United States History

The purpose of this guide is to list relevant Internet sites, Library databases, electronic journals and printed reference sources relating to United States history. This is not a comprehensive guide or gateway but rather a starting point to information in areas taught at the University of Sydney. Other useful resources will appear under General History.


ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

• Electronic journals generally provide access to the full text of articles via the Internet.

Latest list of US history ejournals, direct from the catalogue

• Current University of Sydney staff and students may access many of these from their home or office using an Extro Account or the Remote Access Service. In some cases, passwords may be available.

NB Remember, there may be printed copies of the journals, especially earlier issues, in Fisher Research Library.

Other relevant ejournals or lists of ejournals

Common-place
Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. It is a cross between a scholarly journal and a popular magazine, exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture.
star iconFreely accessible on the Web, url: http://www.common-place.org/

Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals
This collection presents twenty-three popular periodicals digitized by Cornell University Library and the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. They include literary, political and some scientific magazines.
star icon url: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html

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INTERNET RESOURCES

General sites

American Memory: Historical collections for the National Digital Library
This site, from the Library of Congress, contains primary source materials for American history and culture with full text.
star icon url: http://memory.loc.gov/

American studies at the University of Virginia
Contains links to hypertexts, cultural maps and materials from the 1930s.
star icon url: http://xroads.virginia.edu/

AMDOCS
Full text documents for the study of American History. The site contains a range of material from Columbus' letters to George W Bush's inauguration speech.
star icon url: http://www.vlib.us/amdocs/

Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA)
The Association encourages the study and research in all aspects of US culture and society. It publishes the Australasian Journal of American Studies Fisher Research 973.05 18, vol. 1, no. 3, 1982. .
star icon url: http://www.anzasa.arts.usyd.edu.au/

Documenting the American South
A collection of sources on Southern history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century.
star icon url: http://docsouth.unc.edu/

From Revolution to Reconstruction
Full text site that is an ongoing hypertext history of the US based upon publications by the United States Information Service. The text has been enriched with hypertext-links to relevant documents, original essays and other Internet sites.
star icon url: http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/

Rare Map Collection - Colonial America
A selection of maps scanned from the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Lbrary, ranging from the Columbus' explorations to the Civil War.
star icon url: http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/neworld.html

University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections
A database of photographs, maps and audiovisual material with some text. The site includes the award-winning project American Indians of the Pacific Northwest. These collections are especially strong in Seattle history, architecture, labor and industry, the Klondike Gold Rush, and our natural environment.
star icon url: http://content.lib.washington.edu/

Colonial America

Archiving Early America
The main focus of this site is the provision and digital display of primary source material from 18th Century America.
star icon url: http://www.earlyamerica.com/

Colonial North America 1492-1763
A solid overview of pre-colonial and colonial America.
star icon url: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/colonial

Colonial American History and the Early Republic to 1812
A subject directory maintained by the Dept. of History at the University of Colorado. links to archives and primary documents online are included.
star icon url: http://web.uccs.edu/history/ushistory/colonial.htm

Plymouth Colony Archive Project at the University of Virginia
A collection of searchable texts related to the Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691.
star icon url: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/

Martha Ballard's Diary
DoHistory is a site that explores the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past. The creators have used the 200 year old diary of midwife/healer Martha Ballard as a case study.
star icon url: http://www.DoHistory.org/

Salem Witch Trials
A documentary archive and transcription project, consisting of an electronic collection of primary source materials and a new transcription of the court records.
star icon url: http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/home.html

Virtual Jamestown
A digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment".
star icon url: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vcdh/jamestown/

American War of Independence

American Revolution: National Discussions of Our Revolutionary Origins
Provides a substantial bibliography of print resources, as well as discussion sites and other web links.
star icon url: http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/intro.html/

Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
The Avalon Project provides full text digital documents relevant to the fields of American law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government in a seachable database.
star icon url: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/18th.htm

George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799
Full text documents include facsimiles of correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, journals, military records and reports. Work is still in progress.
star icon url: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html

Civil War

American Civil War Homepage
Subject directory which gathers together links to the most useful identified electronic files about the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the secession crisis which preceded it.
star icon url: http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/

Civil War Maps
An image database from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division consists of reconnaissance, sketch, coastal, and theater-of-war maps which depict troop activities and fortifications during the Civil War.
star icon url: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/cwmhtml/

Making of America
A digital full text library of primary resources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
star icon url: http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/

Valley of the Shadow
The project is a hypermedia archive of thousands of sources for the period before, during, and after the Civil War for Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Those sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records.
star icon url: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow/

Frontier History

Academic Info: The American West: frontier history
A subject gateway of Internet resources aimed at the tertiary and research community.
star icon url: http://academicinfo.net/amwest.html

Gold Rush
Material on the Californian gold rush from the Oakland Museum of California.
star icon url: http://www.museumca.org/goldrush/index.html

History of the American West 1860-1920
A searchable site of over 30,000 photographs drawn from the holdings of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library.
star icon url: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/codhtml/hawphome.html

Nineteenth Century

19th Century American History
A large subject directory of links covering the major events of the history and society of nineteenth century America.
star icon url: http://americanhistory.about.com/cs/19thcentury1/

Democracy in America: Tocqueville's America
A re-contextualizing Alexis de Tocqueville's political and cultural analysis of American democracy, by constructing a virtual America ca. 1831-32. Topics include: Everyday life in 1831; American religion in 1831 and American Women 1820-1842.
star icon url: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/home.html

Dramas of Haymarket
Produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University, the site examines selected materials from the Haymarket Strike Digital Collection.
star icon url: http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/index.htm

Nineteenth Century in Print: Books and Periodicals
This collection comprises books and periodicals published in the United States during the nineteenth century, primarily during the second half of the century. Most of the materials were digitized through the Making of America project, a collaboration of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to preserve textual materials on deteriorating paper and make them accessible electronically. The materials selected illuminate the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Also included are volumes of American poetry.
star icon url: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/ncphome.html

Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
A multimedia archive.
star icon url: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/

Women & Social Movements
A collection of almost 900 primary documents.
star icon url: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/

Twentieth Century

Ad*Acess
The project presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.
star icon url: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

America from the Great Depression to World War II
Photographs created by government photographers showing Americans in every part of the nation. Initially, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II.
star icon url: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html

Children in Urban America
An historical archive developed and maintained at Marquette University. The site features documents and images about children in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, drawn from newspapers, government and other official records, oral histories and memoirs, and many other sources.
star icon url: http://xserver1.its.mu.edu/intro.bsp

CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
A pdf book containing a large selection (over 100) of declassified documents on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the CIA.
star icon url: http://www.odci.gov/csi/books/cubamis/book1.pdf

Encyclopedia of Chicago
Resource created by historians in collaboration with Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society and the Northwestern University. Entries include the politics, social life and popular culture of the city.
star icon url: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/

National Security Archives
The NSA was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who had obtained documentation from the US government under the Freedom of Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over the past decade, the Archive has become the world's largest non governmental library of declassified documents . Their Electronic Briefing Books provide online access to critical declassified records on specific issues, inlcuding U.S. national security, foreign policy, military history, intelligence policy, and more.
star icon url: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

New Deal Network
A guide to the Great Depression of the 1930s, this site offers access to full text documents, photographs of the era and a moderated H-Net discussion list.
star icon url: http://newdeal.feri.org/

1930s Project
Created for the American Studies Project at the University of Virginia. The site provides political, social and cultural timelines, with full text articles and bibliographies.
star icon url: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/front.html

US Government Subject Guide
Created by the University of Sydney Government Publications Librarian. This site links to official US government webpages, legislation, specialist sites and a list of printed library materials.
star icon url: http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/subjects/government/us.html

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents
These full text documents contain statements, messages, and other Presidential materials released by the White House from 1994+.
star icon url: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/wcomp/index.html

Native American History

American Indian History and Related Issues
Subject directory maintained by Prof Troy Johnson of the California State University. Has recently expanded to include the Indian peoples of Central America and Mexico.
star icon url: http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/index.html

African American History

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection 1818-1907
Contains the full text of pamphlets from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
star icon url: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. This site presents a sample of those interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79) in Fisher Research 301.451 252
star icon url: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html

Black History Quest
Subject directory of links to African-American history, culture and Black studies resources.
star icon url: http://blackquest.com/link.htm

Civil Rights in Mississippi
The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries' fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi.
star icon url: http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
Full text of 397 pamphlets from the Library of Congress. This site complements the African American Perspectives Pamphlets.
star icon url: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml/aapchome.html

Gateway to African-American History
Produced by the US State Department, the site contains links on history, society, politics and the arts.
star icon url: http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/blackhis/

North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920
Full text site which, when completed, it will include all the narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920.
star icon url: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/neh.html

Race & Place
An archive about the racial segregation laws, or 'Jim Crow' laws, from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia.
star icon url: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/

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PRINTED RESOURCES

Atlases and Guides

The African-American atlas: Black history and culture--an illustrated reference / Molefi K. Asante.
New York: Macmillan; London: Prentice Hall International, c1998.
Fisher Ref 973.0496073 76

Atlas of American history.
New York : Scribner, 1984. 2nd rev.ed.
Fisher Ref 911.73 11

Atlas of early American history: the Revolutionary era, 1760-1790 / Lester J. Cappon, editor-in-chief.
[Princeton, N.J.]: Published for the Newberry Library and the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the Princeton University Press, 1976.
Fisher Ref F911.73 2

The new encyclopedia of the American West / Howard R. Lamar, ed.
New Haven, Conn. ; London : Yale University Press, c1998. Rev. and expanded ed.
Fisher Ref 978.003 4

Harvard guide to African-American history / Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ed.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Fisher Ref 973.0496073 80

Harvard guide to American history / Frank Freidel, ed.
Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974. 2 vols.
Fisher Ref 016.973 2

Oxford companion to United States history / editor in chief, Paul S. Boyer.
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Fisher Ref 973.03 7

Reader's guide to American history / editor, Peter J. Parish.
London; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.
Fisher Ref 973.03 6

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

The American Heritage encyclopedia of American history / John Mack Faragher, ed.
New York: H. Holt, 1998.
Fisher Ref 973.003 1

Encyclopedia of American history / edited by Richard B. Morris.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, c1996. 7th ed.
Fisher Ref 973.03 3A

Encyclopedia of contemporary American culture / edited by Gary W. McDonogh.
London; New York: Routledge, c2001.
Fisher Ref 973.9203 1

Encyclopedia of Southern history / edited by David C. Roller.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1979.
Fisher Ref 975.003 1

Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal / James Ciment.
Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe Reference, 2000. 2 vols.
Fisher Ref 973.91703 1

The Oxford companion to United States history / editor in chief, Paul S. Boyer.
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Fisher Ref 973.03 7

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Bibliographies and Indexes

American bibliography: a chronological dictionary of all books, pamphlets and periodical publications printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820 / compiled by Charles Evans.
Also known as Evans' American Bibliography.
New York: Peter Smith, 1941. 13 volumes
Fisher Ref 015.730903 1

American Bibliography of Charles Evans / Roger P Bristol.
Worcester, Ass: American Antiquarian Society, 1959.
Fisher Ref 015.730903 1
General Cumulative index to the first 13 vols of Evans' American Bibliography.

National Index of American Imprints through 1800 (The Short-Title Evans) / Clifford K Shipton & James E Mooney.
American Antiquarian society and Barre Publishers, 1969. 2 volumes.
Fisher Reference 015.730903 1 A
Use in conjunction with the Evans Microcard Collection listed below under Primary sources.

American Bibliography.
New York, Office of the Publisher's Weekly, 1802-
Covers 1801 - 1819.
Fisher Ref 015.730903 4

American Catalog.
New York, Office of the Publisher's Weekly, 1876-
Covers 1876-1910
Fisher Ref 015.7309034 1

C.R.I.S.: the combined retrospective index set to journals in history, 1838-1974 / executive editor, Annadel N. Wile, assistant editor, Deborah Purcell ; with an introd. and user's guide by Evan I. Farber.
Washington: Carrollton Press, 1977- .
Fisher Ref 016.9 10

Era of the American Revolution: a bibliography / Dwight L. Smith, editor.
Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, c1975.
Fisher Ref 016.9733 4

The Gilded Age, 1877-1896 / compiled by Vincent P. de Santis.
Northbrook, Ill., AHM Pub. Corp. [1973].
Fisher Ref 016.9738 2

The progressive era and the Great War, 1896-1920 / compiled by Arthur S. Link.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, [1969].
Fisher Ref 016.97326 1

Social history of the United States: a guide to information sources / Donald F. Tingley.
Detroit : Gale Research Co., c1979.
Fisher Ref 016.309173 4

Struggle for empire: a bibliography of the French and Indian War / James G. Lydon.
New York: Garland Pub., 1986.
Fisher Ref 016.97326 1

The Truman and Eisenhower years: 1945-1960; a selective bibliography, by Margaret L. Stapleton.
Metuchen, N.J., Scarecrow Press, 1973.
Fisher Ref 016.973918 2

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Biographies

American National Biography / general editors, John A. Garraty, Mark C. Carnes.
New York : Oxford University Press, 1999. 11 vols.
Fisher Ref 920.073 38

Dictionary of American biography.
New York, Scribner.
Fisher Ref 920.073 4 A

Who's who in America.
Chicago: Marquis Who's Who
Fisher Research 920.073 10, 1903/05-2000
Fisher Ref 920.073 10, 2000+

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Primary Sources

Fisher Library contains a large set of US Government Publications. They are comprehensively listed on the Government Subject Guide both material held in print and microform, as well as links to Internet sites. There is also a listing for more recent electronic materials.

American Culture Series, 1493 - 1875.
A microfilm collection of early books and pamphlets.
ACS I covers 1493 to 1806, while ACS II extends to 1875
Fisher Audiovisual MIC 973 249
The author, title and subject index indicates the reel number required and is shelved with the microfilms.

Annals of America, 1493 - 1968.
Chicago; London: William Benton; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968. 20 volumes.
Fisher Ref 973 78
A collection of government documents, writings, speeches, articles, songs and poems from the period.

Early American imprints, 1639-1800 [microform] / Clifford K. Shipton, editor.
Publisher Worcester, Mass. : American Antiquarian Society, 1955-1969.
Storage XTA 12
Description: 31,000 microopaques (microcards).
This collection is a microprint edition of the complete text of every existent book, pamphlet and broadside printed in the United States in the years 1639 to 1800. It includes more than 42,000 titles. The collection is based on Evans' bibliography, and also includes additional items turned up since the printing of the Evans volumes.
The Index to this collection is the National index of American imprints through 1800: the short-title Evans, by Clifford Kenyon Shipton and James E. Mooney, Fisher Ref 015.730903 1 A.
To request the item from Storage, complete the electronic form quoting the running number given for the item in the Shipton index listed above.

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