Dr. Kurt Hackemer

Useful Digitized Online Resources

Researchers may want to start with the recently developed Digital Public Library of America, which brings together different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage. More targeted sites that post digitized images of primary resources remain very useful. Here are a few to consider.

It's also worth looking at the Open and Free Access Materials for Research list from the Institute of Historical Research, which is collecting links to accessible online materials.

Those doing research on World War I will want to consult these blog posts listing resources for WWI on Land and WWI at Sea and in the Air.

This site also maintains a separate list of historic newspapers.

• 78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood, L.P. - a contributing subproject of the Great 78 Project.
• The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives - Provides access 5.5 million photographs taken over occupied Western Europe by the Allies during World War II.
• American Journeys - Contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
• American Memory Collection from the Library of Congress - Highlights include Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 (contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves), A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875, Journals of the Continental Congress, Letters of Delegates to Congress, Elliot's Debates: The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Farrand's Debates: The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Bills and Resolutions, Statutes at Large, the American State Papers, the US Serial Set (selected), the House Journal, the Senate Journal, the Senate Executive Journal, Maclay's Journal: Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789-1791, the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates, the Congressional Globe, the Congressional Record, Civil War Maps, 1861-1865, the Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room, Newspaper Pictorials: WWI Rotogravures, The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals, and Stars and Stripes February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919
• The Atlantic Civil War Photographs
• The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record - The thousand images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.
• The American Soldier in World War II - During World War II, the US Army administered more than 200 surveys to over half a million American troops to discover what they thought and how they felt about the conflict and their military service. The surviving collection of studies is now accessible to the public for the first time at The American Soldier in World War II. Browse and search over 65,000 pages of uncensored, open-ended responses handwritten by servicemembers, view and download survey data and original analyses, read topical essays by leading historians, and access additional learning resources.
• Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States - Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data.
• Ben Kaplow Letters - Ben Kaplow served as a messenger-cryptographer during WWII in the US 3rd ARMY, 26th Infantry Division,  (Yankee Division) 104th Regiment. The site contains over 200 letters that he wrote home from basic training and from the battlefield to his parents, brother, and sisters, including scans of each letter, a typed transcription, and an audio reading of each one. 
• British Library World War One project - Discover World War One historical sources from both sides of the conflict, contributed by institutions from across Europe.
• British Pathé - Newsreel archive British Pathé has uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to its YouTube channel.
• Brown University Library Collections - Contains several collections that include manuscripts, images, broadsides, newspapers, sheet music and other objects.
• The Cabinet Papers, 1915-1986 - digitized UK Cabinet papers.
• The Capital - A Washington D.C. weekly newspaper founded by Donn Piatt in 1871, is a primary record of the American Reconstruction Period, one of the most momentous periods of U.S. history, when the nation sought to reconcile the trauma and devastation of the Civil War. This digital version of The Capital includes every issue published in volumes 1-9, from March 12, 1871 through February 22, 1880.
• Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts - Offers a simple and straightforward means to discover medieval manuscripts available on the web.
• Center of Military History Online Bookshelves
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers - Library of Congress project that allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
• CIA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room - From the site: Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you? You can find information about all of these topics and more in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room.
• Civil Rights Digital Library - The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
• Collected Papers of Albert Einstein - The volumes are presented in the original language version with in-depth English language annotation and other scholarly apparatus. In addition, the reader can toggle to an English language translation of most documents.
• Colonial North American Project at Harvard University - Contains approximately 450,000 digitized pages of all the known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library relating to 17th- and 18th-century North America
• Colored Conventions - From 1830 until well after the Civil War, free and fugitive Blacks came together in state and national political "Colored Conventions." This site contains digital images of those meeting minutes.
• Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library - Digital images of documents from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
• Connecticut Digital Archives Collections - Includes a variety of digital collections, including several sets of corporate records, newspapers and periodicals, and veteran oral histories.
• A Continent Divided: The US-Mexico War - A Continent Divided is committed to digitizing primary source materials drawn from the UT-Arlington Library's Special Collections, long recognized as one of the premier repositories on the 1846-1848 conflict.
• Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War - During the Second World War, the staff of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper kept its own monumental record of the war. This collection of more than 144,000 newspaper articles, manually clipped, stamped with the date, and arranged by subject, includes news stories and editorials from newspapers, mostly Canadian, documenting every aspect of the war.
• Digital and Multimedia Center at Michigan State University - Includes materials on American Cookbooks, American Radicalism, Catechism of the Steam Engine, Comic Art, Early French Material, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fables, Fencing, Indian Cessions, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, MSU Student Radicalism, Nomenclature of British Insect, Occult Philosophy, Osteopathy, Robert C. Kedzie, Speculum, Sunday School Books, Temperance, the Captives of the Amistad, the Masses, Veterinary Medicine, and Women & Botany.
• Digital Archive: International History Declassified - The Digital Archive contains once-secret documents from governments all across the globe, uncovering new sources and providing fresh insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy. It collects the research of three Wilson Center projects which focus on the interrelated histories of the Cold War, Korea, and Nuclear Proliferation.
• Digital Bodleian - Digitized collections from Oxford University.
• Digital Collections: Trinity College Library
• Digital Library of Georgia - The Digital Library of Georgia is a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.
• DocsTeach - Primary sources from the National Archives.
• Dolly Madison Digital Edition - Complete edition of all known Dolly Madison correspondence
• Dr. Seuss Went to War: A Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. Seuss
• Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History - Provides access to typescripts of interviews (1967-1972) conducted with hundreds of Indians in Oklahoma regarding the histories and cultures of their respective nations and tribes.
• Early American Foreign Service Database - The EAFSD places biographical and professional information about all foreign service officers in a relational data structure. This data structure allows users to trace the early American governments' attempts to deploy and control their overseas representatives.
• ECO: Early Canadiana Online - Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital library providing access to 2,009,084 pages of Canada's printed heritage. It features works published from the time of the first European settlers up to the early 20th Century.
• European Political Print Collection at the American Antiquarian Society - This fully illustrated inventory of over 200 graphic arts items dating from 1720 to 1843 is a rich resource for those studying the cultural capital of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
• FamilySearch: U.S. Civil War Era Records - Provides a quick overview of the vast array of historic records and aids for those researching casualties and veterans of the Civil War. Collections include: Union and Confederate pension, prisoner of war, cemetery, National Soldier Home, and census records.
• First Division Museum at Cantigny Digital Archive - The initial collection consists of 1st Infantry Division 1944 battle records scanned from 86 microfilm reels from the 172 reel collection Historical Records of the First Infantry Division and its Organic Element, World War II. The scanned materials contain 424 discrete files which hold approximately 143,965 pages. Significant files include the divisional plans for Operation Neptune, the 16th Infantry Regiment’s documents regarding the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, and divisional documents on the capture of Aachen.
• The First World War Poetry Archive
• Fold3 - Paid access site containing American military records.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives
• French Revolution Digital Archive - The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.
• FultonHistory - Started as a repository of New York newspapers (see below) but has expanded beyond New York. To browse, and for instructions, go to http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton_New_help.html.
• Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection - The Gilmer maps are an extensive group of Civil War maps, including both manuscript maps and printed maps with manuscript annotations and engineers' drawings of military construction.
• Great 78 Project - a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records.
• Historic Government Publications from World War II
• Historical Maps Online - Images of maps charting the last 400 years of historical development in Illinois and the Northwest Territory.
• Historical Picture Collections
• The History Collection - Selected by librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists along a wide range of criteria, this collection includes published materials as well as archival documents. The items were digitized from a variety of formats including books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and other resources.
• History of the Cold War: Selected Resources at the Mudd Manuscript Library - The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library holds papers for architects of the Cold War strategy and those who fought the battles. Significant collections include the papers of James Baker, George Ball, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, James Forrestal, George Kennan, George McGovern and Adlai Stevenson and the records of the Council on Foreign Relations.
• Hyperwar: A Hypertext History of the Second World War - Consists primarily of official documents produced by various agencies of the United States, United Kingdom and British Commonwealth governments.
• Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties - Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler, this historically significant, seven volume compilation contains U.S. treaties, laws and executive orders pertaining to Native American Indian tribes. The volumes cover U.S. Government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883 (Volume II) and U.S. laws and executive orders concerning Native Americans from 1871-1970 (Volumes I, III-VII).
• The Internet Archive - A digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form. Includes texts (out of copyright), movies, live music and audio files. All can be downloaded and all are free.
• Internet Library of Early Journals - A digital library of 18th and 19th Century British journals, including the Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Note and Queries, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and The Builder.
• Letters from David Lloyd George to his brother
• Letters from World War One and Two - Primary source website dedicated to databasing as much mail from soldiers of World War One and Two as possible and making them freely available online. Site contains hundreds of letters, envelopes, stamps, photos and miscellaneous items.
• Lewis & Clark: A Journey - Celebrates the bicentennial of the expedition by providing resources for education and research from the collections of the University of Cincinnati Libraries and beyond.
• Library of American Political History Images
• The Library of Virginia Digital Library Program - The Digital Library Program transfers rare and unique Virginia materials into an integrated, user-friendly electronic research environment. Since its inception in 1995, the Program has digitized more than 2.2 million original documents, photographs, and maps, and produced more than 80 fully-searchable databases, indexes, and electronic finding aids.
• The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2004 - Includes not only television commercials for the 1952-2008 period, but also web-based advertising since 2004.
• The LOUISiana Digital Library - Click the "Collections" link to see everything that is available. Contains several searchable collections, including "The American Missionary Association and the Promise of a Multicultural America: 1839-1954," "French Colonization of Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase Map Collection," "From Diversity, Strength: A People's History of Louisiana, 1800-1815," "Siege of Port Hudson Louisiana 1863," "John H. Randolph and Family Letters," and "Norman (E. B. and N. Philip) Collection of Steamboat Photographs."
• Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History Project - Provided by the Scripps Library at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. A collection of over 1,150 interview transcripts from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, may be viewed online in .pdf format. Each interview is fully searchable.
• Making of America at the University of Michigan - This collection contains images of 8500 books and over 50,000 articles with 19th century imprints. The site has a powerful search engine that lets you search the text of all of the books and articles. This site focuses on monographs in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, science and technology, and religion, although there are many articles available as well.
• Making of America at Cornell University - This collection provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.The site has a powerful search engine that lets you search the text of all of the books and articles. This site focuses on the major journal literature of the period, ranging from general interest publications to those with more targeted audiences (such as agriculture). Highlights include The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion
• Montana Newspapers - This full-text searchable database contains 361,568 pages from 47 Montana newspapers dated 1885-2014.
• Napoleon Digital Library
• National Archives - Researchers should start with the Archival Research Catalog (ARC), the gateway to searching digital and non-digital records at the National Archives. You might also find Films available through Google Video to be useful.
• National Photographic Archive and Film Collections of Historic and Social Importance 
• National Security Agency/Central Security Service Declassification Initiatives - NSA/CSS periodically releases declassified documents or indexes to these documents to the public. Specific initiatives provide documents on the Gulf of Tonkin, USS Liberty, VENONA, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy Assassination and the Truman Memorandum.
• The National Security Archive at The George Washington University - National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Books provide online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and more.
• NATO Archives - The NATO e-Library (http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/publications.htm) includes a significant number of documents.
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery - NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
• New York State Newspapers - From the Fulton NY project. Not particularly elegant, but access to a LOT of newspapers. Keyword searches can be made at http://www.fultonhistory.com/fulton.html.
• 19th Century Books from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts - primarily Civil War-related books
• North Carolina military installation camp newsletters and newspapers from World War II
• The Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection
• The Online Archive of California - Brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections are available.
• Online Collections from the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress - Includes the Abraham Lincoln Papers, Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929, The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, 1862-1939, African American Odyssey exhibition (digital images), The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920, The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, By Popular Demand: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s, Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection, and Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years.
• The Open Library - The Open Library website was created by the Internet Archive to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online. The vision is to create free web access to important book collections from around the world. Books are scanned and then offered in an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.
• Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 - Fire destroyed the War Department office in 1800. For decades historians believed that its files, and the window they provide into the early federal government, had been lost forever. This collection unites copies of the lost files in a digital archive that reconstitutes this invaluable historical resource.
• Photogrammar - A web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
• Popular Culture: Resources for Critical Analysis - Links pages of digitized resources and articles, sorted by category.
• Public Domain Torrents - A collection that describes itself as "movies that made history... sort of."
• Puck's Homepage: Uniting Mugwumps and the Masses - Discusses how the cartoons in Joseph Keppler's satirical magazine Puck conveyed the liberal viewpoint during the 1880's.
• Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University - Digitized collections posted here include, Medicine and Madison Avenue; Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920; William Gedney Photographs and Writings; Ad*Access, Historic American Sheet Music; Emma Spaulding Bryant Letters; The Urban Landscape Digital Image Access Project; Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement; George Percival Scriven: An American in Bohol, The Philippines, 1899-1901; African-American Women; Civil War Women; Duke Papyrus.
• Red Scare - An image database about the period in the history of the United States immediately following World War I. The dates are approximately from the Armistice in November of 1918 to the collapse of hyper-inflation in mid-1920.
• Sassoon Journals - notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) during his service in the British Army in the First World War
• The Shapell Roster - the first comprehensive digital archive of Jewish soldiers who fought in the American Civil War.
• Southeastern Native American Documents, 1730-1842 - From the Digital Library of Georgia
• Survivor Library - It's a survivalist site, but it contains scans of lots of old books describing how items were manufactured, products were made and tasks were completed before the modern age. The site describes itself as "a compendium of the Technological and Industrial Knowledge of the 1800 through early 1900s."
• Truman Presidential Library Digital Archives - Includes materials on the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, Recognition of Israel, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, Desegregation of the Armed Forces, the 1948 Campaign, the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
• Turning the Pages - Digital images of great books and manuscripts from the British Library.
• UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive - This searchable database features all types of recordings made from the late 1800s to early 1900s, including popular songs, vaudeville acts, classical and operatic music, comedic monologues, ethnic and foreign recordings, speeches and readings.
• United Nations - Official Documents
• United States Military Academy History Department Map Library - Digital representations from the six atlases and nearly one thousand maps in the History Department's collection, encompassing not only America's wars but global conflicts as well.
• United States Military Academy Library Digital Collections - The U.S. Military Academy Library maintains extensive documentation of the history of West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, and Academy alumni in its Special Collections and Archives. These rich historical collections include extensive book, manuscript, and photograph holdings among other formats.
• University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service - DLPS provides access to over 200 text, image, and finding aid collections that collectively provide access to over a million digital objects. Some are restricted to University of Michigan users but many are public. Some highlights: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Basler edition), the Digital General Collection (books from the University of Michigan collection, scanned for preservation purposes), the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, the Transportation History Collection: Railroads, and The United States and Its Territories: 1870-1925: The Age of Imperialism, which contains the full text of monographs and government documents published in the United States, Spain, and the Philippines between 1870 and 1925. The primary focus of the material is the Spanish-American war and subsequent American governance (approximately 1898-1910).
• University of Washington Library Digital Collections
• University of Wisconsin Digital Collections - Offers a wide array of digitized materials. SELECTED highlights include Foreign Relations of the United States - selected volumes and the Great Lakes Maritime History Project
• US Army Heritage and Education Center Digital Collections - Includes photographs, military publications/manuals, reference bibliographies, unit histories, etc.
• Portal to Asian Internet Resources
• University of Utah Digital Collections
• UNZ.org - A free website for periodicals, books, and videos. Includes 19th and 20th century digitized periodicals from the United States.
• William T. Sherman Papers at the University of Notre Dame - The William Tecumseh Sherman Family Papers, as they were deposited in the University of Notre Dame Archives by Miss Eleanor Sherman Fitch, the granddaughter of General Sherman, prior to her death in 1959, consisted of correspondence, clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, various legal papers and documents, cancelled checks, bankbooks, financial ledgers, drafts for and copies of articles, speeches and military orders, and explanatory notations -- sometimes on the items themselves and sometimes on separated sheets. This material ranged from the year 1808 to the year 1959 and consisted of originals, photostats, microfilm, typewritten copies and handwritten copies. The nucleus of the collections had been gathered and preserved by Philemon Tecumseh Sherman followed the death of the father, General Sherman. It was subsequently augmented by Miss Fitch, Philemon's niece, who added items in her own possession, typewritten copies which she had made of various items in the collections itself, items or copies of items which she was able to acquire from the others, and her own explanatory notes.
• World Digital Library - A United Nations project that makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
• World War II Field Manuals - Presented as downloadable PDF files.