History 201 - US History to 1877

A collection of primary sources from American history. Includes several speeches by Native American leaders.

The billions of historical documents and other materials housed at the National Archives throughout the country include information relating to Native Americans from the 18th through the 21st century. The documents we hold related to Native Communities reflect their interaction with the U.S. Government. On this page we include primary sources related to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

First published in 1727, "Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard" was written by Experience Mayhew and provides insights into the lives and culture of four generations of Native Americans in colonial America

This site contains the entire English translation of the The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, originally compiled and edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites and published by The Burrows Brothers Company, Cleveland, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment."

The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive is a freely available resource for non-commercial educational purposes that provides access to court records, personal letters, sermons, maps, and more.

Documenting the American South provides Internet access to books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs related to southern history, literature, and culture.

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of primary source materials associated with the American Revolution era (1763-1783), including manuscripts, broadsides, government documents, books, images, and maps.

Beginning in 1837 the printer Peter Force, devoted 16 years to collecting thousands of pamphlets, booklets, and newspaper articles pertaining to the "Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America" from the Revolutionary Era in order to preserve them for future generations. He published them in a set of 9 large volumes that he called the American Archives. By the late 20th century Force's collection of materials from the years 1774-6 had become a valuable scholarly resource, as it contained the only surviving copies of many important documents.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School presents a compilation of primary source documents from 1764 to 1783 associated with the American Revolution.

The Massachusetts Historical Society's site contains primary sources and contextual essays arranged into 15 topics relating to the events leading up to the American Revolution

This online exhibit from the Sir Henry Clinton Collection at the Clements Library, University of Michigan, examines the everyday intelligence operations of both the British and American armies. Many of the letters highlighted in this digital exhibit were pivotal to the successes and failures of sieges, battles, and surprise attacks. The exhibit includes a gallery of letters, a timeline, biographical information, stories, and a variety of educational resources.

The International African American Museum is a museum of African-American history in Charleston, South Carolina, on the site where Gadsden's Wharf, the disembarkation point of up to 40% of all American enslaved persons, once stood.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the American Abolitionist Movement. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide.

The Antislavery Collection contains several hundred printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. The holdings include speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project, this database contains full-text accounts by thousands of former slaves still living in the 1930s when the federal government as part of the New Deal sponsored the collection of their first-person stories.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro offers this database of abstracts of about 3,000 petitions to courts and legislatures in the antebellum South, portraying slave/owner relations. interracial sex, free blacks, the black family, and racial attitudes.

The Library of Congress has acquired 540 rare and historic Civil War stereographs from the Robin G. Stanford Collection. The first 77 images are now online, including 12 stereographs of President Lincoln’s funeral procession through several cities and 65 images by Southern photographers showing South Carolina in 1860-61.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online database providing information about slaves and slave trading voyages, will soon expand to include information about intra-American slave trade as well as have a new accessibility. The online database is supervised by two Emory faculty members in partnership with international scholars. This new project aims to add in-depth information about individual slaves to the database’s catalogue of information regarding voyages, the number of slaves on the voyages, where the voyages landed and more.

In addition to thousands of individual soldier profiles, we have several ways to look at the battle and the campaign of September 1862: with interactive maps, narratives from the official to the personal, and special projects highlighting aspects of the history.

This website engages Civil War buffs, scholars, students, and local residents in research and discussion on the Missouri-Kansas Border War that shook the region from 1854 to 1865. Through a collaborative effort among libraries, museums, and historical societies across the greater Kansas City region, the project provides free access to selected primary source materials and adds unique interactive features and a thematic layer of original scholarly essays and topical encyclopedia entries.

Primary source documents and photographs. Explore topics including the politics of the Union, creating the Confederacy, enlisting armies, military service, African American lives, battles, the war at home, and remembering the Civil War.

The American Civil War in Missouri collection contains letters, diaries, maps, and military records. Manuscript collections for the Civil War era are often personal accounts of events and actions of Missourians during the conflict and offer valuable insights into how Missourians experienced the Civil War. These collections also shed light on the events leading up to the war and how Missouri moved forward after the war.

A first person narrative by nurse Amanda Akin, who spent fifteen months serving injured soldiers and others at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, DC. Her letters to her sisters and other missives are included as well courtesy of the Smithsonian's American History Museum. Visitors can explore documents via an interactive map of DC or look though the items based on themes.