American History: Reconstruction to Present

A companion site to the NPR radio documentary on segregated life in the South. Presents audio excerpts and photographs, arranged in six thematically-organized sections. Covers legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community life, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life.

This Library of Congress online exhibit draws from the thousands of personal stories, oral histories, and photographs collected by the Voices of Civil Rights project.

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.

This site contains many primary sources from the 1960s, including diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.

Over 200,000 documents, including letters, drafts of speeches, and handwritten notes, from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s papers are available online for free public access.

This online database from Temple University details the history of the modern civil rights movement in Philadelphia. Through a photographs, newspapers, manuscripts, film footage, and oral histories, this archival collection seeks to highlight the key people, places, and events that made Philadelphia an important part of the national struggle for racial equality and social change.

This website from the National Endowment for the Humanities includes four full length documentaries about the Civil Rights Movement in America from the 1830s through the 1960s.

This website from the Gerald Ford Library and Museum includes timelines, documents, film reels, and information about the people involved in the Watergate trial.

The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.

This site presents full text oral history transcripts from leaders and participants in the women's suffrage movement, including Alice Paul and Jeannette Rankin.

This site focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections.

This site tells the story of the Triangle Factory Fire in 1911, using photographs, interviews, models, and much more.

This site contains more than 900 separate texts, including correspondence, newspaper articles, unpublished memoirs, magazine and journal articles, maps, and hundreds of images of historic significance for documenting the life and times of Jane Addams, the history of the social settlement movement and of Hull-House, and the history of the Near West Side neighborhood and its immigrant communities.

This site contains over 5,000 photographs from the National Child Labor Committee, who was charged with documenting the working and living conditions of children in the US between 1908-1924.

This companion site to the PBS documentary has videos, timelines, biographies, and background information about the Temperance Movement and Prohibition.

This site examines the the American eugenics movement in the early 20th century.

This site documents the historical formation and cultural foundations of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, through books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and motion picture footage.

The Library of Congress's digital collection of historic newspapers has many contemporary articles on the annexation of Alaska and Hawaii, as well as much more.

This site provides resources and documents about the Spanish-American War, the period before the war, and some of the people who participated in the fighting or commented about it. Information about Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United States is provided in chronologies, bibliographies, and a variety of pictorial and textual material from bilingual sources, supplemented by an overview essay about the war and the period.

This site has the full text of The Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt's personal writings on his adventures in the Spanish American War. It was an immediate best-seller upon its release in 1899.

This is the companion site to the American Experience program on Woodrow Wilson. It includes, timelines, transcripts of the documentary, and essays about major topics in his presidency.

This National Geographic documentary examines the sinking of the luxury passenger ship Lusitania. The sinking of the Lusitania was significant in shaping public opinion about the World War I and heightened calls in the US for joining the war.

This is the companion website for the PBS special The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. It includes an overview of the war, timeline, maps, and more.

This site contains the full text of the complete run of The Stars and Stripes, the newspaper the US Army published for its forces in France. This weekly featured news from home, sports news, poetry, and cartoons.

This web-based collection of historical materials from Harvard's collections documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.

This site contains a vast archive of newspapers, oral histories, and personal papers, along with the organizational records of immigrants and refugees and the agencies created to serve them.

This is the full-text of Jacob Riis's book of sensationalist prose and photography of the living conditions in the Lower East Side of turn-of-the-century New York City.

THis site illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter.

This site is dedicated to educate, preserve, collaborate and inspire action for equity as it tells the story of Japanese Americans during World War II.

This interactive map allows you to select a foreign-born group to see how they settled across the United States.

This PBS documentary on the Stock Market Crash is available online, along with the full transcript.

This site from the University of Virginia views the 1930s through the lenses of its films, radio programs, literature, journalism, museums, exhibitions, architecture, art, and other forms of cultural expression.

This online presentation documents the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. This collection consists of audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, and ephemera.

This site is a multimedia resource on World War II, created by award winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees.

This website from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is a virtual reference room and digital repository that provides free and open access to the digitized collections of the Roosevelt Library, including documents, photographs, letters, presidential proclamations, and more.

This 24 part series is a great overview of the Cold War, and interviewees include Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and Fidel Castro.

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.

This online Library of Congress exhibit provides primary sources, a time line and map, and various assessments, pro- and con-, of the Marshall Plan, on its fiftieth anniversary.

This site hosts a collection of primary resources for teaching or researching the Korean War. It contains a chronology, accounts, letters, presidential calendars, telegrams, memorandums, and other digitized documents that trace developments in the war on a daily and weekly basis.

This site from the JFK Presidential Library goes through the crisis one day at a time with historical documents such as the intelligence photos the President acted upon; the correspondence between the White House and the Kremlin, and Kennedy's speech to the American public.

From the National Archives, here is the full-text of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy.

The Virtual Vietnam Archive currently contains over 3.2 million pages of scanned materials, including documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids.

This site from NASA provides 80 transcripts of recorded air-to-ground transmissions and from tapes recording the words of the astronauts while onboard the Mercury through Apollo missions.

This website from the National Portrait Gallery highlights how the ten U.S. Presidents who served from World War II to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union shaped or reacted to events during this era.