History of the United States: Websites

The focus of this site is Americana and Cartographic Treasures. It includes maps of military battles and campaigns, cities and towns, as well as discovery and exploration maps.

From the University of Texas, this is an excellent source of online maps. Find original maps of major United States historical events including early inhabitants, exploration and settlement, territorial growth and extensive military history detailing every major battle. Most maps are pre-1900.

This image database is part of the larger Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative at the University of Illinois Library. The project includes scanned maps related to the history of Illinois and the Northwest Territory, 1650-1976.

From the Library of Congress, "a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 5 million items from more than 90 historical collections."

Browse a list of scanned diaries and letters from the University of Iowa Libraries, some of which currently have transcriptions, but not all. You can also browse by year to get the materials for a particular time.

This site provides balanced information on the East-West conflict not only from a US perspective, but also from sources that dramatize the worldwide component of the Cold War. Key sections such as archives and feature collections afford students and scholars helpful access to sources dealing with the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the conclusion of the Cold War.

A project by the National Endowment for the Humanities and several partners (The Chicago History Museum, The University of Houston, and the National Park Service, to name a few). A comprehensive site with primary documents related to each era of American history as well as music, film, images, events and people.

DocSouth provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to Southern history, literature and culture. It includes nine thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South.

Created by a Florida State University's Department of History Professor, this site contains many primary source documents relating to the experience of men and women serving during WWII.

Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NEH and produced in association with Duke University, this Web site is the intellectual property of Minnesota Public Radio. It presents both facts and source materials on what the compilers maintain is "the often-overlooked war that helped define global politics and American life for the second half of the 20th century."

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to provide enhanced access to United States Newspapers. The NDNP is in the process of creating a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all of the states and U.S. territories between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress and will be freely accessible via the Internet. Currently, the prototype of this site has been launched called "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers" with newspaper pages from 1900-1910.

The Library of Congress created this site which explores the role religion played in the founding of the American colonies, the shaping of early American life and politics and the forming of the American Republic.

Established by Dr. John Steiner, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at SSU and survivor of the death campus of Auschwitz and Dachau. The site also includes information on current lectures and includes a lecture series archive.

Founded at Texas Tech in 1989 to encourage the study of the US experience in Vietnam, this site is an especially rich resource. It contains an Oral History Project. The site includes a variety of points of view, but has no specific political agenda about the war. It is the best Web site dealing with original documents on the war, especially those involving veterans and military operations.

Excellent book by Daniel J. Cohen, Assistant History Professor at George Mason University and Roy Rosenzweig, Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University.