Dr. Kurt Hackemer

Useful Digitized Online Resources

As a general rule, I retain a healthy skepticism of research conducted on the web, especially because anyone can post anything they want. However, there are exceptions. I find reputable sites that post digitized images of primary resources very useful. Here are a few to consider.

To search for other digital collections, check out the ARL Digital Initiatives Database, a Web-based registry for descriptions of digital initiatives in or involving libraries.

• The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives - Provides access 5.5 million photographs taken over occupied Western Europe by the Allies during World War II.
• 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.
• American Memory Collection from the Library of Congress - Highlights include Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 (contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves), A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875, Journals of the Continental Congress, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Elliot's Debates: The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Farrand's Debates: The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Bills and Resolutions, Statutes at Large, the American State Papers, the US Serial Set (selected), the House Journal, the Senate Journal, the Senate Executive Journal, Maclay's Journal: Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789-1791, the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates, the Congressional Globe, the Congressional Record, Civil War Maps, 1861-1865, the Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room, Newspaper Pictorials: WWI Rotogravures, The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals, and Stars and Stripes February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919
• Atlantic County, NJ Civil War Newspapers
• The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record - The thousand images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.
• Brooklyn Daily Eagle - The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published from 1841 to 1955, then revived for a short time from 1960 to 1963. This site covers the period from October 26, 1841 to December 31, 1902, representing half of the Eagle's years of publication. This period includes all of the years for which there is no index as well as the eleven years during which an index was published. Approximately 147,000 pages of newspaper in various digital formats are contained in this online repository. Access can be gained either by date of issue or by keyword searching.
• Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives - Contains several collections that include manuscripts, images, broadsides, newspapers, sheet music and other objects.
• California Digital Newspaper Collection
• Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts - Offers a simple and straightforward means to discover medieval manuscripts available on the web.
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers - Library of Congress project that allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
• Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library - Digital images of documents from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
• Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War - During the Second World War, the staff of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper kept its own monumental record of the war. This collection of more than 144,000 newspaper articles, manually clipped, stamped with the date, and arranged by subject, includes news stories and editorials from newspapers, mostly Canadian, documenting every aspect of the war.
• Digital and Multimedia Center at Michigan State University - Includes materials on American Cookbooks, American Radicalism, Catechism of the Steam Engine, Comic Art, Early French Material, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fables, Fencing, Indian Cessions, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, MSU Student Radicalism, Nomenclature of British Insect, Occult Philosophy, Osteopathy, Robert C. Kedzie, Speculum, Sunday School Books, Temperance, the Captives of the Amistad, the Masses, Veterinary Medicine, and Women & Botany.
• Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. Seuss
• Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History - Provides access to typescripts of interviews (1967 -1972) conducted with hundreds of Indians in Oklahoma regarding the histories and cultures of their respective nations and tribes.
• ECO: Early Canadiana Online - Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital library providing access to 2,009,084 pages of Canada's printed heritage. It features works published from the time of the first European settlers up to the early 20th Century.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives
• Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection - The Gilmer maps are an extensive group of Civil War maps, including both manuscript maps and printed maps with manuscript annotations and engineers' drawings of military construction.
• Historic Government Publications from World War II
• Historical Picture Collections
• Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties - Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler, this historically significant, seven volume compilation contains U.S. treaties, laws and executive orders pertaining to Native American Indian tribes. The volumes cover U.S. Government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883 (Volume II) and U.S. laws and executive orders concerning Native Americans from 1871-1970 (Volumes I, III-VII).
• The Internet Archive - A digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form. Includes texts (out of copyright), movies, live music and audio files. All can be downloaded and all are free.
• Internet Library of Early Journals - A digital library of 18th and 19th Century British journals, including the Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Note and Queries, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and The Builder.
• Jacksonville (AL) Republican newspaper
• Letters from World War One and Two - Primary source website dedicated to databasing as much mail from soldiers of World War One and Two as possible and making them freely available online. Site contains hundreds of letters, envelopes, stamps, photos and miscellanous items.
• Lewis & Clark: A Journey - Celebrates the bicentennial of the expedition by providing resources for education and research from the collections of the University of Cincinnati Libraries and beyond.
• Library of American Political History Images

• The Library of Virginia Digital Library Program - The Digital Library Program transfers rare and unique Virginia materials into an integrated, user-friendly electronic research environment. Since its inception in 1995, the Program has digitized more than 2.2 million original documents, photographs, and maps, and produced more than 80 fully-searchable databases, indexes, and electronic finding aids.

• The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2004 - Includes not only television commercials for the 1952-2008 period, but also web-based advertising since 2004.
• The LOUISiana Digital Library - Click the "Collections" link to see everything that is available. Contains several searchable collections, including "The American Missionary Association and the Promise of a Multicultural America: 1839-1954," "French Colonization of Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase Map Collection," "From Diversity, Strength: A People's History of Louisiana, 1800-1815," "Siege of Port Hudson Louisiana 1863," "John H. Randolph and Family Letters," and "Norman (E. B. and N. Philip) Collection of Steamboat Photographs."
• Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History Project - Provided by the Scripps Library at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. A collection of over 1,150 interview transcripts from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, may be viewed online in .pdf format. Each interview is fully searchable.
• Making of America at the University of Michigan - This collection contains images of 8500 books and over 50,000 articles with 19th century imprints. The site has a powerful search engine that lets you search the text of all of the books and articles. This site focuses on monographs in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, science and technology, and religion, although there are many articles available as well.
• Making of America at Cornell University - This collection provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.The site has a powerful search engine that lets you search the text of all of the books and articles. This site focuses on the major journal literature of the period, ranging from general interest publications to those with more targeted audiences (such as agriculture). Highlights include The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion
• National Archives - Researchers should start with the Archival Research Catalog (ARC), the gateway to searching digital and non-digital records at the National Archives. You might also find Films available through Google Video to be useful.
• National Photographic Archive and Film Collections of Historic and Social Importance 
• National Security Agency/Central Security Service Declassification Initiatives - NSA/CSS periodically releases declassified documents or indexes to these documents to the public. Specific initiatives provide documents on the Gulf of Tonkin, USS Liberty, VENONA, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy Assassination and the Truman Memorandum.
• The National Security Archive at The George Washington University - National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Books provide online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and more.
• New Orleans Bee
• The New South (SC) Newspaper - Port Royal and Beaufort, SC
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery - NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
• Newspaper Archives of Cedar Rapids Public Library
• Newspaperarchive.com - Contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1759 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy to quickly explore historical content.
• The Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection
• The Online Archive of California - Brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections are available.
• Online Collections from the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress - Includes the Abraham Lincoln Papers, Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929, The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, 1862-1939, African American Odyssey exhibition (digital images), The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920, The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s, Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection, and Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years.
• The Open Library - The Open Library website was created by the Internet Archive to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online. The vision is to create free web access to important book collections from around the world. Books are scanned and then offered in an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.
• Popular Culture: Resources for Critical Analysis - Links pages of digitized resources and articles, sorted by category.
• Public Domain Torrents - A collection that describes itself as "movies that made history... sort of."
• Puck's Homepage: Uniting Mugwumps and the Masses - Discusses how the cartoons in Joseph Keppler's satirical magazine Puck conveyed the liberal viewpoint during the 1880's.
• Quincy (IL) Historical Newspaper Archive
• Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University - Digitized collections posted here include, Medicine and Madison Avenue; Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920; William Gedney Photographs and Writings; Ad*Access, Historic American Sheet Music; Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters; The Urban Landscape Digital Image Access Project; Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement; George Percival Scriven: An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899-1901; African-American Women; Civil War Women; Duke Papyrus.
• Red Scare - An image database about the period in the history of the United States immediately following World War I. The dates are approximately from the Armistice in November of 1918 to the collapse of hyper-inflation in mid-1920.
• Suffolk (NY) Historic Newspapers
• Truman Presidential Library Digital Archives - Includes materials on the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, Recognition of Israel, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, Desegregation of the Armed Forces, the 1948 Campaign, the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
• Turning the Pages - Digital images of great books and manuscripts from the British Library.
• United States Military Academy History Department Map Library - Digital representations from the six atlases and nearly one thousand maps in the History Department's collection, encompassing not only America's wars but global conflicts as well.
• United States Military Academy Library Digital Collections - The U.S. Military Academy Library maintains extensive documentation of the history of West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, and Academy alumni in its Special Collections and Archives. These rich historical collections include extensive book, manuscript, and photograph holdings among other formats.
• University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service - DLPS provides access to over 200 text, image, and finding aid collections that collectively provide access to over a million digital objects. Some are restricted to University of Michigan users but many are public. Some highlights: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Basler edition), the Digital General Collection (books from the University of Michigan collection, scanned for preservation purposes), the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, the Transportation History Collection: Railroads, and The United States and Its Territories: 1870-1925: The Age of Imperialism, which contains the full text of monographs and government documents published in the United States, Spain, and the Philippines between 1870 and 1925. The primary focus of the material is the Spanish-American war and subsequent American governance (approximately 1898-1910).
• University of Washington Library Digital Collections
• University of Wisconsin Digital Collections - Offers a wide array of digitized materials. SELECTED highlights include Foreign Relations of the United States - selected volumes and the Great Lakes Maritime History Project
• The History Collection - Selected by librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists along a wide range of criteria, this collection includes published materials as well as archival documents. The items were digitized from a variety of formats including books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and other resources.
• Portal to Asian Internet Resources
• University of Utah Digital Collections
• Winona (MN) Daily Republican newspaper
• World Digital Library - A United Nations project that makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.