Research Guides: American History: Web Sites

Web Sites

Digital Collections, Library of Congress (formerly American Memory)
Manuscripts, motion pictures, sound recordings, photographs, prints from the Library of Congress.

The Avalon project at the Yale Law School
Full text documents relating to history, law and government organized by time period. The emphasis is on American and European history. An internal search engine simplifies access.

AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History
A bibliography of primary documents, essential to the study of U.S. history, available in full text. The Find in Page button will simplify title access, or the list of topics can be browsed.

100 Milestone Documents
"A list of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965."

The Making of America
A collection of primary source material–letters, magazine articles, diaries, short monographs-- from 19th century.

General MacArthur surveys the beachhead on Leyte Island, 1944
National Archives and Records Administration

Demonstrator at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963
National Archives and Records Administration

National Archive Information Locator (NAIL)
Prototype for a full catalog of National Archives holdings. Digitized texts, photos and prints, and descriptions of NARA's extensive microform collections.

Center for New History and Media, George Mason University
An Internet clearing house for a wide variety of materials about history.

A Century of lawmaking for a new nation: U.S. Congressional documents and debates 1774-1875
Includes digitized versions of the following documents: Journals of the Continental Congress (1774-89); The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787; The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution; the Journals of House of Representatives and the Senate; United States Statutes at Large; the Senate Executive Journal; the Annals of Congress. The American State papers may be added in the future.

Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, University of California, Berkeley. Includes The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study.

Web Archives

Use a web archive to access previous versions of web pages or other materials that were once on the web.

Web archives - general

Wayback Machine, Internet Archive. Best Bet
Holds billions of webpages from millions of websites.

Archive-It
Hosts content from a variety of organizations worldwide.

Library of Congress Web Archives, 2000-present.
"Thousands of sites have been preserved in a variety [of] event and thematic Web archives, selected by subject specialists." Collections include the United States Congressional, Public Policy Topics, United States Elections, Legal Blawgs, Iraq War 2003, September 11, 2001, Webcomics, Brazil Cordel Literature, Visual Image, Indonesian General Election 2009 web archives, and many more.

Web archives - U.S. government

Federal Depository Library Program Web Archive, Government Publishing Office.
"The FDLP Web Archive provides point in time captures of U.S. Federal agency websites, while preserving the functionality of the site to the extent possible. The aim is to provide permanent public access to Federal Agency Web content. GPO harvests and archives the websites with Archive-It, a subscription-based Web harvesting and archiving service offered by the Internet Archive."

End of Term Web Archive, 2008-present.
"Captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. [...] Contains federal government websites (.gov, .mil, etc) in the Legislative, Executive, or Judicial branches of the government. Websites that were at risk of changing (i.e., whitehouse.gov) or disappearing altogether during government transitions were captured. Local or state government websites, or any other site not part of the federal government domain were out of scope."

Congressional Web Harvest, National Archives and Records Administration, 2006 (109th Congress)-present.
"As the repository of the official records of Congress, the Center for Legislative Archives conducts a web harvest of all congressional websites at the end of each Congress."

Search across web archives

time travel
Find prior versions of web pages (called "Mementos" in this service) in: "archive.today, Archive-It, Arquivo.pt: the Portuguese Web Archive, Bibliotheca Alexandrina Web Archive, DBpedia archive, DBpedia Triple Pattern Fragments archive, Canadian Government Web Archive, Croatian Web Archive, Estonian Web Archive, Icelandic web archive, Internet Archive, Library of Congress Web Archive, NARA Web Archive, National Library of Ireland Web Archive, perma.cc, PRONI Web Archive, Slovenian Web Archive, Stanford Web Archive, UK Government Web Archive, UK Parliament's Web Archive, UK Web Archive, Web Archive Singapore, WebCite, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek", etc. ♦ Memento Time Travel extension for Chrome