History

Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history.
 

Painstakingly assembled from hundreds of sources, Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. The project brings coherence to a wide range of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, and letters.

Immigration and migration, racism and civil rights, labor and industry, women and universal suffrage, American Indians, and the environment are just a few of the issues that came to the fore during the Gilded Age. With this collection, Alexander Street Press brings 40,000 pages of texts, photographs, songs, and primary materials together with 5,000 pages of reference and secondary materials. The result is a highly visual, annotated record of this critical—yet sometimes understudied—period in American history.

Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines is the definitive online Civil War media resource. The database contains 65,000 pages drawn from 49 periodicals, including 15 campaign newspapers, most of them illustrated—3,720 issues published from 1860 to 1865.  Originally printed in 16 different cities, many of the publications are now rare and hard to find, with an item sometimes extant only in a single archive.

Images of the American Civil War is a richly indexed collection of more than 50,000 photographs, prints, and other visual materials that illustrate the experience of Americans in a time of national crisis. Collectively, these items offer a vivid glimpse of American popular culture in the 1850s and 1860s—reflecting attitudes toward national heroes and villains, revealing evolving definitions of patriotism and just dissent, and providing invaluable information on prevailing forms of popular education and entertainment. Part of The American Civil War Online series.

Coming Soon

At the outset of the twentieth century, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender life (LGBT) existed on the fringes of society. Yet as the era progressed and communities developed, a social movement emerged. LGBT Thought and Culture will be a one-of-a-kind online resource that will host the key works and archival documentation of the movement.

From 1935, when it first appeared in American movie theatres as newsreels, through 1967, when the last television segment aired, The March of Time^® awed journalists, filmmakers, and audiences alike with its controversial topics and unique approach. Today, the collection presents an unmatched reflection of American values and culture for students and scholars.

North American Indian Thought and Culture contains more than 100,000 pages of personal stories, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find. The collection presents the entire spectrum of Indian and Canadian First People experiences from their own point of view. Firsthand accounts reveal how Indians lived, thought, and fought to protect their interests; how the tribes interacted with each other and the white invaders; and how they reacted to the constantly changing and challenging situations they faced.

Oral histories are the voices of the disenfranchised—the famous and the lesser known. Artists, musicians, laborers, survivors, immigrants, and students are just a few of the silent people to whom oral histories give voice. Groups whose stories otherwise might remain unnoticed—the illiterate, common people, minorities, and others who rarely see their stories published—can finally be heard through oral histories.

Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online allows today’s readers to feel and understand what it was like to be a person of any time, race, ethnicity, or gender, experiencing the past viscerally—through personal and private writings presented as searchable full-text documents, audio files, images, and online videos. The most comprehensive archive of social memory yet created, Letters and Diaries Online is the ideal starting point for historians, sociologists, genealogists, linguists, and psychologists who want to explore and analyze human experiences.

Women and Social Movements in the U.S., Basic Edition offers path-breaking document projects that facilitate the use of documents to study all aspects of American history from colonial times to the present. An online journal and database that includes work by leading and emerging scholars, the Basic Edition gives scholars and students an especially rich opportunity to study American history through women's eyes.

The new Scholar's Edition features enhanced content and search tools that make it ideal for research and scholarship. It includes the Basic Edition plus all five volumes of the indispensable biographical dictionary Notable American Women, and all publications of local, state, and national commissions on the status of women since 1963. This incomparable database includes 90,000 pages of previously inaccessible data and statistics about American women and American society since 1960.