American History: Colonization to Reconstruction

This online exhibit from the Library of Congress features selections from more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts. It has three major themes: Pre-Contact America; Explorations and Encounters; and Aftermath of the Encounter.

This site explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement, and "the Virginia experiment" using documents, archaeological finds, 3-D reconstructions, and much more.

This website is a bilingual digital library published by the Library of Congress. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century, including the French and Indian War, and the French involvment in the American Revolution.

This site consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.

This open course from Yale will examine the Revolution from a broad perspective, tracing the participants' shifting sense of themselves as British subjects, colonial settlers, revolutionaries, and Americans. The site provides syllabi, and lectures taught by scholars at Yale.

This guide compiles links to digital materials related to the American Revolution that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on the American Revolution and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has a number of excellent online exhibits, including the Adams Family Papers, Coming of the American Revolution, the End of Slavery in Massachusetts, the Seige of Boston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and more.

This site tells the story of Shays' Rebellion, and a crucial period in our nation's founding when the survival of the republican experiment in government was neither destined nor assured.

The SRC's Constitution Day LibGuide includes many resources on the Constitution, including delegates, the Constitutional Convention, and current Constitutional issues.

This exhibit provides an overview of the work of and issues faced by the first Congress, which was a virtual second sitting of the Federal Convention, fleshing out the governmental structure outlined in the Constitution and addressing the difficult issues left unresolved by the Constitution.

This PBS website includes the entire documentary of the War of 1812, plus bonus materials, essays, and classroom materials.

This website from the National Archives includes searchable correspondence and writings of Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison.

This open course from Yale explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, including the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction. The site provides syllabi, and lectures taught by scholars at Yale.

This site holds 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. You'll find thousands of letters and diaries, census and government records, newspapers and speeches, all of which record different aspects of daily life in these two counties during the war.

This site, from the US National Library of Medicine, looks at the men and women who served as surgeons and nurses and how their work as medical providers challenged the prescribed notions of race and gender.

This PBS site has a good overview of Reconstruction topics, primary sources, and links to other valuable websites.

This online exhibit covers topics such as the move from slave labor to free labor, politics, and the restoration of the South back into the Union.

America's journey through slavery is presernted in four parts, each with a historical narrative and resource bank materials.

This site explores Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an American cultural phenomenon using texts, songs, and images from the various genres Stowe drew upon, Stowe’s defense against criticism, responses to the book, and more.

This site provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. It currently includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

This website from the University of Detroit has a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period.

The site features the full text - almost five thousand pages - of the journals. Also included are a gallery of images, important supplemental texts, and audio files of selected passages plus Native American perspectives.

This five part PBS documentary spans almost 400 years and tells the story of pivotal moments in US history from the Native American perspective. The entire documentary is available online.

This site has original documents, transcriptions and commentaries in English and Russian that offer a comparative history of American and Russian expansion through frontier territories in each nation’s continent.

The companion website to Ken Burns' 8-part PBS documentary includes biographies, primary sources, maps, timelines and more.

This site from the Library of Congress consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts.

The Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History online 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. Related are accounts of Indian ceremonies, customs, social conditions, philosophies, and standards of living.

The photographer not only photographed Native Americans, but traveled for years among most of the remaining tribes and gained all sorts of knowledge about their different cultures. This website from Northwestern University is a full-text of his 20 volume work, The North American Indian.