American Studies

The DPLA contains over 2.5 million records for photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website.

Broadsides (historically, large posters and ads) printed between 1760 and 1900 with contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports.

Includes collections:
"We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death:" Freedom Riders in the South, 1961
Confederate Newspapers: A Collection from Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama
Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activist, Political Activist, and Woman
Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984
Hollywood, Censorship, and the Motion Picture Production Code, 1927-1968
Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers’ Project
The Civil War in Words and Deeds
The Quest for Labor Equality in Household Work: National Domestic Workers Union, 1965-1979
Witchcraft in Europe and America
Women, War and Society, 1914-1918

This archival research collection documents the social and cultural forces that shaped the lives of Americans from 1800 to 1920 including families and home life, religion, race, education, employment, politics, marriage, sexuality, health, childhood, fashion, travel, and entertainment.

Find materials related to the women’s rights movement in America from the campaign for women’s suffrage to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and beyond, including the National Woman’s Party Papers (1913-1971), League of Women Voters collection (1918-1974), and documents about the Women’s Action Alliance (1971-1996).

A database containing over 500,000 pages of declassified documents gathered through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The DNSA archive contains a range of policy documents including presidential memos, meeting notes, briefing papers, White House communications, email, letters, and other secret material detailing U.S.foreign and military policy since 1945. Topics include the Koreas, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, nuclear proliferation, among many others. See also smaller open access version from George Washington University.

First-person accounts, compiled in the postwar period and early 20th Century period, chronicle the highs and lows of army life from 1861 through 1865.

The historical map collection has over 45,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials.

Digitized archive of monograph, manuscript, newspaper, periodical and photograph collections pertaining to Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada.

Original material on the legacy of slavery, social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today from the British Library, Duke University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL, and more.

Original manuscripts, maps, ephemera, and printed sources from the Newberry Library, Chicago. The documents detail frontier life, Native Americans, the growth of urban centers, the environmental impact of westward expansion, and life in the borderlands.

Primary sources relating to New England states.