History Guide

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, created in 2004, is a nonprofit organization established as a public-private partnership between the Library and philanthropist Norman Leventhal. Its mission is to use the collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases for the enjoyment and education of all. This website that includes more than 7,700 digitized maps. The map collection is global in scope, dating from the 15th century to the present, with a particular strength in maps and atlases from the New England region, American Revolutionary War period, nautical charts, and world urban centers.

Digitized maps from all over the world, spanning ancient to modern times.

The majority of items presented here are documented in Panoramic Maps of Cities in the United States and Canada, second edition (1984), by John R. Hébert and Patrick E. Dempsey. Hébert and Dempsey compiled a checklist of 1,726 panoramic maps of U.S. and Canadian cities, the bulk of which were done by Albert Ruger, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, Lucien R. Burleigh, Henry Wellge, and Oakley H. Bailey who prepared more than fifty-five percent of the panoramic maps in the Library of Congress.

Mapping Occupation captures the regions where the United States Army could effectively act as an occupying force in the Reconstruction South. It presents the nuts-and-bolts facts about the Army's presence, movements that are central to understanding the occupation of the South. Viewers can use these maps as a guide through a complex period, a massive data source, and a first step in capturing the federal government's new reach into the countryside.

MapScholar is a free, online platform for geospatial visualization. It enables humanities and social science scholars to create digital “atlases” featuring high-resolution images of historic maps. This web application runs in any internet browser and requires no special software. MapScholar’s user-friendly interface manages geospatial data to make it easy to create and publish simple map collections quickly. MapScholar also supports more sophisticated projects, from data-driven research to the creation of curated exhibitions of cartographic collections. Its suite of tools for image processing, text and graphic annotation, and georeferencing help put maps in context.

This is a collection of “persuasive cartography,” maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs - to send or reinforce messages - rather than to communicate objective geographic information. Maps of this sort have also been described as “suggestive cartography,” “rhetorical cartography” and “propaganda maps." In fact, no map provides an entirely objective view of reality. Even the best-intended cartographer must decide what projection to use, what features to include and what to exclude, what colors, what shading, what text, what images – all of which shape the message communicated by the finished product. Every map is somewhere along a spectrum from objective to subjective, from science to art. We deal here with maps that have crossed a line – itself admittedly subjective – into the preference for communicating some message other than objective geographic information.

A webpage hosted by Fordham University that compiles Byzantine history resources online.

The Giza Project, an international collaboration based at Harvard University, aims to assemble and provide access to all archeological records about the most famous site in the world: the Pyramids, surrounding cemeteries and settlements of Giza, Egypt.

A webpage hosted by Fordham University that compiles medieval history resources online.

Links to bibliographies, electronic publications, images, and classics journals.

This website includes an extensive collection of Ancient Greek and Roman materials including a full library of ancient texts in original languages and English translations, reference materials for classical research, and digital reproductions of ancient art and artifacts.

This is an extensive collection of source materials for research on the Ancient Near East.

The Global Middle Ages Project is an effort by an international collaboration of scholars to see the world whole, c. 500 to 1500 CE, to deliver the stories of lives, objects, and actions in dynamic relationship and change across deep time. GMAP looks at the world in a large swathe of time—as a network of spaces braided into relationship by trade and travel, mobile stories, cosmopolitan religions, global cities, cultural borrowings, traveling technologies, international languages, and even pandemics, climate, and wars.

This site was created in order to present the monuments and buildings of Athens from the Mycenaean period (1600 BCE) to the Early Modern period (AD 1833), through 3D reconstructions. Begin your virtual trip by choosing one of the historical periods from the main menu. The periods were separated by taking into account the significant architectural and city planning changes and not the equivalent historical chronological ones (although they do match to a great extent). Each period includes a list of monuments and areas.

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.

The Indigenous Digital Archive provides access to records that document the history of US government Indian boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Users can explore, annotate and learn from over 500,000 archival documents about Indian boarding schools.

A collection of historical works which contributed to the formation of American politics, culture, and ideals; includes literature and documents which were most relevant to the colonists' lives in America.

This website provides access to the materials digitized as part of the ongoing Colonial North American Project at Harvard University. The project will make available to the world digitized images of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th and 18th century North America. These documents reveal a great deal about topics such as social life, education, trade, finance, politics, revolution, war, women, Native American life, slavery, science, medicine, and religion. In addition to reflecting the origins of the United States, the digitized materials also document aspects of life and work in Great Britain, France, Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico.

Read digitized documents from early American history.

The majority of items presented here are documented in Panoramic Maps of Cities in the United States and Canada, second edition (1984), by John R. Hébert and Patrick E. Dempsey. Hébert and Dempsey compiled a checklist of 1,726 panoramic maps of U.S. and Canadian cities, the bulk of which were done by Albert Ruger, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, Lucien R. Burleigh, Henry Wellge, and Oakley H. Bailey who prepared more than fifty-five percent of the panoramic maps in the Library of Congress.

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, created in 2004, is a nonprofit organization established as a public-private partnership between the Library and philanthropist Norman Leventhal. Its mission is to use the collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases for the enjoyment and education of all. This website that includes more than 7,700 digitized maps. The map collection is global in scope, dating from the 15th century to the present, with a particular strength in maps and atlases from the New England region, American Revolutionary War period, nautical charts, and world urban centers.

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his entire lifetime (1809-1865).

Mapping Occupation captures the regions where the United States Army could effectively act as an occupying force in the Reconstruction South. It presents the nuts-and-bolts facts about the Army's presence, movements that are central to understanding the occupation of the South. Viewers can use these maps as a guide through a complex period, a massive data source, and a first step in capturing the federal government's new reach into the countryside.

“Politics in Graphic Detail: Exploring History through Political Cartoons” is part of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Historic Images, New Technologies (HINT) project, a two-year project that aims to enhance description and discovery of its graphics materials and promote the linking and sharing of content among institutions and scholars.

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Housed at the Library of Congress, this archive primarily depicts life in America during the Great Depression and World War II.

DC History Digital Collections currently contains approximately 900 items from the public collections of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

The NYC Department of Records and Information Services preserves and provides public access to historical and contemporary records and information about New York City government. The Municipal Archives preserves over 200,000 cubic feet of original documents, photographs, ledgers, maps, architectural renderings, manuscripts, and moving images.

Created by Penn State, this web and social media archive documents the diversity of Pennsylvania perspectives around the 2016 U.S. election. The collection includes dedicated election sections on Pennsylvania news outlet websites, campaign websites and social media communications of Pennsylvania candidates for state and federal political offices, websites and social media from statewide political advocacy groups, and the perspectives of university student organizations found on Facebook.

In August 2013, the Library of Congress and WGBH received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to engage in the first phase of a long-term project to preserve public media. During this first phase, they oversaw the digitization of approximately 40,000 hours of programs selected by more than 100 public broadcasting stations throughout the nation. Dating from the 1940s to the 21st century and emanating from all regions of the nation, these programs are now available to scholars, researchers, educators, students, and the general public.

The Programme's aim is to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. This is achieved principally through the award of grants in an annual competition. The grants provide funding to enable successful applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home where possible, to create digital copies of the material and to deposit the copies with local institutions and the British Library. EAP hosts digital collections of materials from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

The Giza Project, an international collaboration based at Harvard University, aims to assemble and provide access to all archeological records about the most famous site in the world: the Pyramids, surrounding cemeteries and settlements of Giza, Egypt.

AODL provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources.

This project curates electronic and digitized copies of historical documents and field research materials, archives, and other sources of information that scholars & researchers of Africa have collected over many years of their work. These resources include copies of field notes, manuscripts, rare books, magazines, pamphlets, pictures and images, and transcripts of interviews, songs, and other audio and visual documents covering periods from before colonization of Africa up until the recent past.

A webpage hosted by Fordham University that compiles African history resources online.

The Programme's aim is to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. This is achieved principally through the award of grants in an annual competition. The grants provide funding to enable successful applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home where possible, to create digital copies of the material and to deposit the copies with local institutions and the British Library. EAP hosts digital collections of materials from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.

The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art contains nearly 300,000 original slides and photographs – photographic documentation of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Japan. The documentation covers in situ works of art and architecture ranging from approximately 2500 B.C.E. to the present, as well as pieces found in most major Asian, European, and American museums.

The Programme's aim is to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. This is achieved principally through the award of grants in an annual competition. The grants provide funding to enable successful applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home where possible, to create digital copies of the material and to deposit the copies with local institutions and the British Library. EAP hosts digital collections of materials from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism. The complex histories of colonization in Southeast Asia have enabled the production of a vibrant (and ethnocentric) multiplicity of accounts by missionaries, travelers, officials, military officers, captains, naturalists, scholars, children, and even a dog. The Southeast Asia Visions collection includes a selection of historically rich primary accounts which range chronologically from the 1550s to the 1920s. These travelogues, letters, official accounts, journals, autobiographies, guidebooks, and photo albums cover Southeast Asia in the main but also include East Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America and other locales. All sources are in English or French and with a few exceptions are written by European and American men and women.

The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia. Participants in the Digital South Asia Library include leading U.S. universities, the Center for Research Libraries, the South Asia Microform Project, the Committee on South Asian Libraries and Documentation, the Association for Asian Studies, the Library of Congress, the Asia Society, the British Library, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, MOZHI in India, the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram in India, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Nepal, and other institutions in South Asia. Search for images, maps, books, statistics, and more.

The Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) exists to provide educators and their students, as well as scholars and members of the general public, with a wide variety of materials published or otherwise produced in Southeast Asia. Drawn largely from the collections of universities and individual scholars in this region, the SEADL contains digital facsimiles of books and manuscripts, as well as multimedia materials and searchable indexes of additional Southeast Asian resources. Nations represented in the collection include Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The Ming Shi-lu (also known as the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty) is a collective name for the successive reign annals of the emperors of Ming China (1368-1644). Each of the shi-lu comprises an account of one emperor's reign, and was compiled after that emperor's death on the basis of a number of sources created during the reign. These collected texts, which run to close to 40,000 pages of unpunctuated, manuscript Classical Chinese constitute one of the most important primary texts of the Ming dynasty, and contain a wealth of materials unrecorded in other sources. The collection can be browsed chronologically by Western date or by reign date, or searched by specific terms. To assist in searches, an index of personal and place names, with their Chinese equivalents appended, is provided separately.

Hosted by Texas Tech University, the Virtual Vietnam Archive contains over 4 million pages of scanned material including documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids. While a large portion of the collection is from military veterans, the archive strives to collect and present all sides and viewpoints of the era.

Europeana Photography opens up Europe’s rich photographic heritage to everyone. The material you find here comes from galleries, libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe that want to share their collections with a wider audience

There is a great deal of interest worldwide in the documents of the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) about former victims of Nazi persecution and the liberated survivors. The ITS has uploaded three collections including photos of personal objects that were taken from the prisoners in the concentration camps, a collection on the death marches, as well as files from the Child Search Branch from the time immediately following the liberation of Nazi victims.

These pamphlets were collected by the Princeton University Library starting from the outbreak of World War I. The collection contains pamphlets published in Europe during and immediately after World War I. They cover a broad range of topics including the economy, the press, the military, arms, territorial disputes, and others. The collection also includes speeches, sermons, bulletins, calendars, and songbooks.

The Programme's aim is to contribute to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide. This is achieved principally through the award of grants in an annual competition. The grants provide funding to enable successful applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home where possible, to create digital copies of the material and to deposit the copies with local institutions and the British Library. EAP hosts digital collections of materials from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

These open access sources are readily available to all -- without fees or subscriptions. Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. In addition you will find video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation. The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural). The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.

A webpage hosted by Fordham University that compiles Islamic and Arab World history resources online.

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.

This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.

Presents online documents and secondary discussions which reflect the various ways of looking at the history of women within broadly defined historical periods and areas.

The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. Subject strengths include birth control and reproductive rights, women's rights, suffrage, the contemporary women's movement across race, class, and sexual orientation, U.S. women working abroad, the arts (especially theatre), the professions (especially journalism and social work), and middle-class family life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.

The Long 19th Amendment Project portal is a digital gateway to archival collections, datasets, teaching materials, and scholarship that help us tell a more complex and inclusive story about gender and voting rights in America.

This collection contains manifestos, speeches, essays, and other materials documenting various aspects of the Women's Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women's Liberation Movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, and equal pay. Feminist print culture, such as the examples provided in the collection, supported and sustained the Women¹s Movement and connect it to other movements for social justice.

Women Working, 1800–1930 is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University.

Seven major figures in twentieth-century suffragist history are represented here with full-length oral histories. These include Alice Paul, Sara Bard Field, Burnita Shelton Matthews, Helen Valeska Bary, Jeannette Rankin, Carrie Chapman Catt,Mabel Vernon, and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher.

Gifts of Speech is a non-profit project, sponsored by Sweet Briar College, dedicated to preserving and creating access to speeches by inspirational, influential and contemporary, women from around the world. The site hosts nearly 700 speeches from women all over the world.

The Global Feminisms Project is a collaborative international oral history project that examines the history of feminist activism, women's movements, and academic women's studies in sites around the world. The current archive includes interviews with women's movement activists and women's studies scholars in China, India, Nicaragua, Poland, and the United States.

HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site.

Visit this site, hosted by Michigan State University, to search over numerous datasets and reconstruct the lives of people involved in the historical slave trade. Browse interconnected data, generate visualizations, and explore short biographies of enslaved and freed peoples.

In this freely accessible website, Proquest presents primary source documents from several time periods in American History. It contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom: 1) Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860); 2) The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877); 3) Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932); 4) The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945); 5) The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975); and 6) The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

Mapping Prejudice reveals how racial covenants dovetailed with redlining and predatory lending practices to depress home-ownership rates for African Americans in the Minneapolis, MN area.

Redlining directed both public and private capital to native-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families. As homeownership was arguably the most significant means of intergenerational wealth building in the United States in the twentieth century, these redlining practices from eight decades ago had long-term effects in creating wealth inequalities that we still see today. Mapping Inequality, we hope, will allow and encourage you to grapple with this history of government policies contributing to inequality.

Created by veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement (1951-1968), this website makes available documents from the perspective of those whose boots were on the ground. The collection is about the Civil Rights Movement of 1951-1968, which is also called the "Freedom Movement" — a period of protests and political struggles throughout America to win freedom from race-based discrimination, oppression, and exploitation, to end racial segregation, and to win voting rights for all regardless of race.

The #blacklivesmatter Web Archive contains news articles, blogs, social media, and other websites related to Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, protests and demonstrations around the country, and seeks to document the movement as it grows and evolves.

Documenting Ferguson is a freely available resource that seeks to preserve and make accessible the digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Preserve the Baltimore Uprising is a digital repository that seeks to preserve and make accessible original content that was captured and created by individual community members, grassroots organizations, and witnesses to protests against police brutality, vigilantism, and racial injustice and inequality. The project began after the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015. Gray died from injuries sustained while in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland. It has expanded to include subsequent protests and calls for action in Baltimore against systemic racism.

A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens. Organized in Summer 2015 by Cleveland residents and professional archivists from across the U.S., the archive hopes to provide the Cleveland community--especially survivors of police violence and the families of victims-- a safe and secure space to share any testimony, documents, or accounts that narrate or reflect on encounters or effects of police violence in their lives and communities.

The After Violence Archive was created in 2021 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It serves as an online repository for materials (interviews, correspondence, art, and other items) documenting state-sanctioned violence in the United States, collected by Texas After Violence Project from 2007-present. The After Violence Archive also contains materials from partner collections, the Forced Trajectory Project and the Inside Books Project Archive.

Project STAND is an online clearinghouse where academic institutions can provide researchers a centralized access point to historical and archival documentation on the development and on-going occurrences of student dissent. Project STAND focuses on digital and analog primary sources that document the activities of student groups that represent the concerns of historically marginalized communities (e.g. African American, Chicano/a, LGBTQ, religious minorities, disabled, etc.).

The Occupy Archive is a collection of digitized Occupy Movement materials and ephemera collected from 2011-2018. By Case Western Reserve University.

These pamphlets were collected by the Princeton University Library starting from the outbreak of World War I. The collection contains pamphlets published in Europe during and immediately after World War I. They cover a broad range of topics including the economy, the press, the military, arms, territorial disputes, and others. The collection also includes speeches, sermons, bulletins, calendars, and songbooks.

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Housed at the Library of Congress, this archive primarily depicts life in America during the Great Depression and World War II.

The Museum at FIT is one of a select group of specialized fashion museums. Search their collections online (by time period).

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of more than 33,000 objects representing seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present. Explore the collection online.

Over 400 fashion plates from the 19th and early 20th centuries of women's and men's costume. The digitized images that depict styles and dress from the Empire (1806-1813) to Edwardian (1901-1915) periods, are drawn from some of the leading fashion journals of the time.

Spanning five centuries, the V&A's Fashion collection is the largest and most comprehensive collection of dress in the world. Key items in the collection include rare 17th century gowns, 18th century ‘mantua’ dresses, 1930s evening wear, 1960s daywear and post-war couture.

Search the Costume and Textiles Collection for prints, books, photographs, and more.

Explore over 400 stories by curators from leading institutions across the world.