American Memory: A gateway to the Library of Congress’s vast resources of digitized American historical materials. Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections.
American HIstory: Browse the Library of Congress' online collections of American history by time period or subject.
World History and Cultures: Browse the Library of Congress' online collections of world history by geographic region.
The Digital Public Library of America is a portal to digital resources from archives, libraries, and museums around the country that provides access to millions of items that can be searched by timeline, map, format, or topic. It is super easy to browse chronologically, for example, and identify items and collections that are incredibly useful.
The Bancroft Library: The primary special collections library at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the largest and most heavily used libraries of manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials in the United States. A world of primary sources, browse by collection or search.
Smithsonian Collections: An immense colection of national and international heritage, Browse by topic or search through millions of objects spanning over a billion years of history.
New York Public Library Digital Collections - search through hundreds of thousands of digital items from this world renown collection. After submitting a search use the browse options on the left to narrow down.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History - browse the Met’s collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history to gain access to and information about thousands of art objects that may be considered as primary sources.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): The nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept in the Archives forever.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth): A digital publishing initiative from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Mark Twain Project Online: Browse Twain’s letters, manuscripts, and autobiography at the online archives of the personal papers of America’s most famous wit.
The National Archives and Records Adminsitration operates the presidential libraries going back to Herbert Hoover. The digital collections for these libraries contain a variety of primary resources including papers, letters, photos, recordings, political cartoons and more. The documents cover the private and public lives of the presidents.
