Vetted Resourced: Digital Collections

This resource was developed as part of the AHA’s Remote Teaching Resources initiative.

 

Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981

Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

The Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976-1981 features photographs, transcripts, and most audio recordings of 72 interviews of African American women from across the United States. Interviewees discussed their upbringing, marriage, education, work, and participation in voluntary organizations. Interviewees include Dorothy West, Rosa Parks, Margaret Walker Alexander, Sadie Alexander, Alfreda Duster, Dorothy Height, Clementine Hunter, and Audley Moore.grftb

Canadian Museum of History — Online Exhibitions

Canadian Museum of History

The Canadian Museum of History offers nearly 100 online exhibitions on Canadian and world history and culture. Exhibitions are easy to navigate; the site is available in English and French.

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

David Rumsey

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is composed of 16th through 21st century historical maps. Through the LUNA Viewer, users can browse the entire online collection or search by keyword for specific images. Images may be exported or saved in groups. The resources include atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and more.

Dig: A History Podcast

Averill Earls, Mercyhurst University; Sarah Handley-Cousins, University at Buffalo; Marissa C. Rhodes, Niagara University; Elizabeth Garner Masarik, SUNY Brockport

Dig: A History Podcast is a narrative-driven, open access, and accessible digital history project bridging the worlds of popular and academic history with an explicitly feminist perspective. Topics include motherhood, childhood, health, medicine, slavery, empire, and war. Educator resource topics include creating a podcast, discussion, debate, source assessment, and writing an episode.

Digital Public Library of America

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America works with national partners to make millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the US available to all in a one-stop discovery experience. The Library boasts more than 30 exhibitions and more than 140 Primary Source Sets on topics that are political, economic, social, and cultural in nature, from the 1500s to the present. The teaching guide helps instructors use a specific primary source set in the classroom. It offers discussion questions, classroom activities, and primary source analysis tools.

Documenting the American South

University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs that are keyword searchable. The site also provides a link to the North Carolina Digital textbook.

Goin’ North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia

Charles Hardy III and Janneken Smucker (West Chester Univ.) and Doug Boyd (Univ. of Kentucky Libraries)

Goin’ North draws on the resources of various institutions to tell the story of the Great Migration, the unprecedented 20th-century northern migration of African Americans born in the US South. The site features 42 oral history modules, 26 biographies, multiple essays, and exploratory questions.

Massachusetts Historical Society

Massachusetts Historical Society

The Massachusetts Historical Society tells the story of America through rare and unique documents, artifacts, and irreplaceable national treasures, including rare photographs, drawings, letters, diaries, and other materials. K-12 Teacher Resources include assignments organized around four themes: Founding Fathers and their Families, American Revolution, Slavery and Antislavery, and the Civil War. Other resources include taped webinars and presentations, and the MHS blog, The Beehive.

Mark E. Mitchell Collection of African American History

Mitchell Collection of African American History

The Mark E. Mitchell Collection is a private collection of African American history materials. The website provides access to samples from the collection, the strengths of which include original letters, photographs, ledger excerpts, posters, newspapers, and other primary sources. The site is not searchable, but provides a variety of thematically-organized exhibits, including annotations for each historical item.

National Humanities Center Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in US History

National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center Toolbox Library is a multi-layered collection of primary sources divided into “toolboxes” with themes like American Beginnings, Becoming American, Making and Living the American Revolution, African American Identity, and The Gilded and Gritty. The toolboxes cover dates from 1492 to 1978, and have five themes each. Each toolbox has framing questions and related activities across each of its themes. Primary sources are suitable for student research.

The Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom

Kara Johnson, The Newberry Library

The Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom is an educational resource designed for teachers and students featuring primary sources from the Newberry’s holdings, contextual essays, and discussion questions. Each document collection features critical thinking prompts that encourage student analysis, as well as an overarching question that helps students synthesize about 8 to 14 sources. Ideal for advanced secondary and undergraduate history students in a flipped or remote classroom, this site can serve as an introduction to archival work. It offers a broad range of topics and interdisciplinary resources for research papers or presentations.

Pandemic Religion: A Digital Collection

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI

Pandemic Religion is a digital collection that preserves interviews, images, and short videos from individuals and religious communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The site includes responses from a diverse range of religious groups. It can be used to help students connect to events unfolding around them and compare present and past religious reactions to pandemics. Students can contribute to the collection. This site also includes a targeted collecting project, American Jewish Life.

Teaching American History

Ashbrook Center at Ashland University

Teaching American History supports teachers of American history, government and civics by bringing the documents and debates of the United States’ past into the present through document-based seminars, document collections, and other multimedia resources. Teachers can create free accounts to save documents to their dashboard and create custom document collections. Teacher resources include toolkits, lesson plans, online exhibits, an interactive timeline, and 50 Core Documents, with additional access to external podcasts and videos.

Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive

The University of Virginia Arthur J. Morris Law Library

The Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project uses Session Papers to explore everyday life in early America, Scotland, and the larger British Atlantic world from the 1750s through the 1830s. Themes include print culture, commerce, criminal law, education, elections, the American Revolutionary era, family litigation, labor, land use, maps, medicine, military, property, slavery and freedom, religion, and women. The Scottish presence in Virginia is also highlighted.

SMU Libraries Digital Collections

Southern Methodist University Libraries

SMU Libraries Digital Collections is home to 98 collections of digital photographs, recordings, paintings, letters, postcards, documents, films, newspapers, yearbooks, oral histories, and drawings relating to the history of the United States, the state of Texas, and, to a lesser extent, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, and China. Suitable for high school and college students.

Virginia Museum of History and Culture: Learning Resources

Virginia Museum of History and Culture

The Virginia Museum of History and Culture collects, preserves, and interprets the Commonwealth’s history. The museum’s learning resources include digital games, in-depth teacher resource guides with lessons plans and activities, primary sources, online exhibits, and educational videos.