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III. BROAD COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
These sites contain large collections of documents that cover long periods of time or, in a few cases, the whole time span of American history. They are good places to find a particular document that you are looking for or to select a series of documents to accompany text readings on a specialized period, such as the colonial era.
A fairly strong collection of standard documents (e.g., the Mayflower Compact, the Emancipation Proclamation); includes every presidential inaugural address.
A very large collection of government documents from the colonial era to the 1970s, organized by general periods and also by some specialized topics, such as the Cold War.
An enormous collection of primary sources, not only from the colonial era, but from previous historical periods all the way back to ancient Greece! The earlier documents are there to show the intellectual and cultural heritage that influenced the colonists. This is by far the most extensive and wide ranging collection of colonial primary source materials and is very useful also for European history.
Contains 1600 books and 50,000 magazine articles written during the nineteenth century. The collection can be searched by subject, keywords, author, or title.
Contains several useful digitized collections of documents:
(1) Civil War Women -- writings of 3 women from the South during the war; (2) African-American Women -- writings of women about their experiences in slavery and in post-Civil War South; (3) Ad Access -- 7000 advertisements for beauty products, automobiles, and other consumer items, published between 1911 and 1957.
Extensive collection divided into several categories: (1) Slave Narratives; (2) First Person Narratives of the American South -- diaries, autobiographies, and travel accounts by white and black Southerners from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (3) Library of Southern Literature -- 100 of South's 11 most important literary works" of the 1800s and early 1900s; (4) The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865 -- a work in progress, this collection will include 400 books and manuscripts and 1000 images (photos, maps,etc.), all reflecting "Southern life during the Civil War"; (5) The Church in the Southern Black Community -- a collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century writings related to this topic.
New hypertext editions of classic works of American literature, such as the Federalist Papers, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Looking Backward, and Sister Carrie, with scholarly appendices, links to relevant documents, and critical essays by graduate students and faculty in the American Studies program at the University of Virginia.
397 pamphlets from 1824-1909, searchable by subject, title, author, and keywords. Contains works by many obscure and well known figures in African-American history.
2900 life history accounts of "ordinary" Americans recorded by interviewers in the 1930s working for the WPA Writers Project. A wonderful body of material, but it is searchable only by state (e.g., New York, Missouri) or by keyword, which makes it somewhat hard to use.
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