History

Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more.

With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.

Digitized from one of the most important collections ever produced on microform, Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans’ renowned “American Bibliography” and Roger Bristol’s supplement. Including more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages, Series I also offers new imprints not available in microform editions.

A wide variety of 17th- and 18th-century imprints
Early American Imprints, Series I is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties and more.

Extensive indexing and easy browsing
The imprints in Series I are expertly indexed and may be browsed by genre, subjects, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Topics covered include agriculture, astronomy, auctions, capital punishment, child rearing, commerce, constitution, diseases, education, foreign affairs, French & Indian wars, geography, Indians, Latin, lotteries, masonry, medicine, military operations, missionaries, operas, religious thought, revolutionary war, slavery, suffrage, temperance, trials, witchcraft, women, work, yellow fever and thousands more.

Two dramatic expansions of Evans, 1639-1800
Readex now offers a broad range of recently uncovered imprints, most of which were not included in either Charles Evans’ monumental work or Roger Bristol’s supplement. From the acclaimed holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society come two individually available supplements to Evans, 1639-1800. Together these collections offer approximately 1,750 rare and unique items printed during a 150-year period spanning the colonial era and the formation of the new nation. Fully integrated with Evans, these two supplements enable students and scholars to locate relevant material from all three collections simultaneously.

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It is based on the noted “American Bibliography, 1801-1819” by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. With more than four million pages from over 36,000 items—including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions—this digital edition from Readex is an essential complement to Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800, the definitive resource for researching 17th- and 18th-century America.

Explore the early 1800s in unprecedented depth and detail
Through Early American Imprints, Series II, students and scholars can extensively research westward expansion, the development of American arts (literature, music, painting, etc.), the progression of American political thought and much more. In addition to books, broadsides and pamphlets, the collection includes published reports and the works of many European authors reprinted for the American public. Additionally, a large number of state papers and early government materials—including presidential letters and congressional, state and territorial resolutions—chronicle the political and geographic growth of the developing American nation.

Extensive indexing by subject
The imprints in Series II are expertly indexed and grouped by genre, subject, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Subjects include the following: 12th Amendment, abolitionism, Adams-Onis Treaty, Bible societies, canals, Embargo Act, fur trade, Hartford Convention, Lewis & Clark Expedition, Louisiana Purchase, nationalism, Panic of 1819, Romanticism, Seminole War, Tippecanoe, Treaty of Ghent, U.S. Military Academy, War of 1812 and hundreds more. In addition to searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text that is associated with each image, Early American Imprints, Series II features bibliographic records from the American Antiquarian Society, which is also upgrading the MARC records for the Readex digital edition.

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For Scholarship, Study, and Personal Research

For academic scholarship, the collection will have broad departmental relevance, showing the personal stories and photos of immigrants, laborers, and newsmakers; documenting the local architecture of homes and businesses; showing images of racism and tolerance; delivering history as observed in real time. The photos are from historical societies, archives, and private collections. The texts are written by local historians—people with deep and personal knowledge of their communities. In many instances, the authors are protagonists in the historical events they describe, with family photographs, primary documents, and other materials that are inaccessible outside of these publications.

Examples of academic disciplines served include:

Sports history, recreation—Major leagues, local teams, and their influences on communities: Metro Detroit Boxing; Gold in the Ozarks; Central Park Zoo; New York City Vaudeville; New York Giants; Hockey in Providence
Architecture and urban studies—How spaces were used in the past: Lost Ann Arbor; Cemeteries Around Lake Winnipesaukee; Railroad Depots of West Central Ohio
Race and gender—Italians in Detroit; Jewish Community of North Minneapolis; The Chinese Community of Stockton; An Oral History of Tahlequah and The Cherokee Nation
Labor and organizational history—Army, Coast Guard, canal workers, nurses, police departments, fire departments, unions, factory conditions: Firefighting in Frederick; Fairchild Aircraft; The Long Island Railroad; Straub Brewery; WNAX 570 Radio
War—New Hampshire in the Civil War; Cincinnati: The World War II years
Religion—The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh

New Tools for Search and Discovery

Alexander Street has indexed the books using a new thesaurus created specifically for this collection. Places, people, dates, events, architectural features, and ethnicities are some of the index terms, making searches such as these easy:

Find African American schools in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Find pictures of coal miners in Kentucky and Virginia from 1900 to 1950.
Find examples of neocolonial architecture in the Northeast and Southwest.
Find pictures and descriptions of college football games in Nebraska in the 1950s.
Find depictions of the Irish American community in Youngstown, Ohio. In all of the Midwest. Compared to the Italian-American communities in these areas.
Find Jewish butchers in Chicago in the 1920s.

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Orderly Books were the controlling document of day-to-day life in the military, most notably during the Revolutionary War. This one-of-a-kind collection – developed in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society – offers access to Orderly Books found nowhere else and contains handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817.

Content Includes:
Over 30,000 pages of original primary source material from two hundred handwritten volumes
Original images, fully transcribed and keyword-searchable

Subjects Include:
Both sides of the American Revolutionary War
The French and Indian War
The War of 1812
The early frontier
Other various military deployments throughout the young United States

Orderly Book Entries Include:
Information on the day, location and general orders
Proclamations from the Continental Congress
Calculations about rations, miles and routes traveled
Personal expenses and loans
“Advertisements” announcing lost items, such as clothing and equipment

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Northern and Southern Points of View
The Civil War Primary Source Documents collection, drawn from the holdings of the New-York Historical Society, is comprised of over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections, and focuses on the War as it was fought from both Northern and Southern perspectives.

Battlefront Perspectives and Personal Artifacts
Invaluable primary resources include letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs and illustrations. Personal accounts appear in various scrapbook journals and family portraits, and strategic initiatives are evident in maps featuring details of troop movements and local landmarks.

Insightful Correspondence and Notable Papers
Highlights include the papers of David Cronin, a famous soldier and artist, soldiers' diaries chronicling daily life and experiences as prisoners of war, Union Defence Committee records and Confederate Army records.

Content Includes:

Over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections
Extensive correspondence from both the Confederate and Union troops, societies and individuals and their families
Diaries from soldiers on the field and civilians on the homefront
Hand-drawn illustrations, maps, and engineering notebooks
Military content from both the army and navy, from the front lines to hospitals and prisons
Letters and first person accounts from such well-known leaders as Ulysses S. Grant, as well as accounts from individual soldiers and sailors

On-Campus Link

During the “Long 19th Century,” New York City was the focal point in North America for industry, trade, commerce and immigration. Gateway to North America is a unique collection of historical directories, member lists and other name-rich sources from the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), and features materials that track individuals and organizations over time and place.

Content Highlights Include:

Residential, trade and occupational directories
Membership lists for professional groups, philanthropic and governmental institutions,
ethnic organizations, religious groups and leisure clubs
Names and physical descriptions of Civil War deserters and the incarcerated
Illustrated advertisements
Commercial listings by trade
Descriptions of local philanthropic, religious and governmental institutions
Travel schedules
Maps
Postal and tax rates
Town histories
Sources Include:

Yearbooks and annuals
Tax lists
Elite blue books
Vital records
Burial lists
Registers
Biographical dictionaries
Gazetteers
Maps Include:

Land development and internal improvements over time
Travel routes
Locations of government buildings, churches and schools
Concentrations of wealth and poverty
Spread of disease

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The uses for the collection will be many and varied. For historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy, and others, North American Women's Letters and Diaries will prove a dramatic new resource. These diaries bring us much more than the personal. They provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves. We can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. We can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends. William Matthews, an early scholar in this field, observed:

"I believe the diary to be a unique kind of writing; all other forms of writing envisage readers, and so are adapted to readers, by interpretation, order, simplification, rationalization, omission, addition, and the endless devices of exposition . . . [diaries] are in general the most immediate, truthful, and revealing documents available. . ."

The collection includes some 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, including more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous. It includes some 300 biographies to enhance the use of the database.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries aims to cover all published material and as large a number of unpublished materials as copyright and cost will allow. The contents have been selected from the bibliographies listed below as well as other sources.

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Covers almost every aspect of American and British law
Includes casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters and speeches
Encompasses a range of analytical, theoretical and practical literature for research in United States and British legal history
Allows researchers to trace the evolution of historical and contemporary legal study in the U.S. and Britain during periods of monumental change

On-Campus Link

The authoritative bibliography is well-known and respected by scholars worldwide, and is a valuable index for libraries, researchers and individuals interested in European works that relate to the Americas. It was co-developed by John Alden and the Curator of European Books at The John Carter Brown Library, Dennis Landis. This electronic index represents a wide range of topics, from the British/French/Dutch in America to natural disasters, religious orders, slavery and more. The John Carter Brown Library, founded in 1846, is a foremost repository of rare books and materials and is a center for advanced research in history and the humanities.

Content Includes:
More than 32,000 records
Coverage of European exploration and portrayals of Native American peoples

Subjects include:
British in America
Commerce
Discoveries
Dutch in America
French in America
Great Britain—Colonies
Jesuits (and other religious orders) in America
Pirates
Slave trade

On-Campus Link

APS Online chronicles the development of America across 150 years. The journals in this collection cover three broad periods:

89 journals published between 1740 and 1800 offer insights into America's transition from colonial times to independence. The journals support research for a range of academic fields. Titles include Massachusetts Magazine, which published America's first short stories, and Thomas Paine's Pennsylvania Magazine, which reported on inventions. One of the first mass printings of the Declaration of Independence, a letter by George Washington on the crucial Battle of Trenton, and the thoughts of Benjamin Franklin are among the highlights of content from this period.

The first 60 years of the 19th century became the golden age of American periodicals, with general interest magazines, children's publications, and more than 20 journals for women. Many of the publications reflect on the growing debate over slavery, including the serialization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin in National Erathat preceded the novel. Also available are hard-to-find materials, such as Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger, as well as the first appearances of Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories in New England Magazine, and Margaret Fuller's contributions to the Dial.

118 periodicals published during the Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1865-1877) eras reflect the nation in turmoil and growth, and titles from the 1880s through 1900 capture the settling of the West and the emergence of modern America. Early professional journals, including Publications of the American Economic Association and Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, popular titles such as Scribner's and Lippincott’s issued by publishing houses, celebrations of Americana in Ladies’ Home Journal, and the incisive political and social commentary of Puck and McClure’s illustrate the variety of the American experience.

Because the database contains digitized images of periodical pages, researchers can see all of the original typography, drawings, graphic elements, and article layouts exactly as they were originally published.

Access to California maps only.

They are large-scale plans containing data that can be used to estimate the potential risk for urban structures. This includes information such as the outline of each building, the size, shape and construction materials, heights, and function of structures, location of windows and doors. The maps also give street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. Seven or eight different editions represent some areas.

Textual information on construction details (for example, steel beams or reinforced walls) is often given on the plans while shading indicates different building materials. Extensive information on building use is given, ranging from symbols for generic terms such as stable, garage, and warehouse to names of owners of factories and details on what was manufactured in them. In the case of large factories or commercial buildings, even individual rooms and the uses to which they were put are recorded on the maps. Other features shown include pipelines, railroads, wells, dumps, and heavy machinery.

Access the map legend provided by the Sanborn Map Company.

For help using the Sanborn Map collection see Frequently Asked Questions.

Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years.

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In addition to its comprehensive data resources, Social Explorer offers features and tools to meet the needs of demography experts and novices alike. From research libraries to classrooms to government agencies to corporations to the front page of the New York Times, Social Explorer helps the public engage with society and science.

DATA RESOURCES
Access current and historical demographic data with ease:
The entire US Census from 1790 to 2010.
The entire American Community Survey (ACS) from 2005 to 2012.
All annual updates from the American Community Survey.
InfoGroup data on religious congregations in the United States for 2009 and 2010, including maps for counties and special census areas, as well as point maps of the actual congregation locations.
The Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) from 1980 to 2010.
Carbon Emissions Data for 2002 from the Vulcan Project.
Social Explorer includes over 40 billion data elements, 500,000 variables, and more than 25,000 interactive maps.
Stay current with the latest data from the US Census Bureau, which is added to the site as soon as it is released.
Browse full source documentation for all reports and maps, as well as the source and computation information for every variable.

TOOLS & FEATURES
Visualize data with customizable, user-friendly maps, allowing unparalleled exploration of demographic and social change, revealing the patterns buried in raw numbers.
Create thematic and interactive maps that explore all historical and modern US census data across the centuries and even down to street level detail (where available).
Locate geographies with the address find tool.
Export, save, and print maps and reports for professional-looking reports, presentations, and graphics. High-resolution images are available and any presentation can be exported directly to PowerPoint.
Create multi-map presentations with the interactive slideshow tool for in-depth comparisons and story-telling.
Graph and chart data with easy on-screen tools to investigate the data and communicate your findings.
Save projects in your personal MyExplorer account for archiving, collaboration, and more.
Share your creations in presentations and online. Maps can be shared through email, Facebook, and Twitter, and embedded in websites.
Create data reports at all geographic levels, including state, county, census tract, block group, zip code, and census place (where the data exist).
Download data to a variety of file formats for use with your favorite statistical package. Our reports automatically calculate aggregates, percentages, inflation adjustments, and medians to save time and eliminate errors.
No software to install or maintain, making it hassle-free for librarians and users. The site works entirely on the web and provides many basic GIS and data manipulation functions.
An ideal teaching resource that employs an engaging visual approach to demographic information for courses across the social sciences, and trusted by Pearson Publishing as a leader in social science online learning.

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