American Social History - Directory of Online Resources

History > U.S. > Modern America > Social History

The Afro American Newspaper
Online version of the weekly newspaper from Baltimore.
  • History
    Sections include: Black Resistance...Slavery in the U.S. ; The Tuskegee Airmen ; Jackie Robinson ; The Black Panther Party ; Black or White ; The Million Man March ; The Scottsboro Boys ; This is Our War.

America at Work / America at Leisure, 1894-1915
"Work, school, and leisure activities in the United States from 1894 to 1915 are featured in this presentation of 150 motion pictures, 88 of which are digitized for the first time (62 are also available in other American Memory presentations). Highlights include films of the United States Postal Service from 1903, cattle breeding, fire fighters, ice manufacturing, logging, calisthenic and gymnastic exercises in schools, amusement parks, boxing, expositions, football, parades, swimming, and other sporting events."
American Memory, Library of Congress

American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
City University of New York

American Temperance and Prohibition
A collection of online articles and essays
K. Austin Kerr, Professor of History, Ohio State University

American Radicalism Collection
Contains a growing collection of digital images
Michigan State University

American Social History Project
City University of New York

Anit-Saloon League 1893-1933
"The League left a legacy of printed material at a site bequeathed to the Westerville Public Library which houses the Anti-Saloon League Museum. The Westerville Public Library in an effort to preserve and share the League's story has established this Web site."

The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 - (dead link)
A University of Arizona Library Web Exhibit
"The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 was an event specific to Arizona that influenced the labor movement throughout the United States. What started as a labor dispute between copper mining companies and their workers turned into vigilante action against the allegedly nefarious activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). This site is a research-based collection of primary and secondary sources for the study of the deportation of over 1,000 striking miners from Bisbee on 12 July, 1917...Materials include I.W.W. publications, personal recollections, newspaper articles, court records, government reports, correspondence, and journal articles that are part of the collections of three libraries: The University of Arizona Library, the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Arizona, and the Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, Arizona.

BoondocksNet.com
A large (over 7,000 pages and 1,700 graphics) site with a focus on American imperialism including a historical graphics gallery, political cartoons, and a Mark Twain directory with more than 1,600 pages of content.
By Jim Zwick

Brown v. Board of Education - see our separate Brown v. Board of Education page.

California in the 20's - (dead link)
"Images of marathon dancing, state society picnics, silent films and junk car races re-create that celebrated decade which secured California's reputation as a social trendsetter. Important, too, are the photographs of daredevil young pilots, industrial and manufacturing workers, dock hands and small businessmen."
- Los Angeles Public Library

Cartoon Research Library - (dead link)
"...houses multi-media collections of primary source materials representative of American culture. Cartoon art, film posters and stills, historic photographs, and magazine illustrations predominate. Original works and related manuscript materials are held, in addition to more than 10,000 published works on cartoon art...CGA is the largest cartoon-related research facility in the United States...Original cartoons will not be posted on our web site due to copyright concerns."

Chicago Anarchists on Trial : Evidence from the Haymarket Affair, 1874-1887
"This collection showcases more than 3,800 images of original manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints and artifacts relating to the Haymarket Affair. The violent confrontation between Chicago police and labor protesters in 1874 proved to be a pivotal setback in the struggle for American workers' rights...Of special interest and significance are the two dozen images of three-dimensional artifacts, including contemporary Chicago Police Department paraphernalia, labor banners, and an unexploded bomb casing given to juror J. H. Brayton by State's Attorney Julius Grinnell. The cornerstone is the presentation, as images and searchable text, of the transcript of the 3,200 pages of proceedings from the murder trial of State of Illinois v. August Spies, et al."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925
"...illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California from 1850 to 1925 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."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

Cornell University - Kheel Center Labor Photos
"The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives' collections include approximately 350,000 images from the 20th century on film, paper, glass, and other media. The collected photographic materials provide invaluable documentation of the nature of labor and management history. While the digital database will be added to continually, it represents only an introduction to the Kheel Center's holdings."

Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
An On-line Archival Collection
Special Collections Library, Duke University
"...document various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humourous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group."
Compiled by Ginny Daley, Women's Studies Archivist and Bibliographe

Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
"...presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture."

Encyclopedia Smithsonian: American Social Cultural History
Sections include: Business and Consumer Culture ; Clothing ; Community Life ; Domestic Life ; Dance ; Film & Television ; Literature ; Photography ; Textiles ; Work & Labor History.
- Smithsonian Institution

Federal Bureau of Investigation - Freedom of Information Act

  • Abbie (Abbott) Hoffman - (dead link)
    "Abbie Hoffman, 1960s and 70s activist and anarchist, was Co-Founder of Youth International Party (YIP a.k.a. Yippies) and one of "Chicago Seven". He was the subject of a security investigation in 1968 in view of his anarchist actions, as well as an anti-riot law investigation as a result of his leadership in disturbances at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DEMCON) in Chicago. (4,101 pages)
  • John Lennon - (dead link)
    "Investigation conducted when the FBI learned that John Lennon contributed $75,000 to a group planning to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 1972."

The Flint Sit-Down Strike Audio Gallery
"The Flint Sit-Down Strike website is a multi-media rich resource devoted to several purposes: 1. To provide an introduction to the sit-down strike for those students or members of the general public who are unaware of the history of this momentous event in American history. 2. To provide an immediacy and personal touch to this historical knowledge through the use of digitized audio files, which contain the actual voices of former sit-downers reminiscing about their experiences. 3. To make a site that was usable on several levels of interactivity, with information and sound files accessible through several different galleries, a Flash-generated map, a timeline, and various search functions. 4. To preserve the interviews done by Leighton etal. in a form that was relatively permanent and easily accessible."
- HistoricalVoices.org

Free Speech Movement: Student Protest - U.C. Berkeley, 1964-65
Sections include: Collections ; Text Documents ; Media Center ; Chronology ; Bibliography.
- University of Berkeley Library

H-Peace Discussion Network
"H-Peace is an international electronic network affiliated with the Peace History Society that seeks to broaden understanding about historical and contemporary peace, justice, and disarmament concerns."

Harvard Business School Baker Library - (dead link)

  • Baker Library Historical Collections - (dead link)
    • Unheard Voices: American Women in the Emerging Industrial and Business Age - (dead link)
      "A Survey of the Baker Manuscript Collections for the Role of Women in Business, 1700-1920."
      "The online guide that follows is the first of these research tools to be available to scholars, providing both information on the materials that were identified within the manuscript collections, as well as a bibliography of secondary resources."

Harvard University - Open Collections Program

  • Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930
    "...is a web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression."
  • Women Working, 1800-1930
    "...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. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images..."

Historical Crime Statistics
Selected US cities (1740-1920 or so)

History Matters
The U.S. Survey on the Web
"Designed for high school and college teachers on U.S. History courses. This site serves as a gateway to Web resources and offers useful materials for teaching U.S. history...We emphasize materials that focus on the lives of ordinary Americans and actively involve students in analyzing and interpreting evidence."
A project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

The History of Jim Crow
Explore the complex African-American experience of segregation from the 1870s through the 1950s
"...an educator's site that presents teachers with new historical resources and teaching ideas on one of the most shameful periods in American history, an era of segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement of African Americans that tore at the very fabric of the nation."
Sections include: Television ; History ; Geography ; American Literature ; Teacher's Resources.

History Through Deaf Eyes
"...is a traveling social history exhibition aligning nearly 200 years of United States history with the experiences of deaf people."
- Developed by Gallaudet University

Immigration History Research Center
University of Minnesota

July 1942: United We Stand
Online gallery of magazine covers from the flag-cover campaign of July 1942.
Smithsonian - National Museum of American History

Jump, Jim Crow, or What Difference Did Emancipation Make? - (dead link)
"A teaching resource in American History created by Lynn Jones, a librarian at the Teaching Library, UC Berkeley, for the California Heritage Project, and the BANDL Librarians' Network."
Sections include: What's Jim Crow ; Jim Crow Timeline ; Freemen's Bureau ; Black Codes ; Stories ; Laws ; Images ; Songs ; Glossary ; For Teachers ; Related Web Resources.

Ku Klux Klan Collection
Selected documents are available online
Michigan State University Libraries

Labor Art
"...a virtual museum designed to gather, identify and display examples of the cultural and artistic history of working people and to celebrate the trade union movement's contributions to that history."

Labor-Management Conflict in American History - (dead link)
Ohio State University

Making of America - (dead link)
"...a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection contains approximately 1,600 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints."
Cornell University and the University of Michigan

On the Lower East Side
Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century
Compiled and edited by William Crozier, et al

Jo Labadie and His Gift to Michigan
"The Labadie is perhaps best known for its varied collections of anarchist materials and social protest literature whose scope includes includes civil liberties, socialism, communism, colonialism and imperialism, free thought, American labor history through the 1930s, the I.W.W., the Spanish Civil War, sexual freedom, women's liberation, gay liberation, student protest movements, and the counterculture."
Description from the Internet Public Library's Anarchist Poster Exhibition - (dead link)

Los Angeles--A City in Stress - (dead link)
"Growing out of Los Angeles--A City in Stress, this project involves bringing up on the Web a series of full text documents dealing with the manifold problems of Los Angeles in the 1990's with emphasis on the civil disturbances of April and May 1992."
- University of Southern California Libraries

  • Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? - (dead link)
    A Report by the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, December 2, 1965
    (The McCone Report)
    "The digitization of this document is being undertaken as part of an on-going project to digitize many documents dealing with Los Angeles in the 1990's."

Michigan State University Libraries - Digital Collections
Major collections include: Africana ; American Radicalism ; Applied and Life Sciences ; History & Social Sciences ; Interviews with Michigan Supreme Court Justices ; Orchids ; Osteopathy ; Sunday School Books ; Veterinary Medicine.

Movie Collection: Internet Moving Images Archive
"This collection contains movies that the Prelinger Archives has digitized (about 750 now online) and donated to the Internet Archive. The films focus mainly on everyday life, culture, industry, and institutions in North America in the 20th century ... This is the first time that most of the films have been available to the public."
- Internet Archive

Lost Museum
Re-creating Barnum's American Museum
"The Lost Museum is composed of three interrelated sections: A three-dimensional interactive Museum, a searchable Archive of primary documents and supplementary information, and a Classroom with teaching activities, background essays and other resources."
- American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, City University of New York in collaboration with Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum
"The first museum in the United States to preserve a tenement building and have it designated a National Historic Site."
Includes: Labor History Tour ; The Wallpaper Excavation ; Tenement Stories.

National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
American Memory, Library of Congress
"The NAWSA Collection consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign."

National Archives and Records Administration

  • 1930 Census Microfilm Locator
    "Welcome to our comprehensive guide to the 1930 census. Learn how the census was taken, which records survive today, and how to find microfilm that may contain your family's records

New York University Libraries - Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

  • An Eyewitness to Labor History 1948-1975
    "Often referred to as 'labor's photographer,' Sam Reiss used his camera to capture historic events that shaped American labor...In the 1980s, Sam Reiss's family donated the photographs assembled for the 1975 exhibit, as well as some 80,000 negatives--most of Reiss's life work--to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. The 128 photographs selected for this online exhibition of Reiss's images represent only a tiny fraction of this , yet they suggest the scope and richness of Reiss's work."
  • Labor & The Holocaust: The Jewish Labor Committee And The Anti-Nazi Struggle
    "This exhibit presents a portfolio of a hundred photographs and documents from the JLC Collection. The text has been adapted from an article by JLC archivist Gail Malmgreen, originally published in Labor's Heritage (October 1991). The exhibit's seven pictorial sections take the viewer on a chronological journey, from the origins of the JLC, through its anti-Nazi activity of the 1930s, to early rescue efforts and wartime assistance to the anti-Nazi Underground, and then examines three aspects of postwar aid and reconstruction. A final section offers a bibliography of resources for further study."

Oakland Museum of California

  • Helen Nestor: Personal and Political
    "The exhibition presents 33 vintage black and white photographs of the California social scene of the '60s and '70s, documenting such subjects as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, nontraditional California families, Vietnam War protests, California feminists, mid-life women, the early days of busing in the Berkeley Unified School District, street life on Telegraph Avenue and the Haight Ashbury, and the People's Park movement."
    Special Feature: Nestor Free Speech Movement Photographs

PBS - Independent Lens - Strange Fruit
Web companion to the TV broadcast of the independent film by Joel Katz.
"STRANGE FRUIT explores the history and legacy of a song unique in the annals of American music. Best-known from Billie Holiday's haunting 1939 rendition, the song 'Strange Fruit' is a harrowing portrayal of the lynching of a black man in the American South...The film tells a dramatic story of America's past by using one of the most influential protest songs ever written as its epicenter."

  • Protest Music
    Sections include: Slavery ; Abolitionists and Women's Rights ; The Workers ; The Great Depression ; War, Labor and Race ; Civil Rights and Vietnam ; Anti-Establishment ; Message Music.

PBS - NOVA Online

  • The Most Dangerous Woman in America
    Companion web site to the October 2004 TV broadcast.
    "Examine the complex case of Typhoid Mary, a cook who was quarantined for life against her will in the early 1900s."
    Sections include: History of Quarantine ; Disease Detective ; Links & Books ; Teacher's Guide.

PBS - The American Experience - The Pill (February 2003)
"The film The Pill and this companion Web site offer insights into topics in American history including advances in science and medicine, contraception, eugenics, social engineering, population trends, government involvement in legislating social behavior, conflicts between religious values and societal trends, feminist activism of the 1960s, twentieth century women's movements, women's changing roles in society, women and work, the evolving relationship of the medical profession to the lay public and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry."
Sections include: Film Description ; Transcript ; Primary Sources ; Further Reading ; Special Features ; Timeline ; Gallery ; People & Events ; Teacher's Guide.

PBS - The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
"A landmark four-part series [Fall 2002], THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW explores segregation from the end of the civil war to the dawn of the modern civil rights movement."
Episodes: Promises Betrayed (1745-1896) ; Fighting Back (1896-1917) ; Don't Shout Too Soon (1918-1940) ; Terror and Triumph (1940-1954).
Sections include: A Century of Segregation ; Jim Crow Stories ; A National Struggle ; Interactive Maps ; Tools & Activities ; For Teachers ; Resources.

Posters of Struggle - (dead link)
Links to posters and images from riots, revolutions, and popular struggles.

Radical America
"...was a product of the campus-based New Left of the late 1960s, specifically the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but the magazine long outlived its seedbed. Its trajectory shows something about the effort to place an intellectual stamp on the radical impulses of the late twentieth century."
- Brown University Library - Center for Digital Initiatives

Radical History and Politics - (dead link)
Includes writings, image collections, and links
Sponsored by Radical History Review

Rear View Mirror - (dead link)
Automobile Images and American Identities
UC, Riverside Museum of Photography

SNCC 1960-1966
Six Years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
"This site covers the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from its birth in 1960 to 1966, when John Lewis was replaced by Stokely Carmichael as chairman. This event marks a decided change in philosophy for SNCC, and one that warrants an equal amount of attention. However, we have focused on the first six years of the movement, in order to adequately explore such events as sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer."

Social Security History Page
"...contains information on the history of the Social Security program and the Social Security Administration. The content is a mix of general-interest material and items that may appeal primarily to scholars. The site is content-rich and quite deep, graphics and photos abound, and there are sound and video clips of significant events in Social Security's history.
- Social Security Administration

Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
"...contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. These panoramas offer an overview of the nation, its enterprises and its interests, with a focus on the start of the twentieth century when the panoramic photo format was at the height of its popularity."
- American Memory, Library of Congress

Tangled Roots
A Project Exploring the Histories of Americans of Irish Heritage and Americans of African Heritage.
"Tangled Roots is a research project about the shared history of African Americans and Irish Americans... seeks to investigate the history of American slaves and immigrants from Ireland and to consider the links between them. A collection of primary documents from the 17th century to the present provides portraits of people and events from the history of African and Irish Americans."
- Yale University - Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

VOAHA: The Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive
California State University, Long Beach
"This site provides access to the full audio recordings of oral histories that have been deposited in Special Collections of the University Library - enabling you, the user, to hear the voice, pitch, and rhythm of the narrations as well as the emotions these convey. You will hear the actual spoken words of oral history narrators, rather than seeing a written version of them in the form of a transcript...Presently, more than three hundred hours of Los Angeles basin oral histories in women's, labor history and Long Beach area history are available online, including forty hours of interviews with California women who were rank and file activists in the national suffrage movement."

University of Oxford - Department of Economic and Social History

Unpacking on the Prairie: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest
"This site explores Jewish womenís experiences in unpacking, rearranging, and remodeling their heritage in the Upper Midwest. It also relates how their female descendants redefined that legacy in order to create a more egalitarian community...Learn about Jewish women and the things that they carried, preserved, and changed in the new place they came to call home."
Sections include: The Journey ; Life Inside the Jewish Home ; Life Outside the Jewish Home.
From the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest

USA 1840-1960: Trade Unionism
Includes biographies, organizations, journals, history and issues.
Spartacus Internet Encyclopedia

Votes for Women: 1850-1920
American Memory, Library of Congress
"This selection of 38 pictures includes portraits of many individuals who have been frequently requested from the holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division and the Manuscript Division. Also featured are photographs of suffrage parades, picketing suffragists, and an anti-suffrage display, as well as cartoons commenting on the movement."

Westinghouse Works Collection
Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904
"...contains 21 actuality films showing various views of Westinghouse companies. Most prominently featured are the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and the Westinghouse Machine Company."
American Memory - Library of Congress

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930
"This website is intended to introduce students to a rich collection of primary documents related to women and social movements in the United States between 1830 and 1930. It is organized around editorial projects completed by undergraduate and graduate students at the State University of New York at Binghamton."

Women's Labor History
Sections include: General Women's Labor History Links ; Women's Trade Union League ; Mother Jones and Other Women in the Mines ; Textile and Garment Industries ; Wobbly Women ; Other Famous Women in Labor History ; Women's Labor Songs - Lyrics ; Women's History - General.
From AFSCME LaborLinks

Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting
"...presents 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in 1994. Paterson is considered to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America...The online presentation also includes interpretive essays exploring such topics as work in the African-American community, a distinctive food tradition (the Hot Texas Wiener), the ethnography of a single work place (Watson Machine International), business life along a single street in Paterson (21st Avenue), and narratives told by retired workers.
American Memory, Library of Congress

World History Archives: History of the Working Class in the US
A collection of online documents

See also

Maintained by Mike Madin.
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