Resources by Topic
Commerce & Enterprise
Accessible Archives at HISTORY COMMONS
History Commons holds the content formerly hosted by Accessible Archives and that provides a comprehensive database of diverse primary resources related to 18th, 19th, and early-20th century American history and culture.
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African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest
African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest offers more than 1,000 fully searchable printed works critical for insight into African-American culture and life from the beginning of Jim Crow to World War I and beyond.
African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle
African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle provides nearly 1,400 fully searchable printed works essential for understanding the African-American struggle for identity from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow.
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African History and Culture 1540-1921
African History and Culture, 1540-1921, features over 1,300 fully cataloged and searchable books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides, and ephemera that exploration the history, peoples, and socio-economic development of the African continent from the 16th century to the early 20th century.
Alexander Street Press: Images of the American Civil War: Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera
Images of the American Civil War: Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera presents the dramatic imagery of nineteenth-century Americana as experienced from the social, military, and political perspectives.
America’s Historical Imprints
America’s Historical Imprints contains 3 collections and 2 supplements of books, pamphlets, broadsides and other scarce printed material.
American Engravings to 1820, Catalog of American Engravings
The Catalogue of American Engravings describes engravings from the early eighteenth century through the year 1820.
American Political Prints 1766-1876
Harper's Weekly provides online access to digital images and descriptive text from Bernard Reilly’s annotated catalogue of political cartoons from 1766-1876.
Benjamin Franklin Papers
In a life spanning from 1706 to 1790, Benjamin Franklin's collected papers and correspondence present a panoramic view of the eighteenth century.
Black Authors 1556-1922
Black Authors, 1556-1922, encompasses over 550 works written by black authors from various regions, including the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The collection covers an extensive range of genres, including personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, novels, essays, poems, and musical compositions.
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Caribbean History and Culture
Caribbean History and Culture, 1535-1920, is an extensive collection of over 1,200 cataloged and searchable items such as books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides, and ephemera related to the Caribbean region.
Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library
The Colonial Williamsburg Digital Library supports research regarding the political and economic life of the thirteen colonies and the new republic.
Digital Paxton
Digital Paxton is a digital collection, critical edition, teaching platform devoted to the 1764 pamphlet war.
Digital Shaw-Shoemaker
Published in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, the Shaw-Shoemaker Series provides online access to books, pamphlets, and broadsides from the 19th century.
Early American Newspapers, Pennsylvania
The Early American Newspapers database provides wide-ranging coverage of historical newspapers from Pennsylvania.
Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA)
Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), a collection of electronic texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Early Canadiana Online
ECO is a digital library containing collections of monographs, serials, and goverment publications related to Canadian history and evolution.
Early Caribbean Digital Archive
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a publicly available archive platform for accessing, researching, and contributing pre-twentieth-century Caribbean archival materials.
Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange
Global Commodities includes a wide range of manuscript, printed and visual primary-source materials exploring the history of key commodities that changed the world.
Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER)
The HABS/HAER surveys document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories.
In Her Own Right
A collaborative digitization project, In Her Own Right includes collections on women’s advocacy in moral reform, abolition, education, work, relief for the poor, healthcare, and women’s own rights from the Philadelphia area between 1820-1920.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
Making of America (MoA)
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspapers
The Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspapers database contains all the words and images from selected newspapers published during the pivotal years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War.
PhillyHistory.org
PhillyHistory is an award-winning online archival project of historic photographs and maps directed by the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Records.
Popular Medicine in America
This database shows the development of popular medicine in America during the nineteenth century.
Samuel J. May Antislavery Collection
Cornell Library’s May Anti-Slavery Collection includes over 10,000 pamphlets and ephemera that document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels.
Slavery and Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s
Slavery and Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s is a digital collection of books and pamphlets that demonstrate the varying ideas and beliefs about slavery in the United States as expressed by Americans throughout the nineteenth century.
The Annuity Museum
The Annuity museum allows visitors to learn online about the history of annuities, from their earliest origins in ancient Rome through the middle of the 20th century.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
This educational resource is a digital archive for hundreds of historical images, paintings, lithographs, and photographs illustrating enslaved Africans and their descendants before c. 1900.
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia centers Philadelphia as a city and community in historical and future contexts.
The Pennsylvania Archives
The Pennsylvania State Archives provides 10 series of historical records in 138 volumes.
The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War.
Watson’s Annals
This digital source, from the US GenWeb Archives on Philadelphia County, provides the full text of collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of early 18th and early 19th century Pennsylvanian life.
Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875
This digital collection of 2,887 titles allows insight into American literature, culture, and history otherwise unattainable.