Call Number: 306.362 DAVIS
ISBN: 9781627793117
Publication Date: 2016-09-20
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Call Number: 305.800973 KENDI
ISBN: 9781568584638
Publication Date: 2016-04-12
This Land Is Our Land by Linda Barrett Osborne
Call Number: 304.80973 OSBORNE
ISBN: 9781419716607
Publication Date: 2016-04-12