Digitized History Resources by S Matkin-Rawn

WPA Ex- Slave Narratives

UCAHist — 2015-07-21 21:00:15 UTC

Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, recorded over 2,000 interviews with former slaves. The Library Congress has an excellent introduction to their digitized collection of these interviews. Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) also has the complete interviews digitized by volume and state.

Behind the Veil

UCAHist — 2015-07-21 21:07:41 UTC

A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Documenting the American South

UCAHist — 2015-07-21 21:14:07 UTC

An incredibly rich collection of digitized (and searchable) books, correspondence, and first-person accounts shedding light on the history of the U.S. South from colonial times through the early 20th century.

Internet Archive

UCAHist — 2015-07-22 14:04:25 UTC

Envisioned by its creator as the "Library of Alexandria 2.0," archive.org has several amazing collections: the "Wayback Machine," which has archived webpages dating back to 1996, the Prelinger Collection, which contains some 48,000 newsreels and short films, concert recordings (including 9000 rare recordings of the grateful dead), the Internet Arcade, where you can play old coin-operated video games from the 1970s, and -- of course -- millions of digitized books.

NYPL Digital Collections

UCAHist — 2015-07-22 14:29:06 UTC

Searcheable database of over 800,000 items from the New York Public Library Collections. NYPL strengths include theater history, LGBT activism, and, of course, the history of New York City.

AfricaMap

UCAHist — 2015-07-22 14:32:08 UTC

This remarkable resource from Harvard University lets you interact with and visualize an astounding amount of contemporary and historical statistical data about the continent -- everything from trade routes and important architectural sites to health statistics, language groups, and population density.

Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians

UCAHist — 2015-07-22 14:40:50 UTC

Charlotte Bronte's childhood writings, an early draft of The Importance of Being Ernest, even a lock of Shelley's hair: the British Library has created a relative small (1,200 or so items) but popular collection of digitized Victoriana.

Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press

UCAHist — 2015-07-22 14:47:49 UTC

The University of Arizona's digital, searchable collection of Mexican and Mexican American newspapers and journals published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.

Civil Rights Digital Library

UCAHist — 2015-08-18 14:11:13 UTC

CRDL is famous for its news footage of civil rights activism, but its new, digitized archive of the newspaper Southern School News is, hands down, my (Dr. Matkin-Rawn) favorite new digitized source. Southern School News is an amazing resource for telling the stories of the African American students who desegregated schools across the South, and the communities that supported and defied them.

Colonial Virginia

2015-08-18 14:41:34 UTC

This collection is absolutely incredible. I has digitized wills and inventories from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, newspapers, ledgers, and archaeological reports. Everything they've done has also been transcribed so it is easy to work with (you don't have to spend your time trying to decipher old hand writing and unusual spelling!

Founding Fathers Online

2015-08-18 14:45:27 UTC

Need a great quote on something from Franklin, Washington, Adams, Hamilton, or Madison? This is your one-stop-shop. The papers are all searchable, so you can get right to the quote about slavery or uncomfortable lodging.

A Wide Array of Early American Primary Sources

2015-08-18 17:36:53 UTC

This is a "treasure trove" of sorts--a great array of major primary sources in early America's history. Check it out!

Benjamin Franklin Papers

2015-08-18 17:40:02 UTC

Almost all of Benjamin Franklin's Papers...digitized.

The American Revolution and Maryland's Press

2015-08-18 17:43:12 UTC

A fantastic site that details the American Revolution through Maryland's Newspapers.

Rag Linen

2015-08-18 17:43:37 UTC

An online resource of newspapers during the American Revolution

Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project

UCAHist — 2015-08-18 18:27:18 UTC

This Oklahoma University and National Indian Law Library project has digitized numerous legal documents (constitutions, treaties, law codes, etc.) relating to native nations' struggles for tribal sovereignty in the United States.

250 Outstanding Digital Archives

UCAHist — 2015-08-21 15:42:25 UTC

A U.S.- and Canada- focused list of digital archives organized mostly by state, courtesy of Open Educational Database. Even browsing the list of archives may give you ideas. For example, could documents from the National Sea Grant Library help you examine the origins of the climate change debate?

Africana and Black History

UCAHist — 2015-08-22 21:35:45 UTC

The Schomburg Center (a division of New York Public Library) has digitized over 11,000 documents (mostly images) relating to African history, the history of slavery, and the lives of people of African descent throughout the Americas after emancipation. This is one of the oldest collections about the African diaspora in the world -- the brainchild of Arturo Schomburg, a Puerto Rican writer and archivist.

Chronicling America

UCAHist — 2015-08-24 12:34:49 UTC

This collaboration between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities provides access to over 5 million pages of digitized historical newspapers . Great for contemporary perspectives on almost any topic between 1836 and 1922.

Internet History Sourcebooks Project

rpauly — 2015-08-26 17:39:49 UTC

In the late 1990s Paul Halsall of Fordham University created the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. It is now the granddaddy of digital World History primary text sites, and while its collection is remarkably comprehensive
it often has short, edited passages rather than full texts.

The Hathi Trust Digital Library

rpauly — 2015-08-26 17:41:39 UTC

This site is associated with the University of California system and Michigan University. It has an extensive collection of printed sources, particularly periodical literature. While some of the
articles were published fairly recently there is a very large amount of European material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Digital Resources for World History

rpauly — 2015-08-26 17:43:04 UTC

This site contains a lot of secondary source material and information directed at the high school level. With some digging collegiate-level students can also find a fairly extensive amount of good primary text material.

World Digital Library

rpauly — 2015-08-26 17:44:36 UTC

The World Digital Library is a remarkable site that even contains page-by-page photographic reproductions of centuries-old
books. The collection may be deeper than wide. It does not always seem as comprehensive as other digital sites, but what is available seems to be reproduced in its entirety.

FamilySearch

UCAHist — 2015-09-04 12:57:01 UTC

This LDS-maintained website is like a free version of ancestry.com. Though its target audience is genealogists, it is also the single-best digital collection for social historians. For Arkansas, for instance, it has all of the papers of the Freedmen's Bureau, all Confederate Pension records, and 19th century probate records for every county. And they've done this kind of collecting globally as well as locally! Their records for Brazil, for instance, are as extensive as their records for Arkansas.

African Digital Collections Online

2015-10-26 18:49:47 UTC

Boston University library Beth Restrick has created a master list of nearly 20 digitized collections on African culture and history, all openly accessible on the internet.

She has grouped the links into three sections: manuscript collections, map collections (such as the "Voyages en Afrique" site pictured below) and maps.

D-Scribe Digital Library

UCAHist — 2016-01-19 01:42:41 UTC

Vast range in this University of Pittsburgh digital archive: browse an archive of propaganda images of Stalin one minute, and one of over one hundred 19th century school textbooks the next

Maps: Library of Congress

UCAHist — 2016-02-04 14:53:42 UTC

15,000 maps online dating back as far as the 13th century and representing nearly every part of the planet. Using the filters on the left-hand side, you can narrow, for example, to get railroad maps for 19th century Arkansas or French maps of 18th century Tibet.

Digitized Political Poster collection

UCAHist — 2016-02-04 15:12:38 UTC

Over 30,000 political & propaganda posters collected from 80 different countries. The website is currently in transition, so it is very plain, but the posters are not. A great way to work with foreign language sources when you are still becoming proficient in the language.

Modernist Journals Project

UCAHist — 2016-08-10 17:37:46 UTC

MJP's tagline is "modernism began in the magazines." This digital archive provides a fascinating view of the birth of modernist literature. These selected journals also provide access to important discussions and key debates that accompanied progressive reform campaigns (e.g. consumer protection) as well as the rise of the feminist, labor, and civil rights movements.