Webliography for Historical Research

Free Online Texts in Either E-book, PDF or HTML 

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Digital Book Index of 17th Century American Literature and Texts provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free.

Gaspee Virtual Archives contains a massive amount of collected information for serious historical researchers, and links to many off-site sources.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD 1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

American Centuries This website is unique in many design features that facilitate successful use by educators and students. It includes a large library of primary resources, curricula, and interactive student activities; most of them presented in age-appropriate, user-friendly formats.

Project Gutenberg offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired.

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress just enter any member name of the U.S. Congress to research.

The Founders Constitution: In this unique anthology, Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner draw on the writings of a wide array of people engaged in the problem of making popular government safe, steady, and accountable. The documents included range from the early seventeenth century to the 1830s, from the reflections of philosophers to popular pamphlets, from public debates in ratifying conventions to the private correspondence of the leading political actors of the day.

Avalon Project at Yale: The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. They do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.

Cornell University Library: The Cornell University Library Windows on the Past was a grouping of selected digital collections of historical significance.

Hanover Historical Projects: The Hanover Historical Texts Collection makes available digital versions of historical texts for use in history and humanities courses.

Library of Congress: Library of Congress collections contain over 162 million books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, music, recordings, images, and electronic resources. The LC Catalog contains 17 million records describing these collections.

Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: Beginning with the Continental Congress in 1774, America’s national legislative bodies have kept records of their proceedings. The records of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the United States Congress make up a rich documentary history of the construction of the nation and the development of the federal government and its role in the national life. These documents record American history in the words of those who built our government.

19th Century in Print: http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html

American Memory

Map Collections: This collection from the Library of Congress includes maps that typically portray the physical environment and a variety of cultural elements for a geographic area at a particular point in time.

The papers of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), diplomat, architect, scientist, and third president of the United States, held in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, consist of approximately 27,000 items, making it the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world.

Large Online Digital Book Sites: