For those new to Oxford, you may not know that the VHL has a page on a site called Delicious where we save links to useful websites and free web resources for US Studies. There is a huge and growing number of quality resources available freely online, especially for historic primary source material, and with so much there it can be difficult to know where to start looking. We keep our eyes open for sites which look good and useful, and save them for you on our delicious page. Every now and then I post a summary of recently saved links on the blog as a reminder and to highlight the resources we’ve come across. You can also always browse our list of sites directly on our delicious page, or see the most recent links listed in the sidebar of the blog or on our online guide to US History.
Other Oxford libraries are also using delicious in this way. Historians might also want to check out the History Faculty Library’s links at http://delicious.com/HFLOxford.
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PhillyHistory
- Nearly 100,000 historic photos and maps from the Philadelphia City Archives.
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Mapping Du Bois: The Philadelphia Negro
- This research, education, and outreach project is dedicated to using new technology and archival data to recreate the survey W.E.B. Du Bois conducted of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward for his 1899 classic book, The Philadelphia Negro.
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Septimus D. Cabaniss Papers (University of Alabama)
- The University of Alabama Libraries’ Digital Services Department was awarded a grant by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize the papers of Septimus D. Cabaniss, a Civil War era attorney, noteworthy for his role as executor of the estate of a wealthy plantation owner who sought to manumit and leave property to his slaves. We now provide contextualized, freely-available online access to the complete holdings of the Septimus D. Cabaniss Papers, which consists of 14, 970 items totalling 46,663 images. Each separate document is linked out from the online searchable finding aid.
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Civil War Resources: North Carolina Digital Collections
- Read letters to and from soldiers during the course of the war. Examine published regimental histories. Search related state documents and selected governors’ correspondence and letter books. A growing number of resources relating to the Civil War are being digitized by the North Carolina State Archives and the Government & Heritage Library at the State Library of North Carolina and are made available through the North Carolina Digital Collections for historians, researchers, students, genealogists and other interested parties.
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Commission on Presidential Debates: Debate Transcripts
- Unofficial transcripts of most Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates since 1960.
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Africana Age (Schomburg Center)
- Exhibition site from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, tracing the history throughout the 20th century of Africa and African diasporas. Includes lots of material on the United States.
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HFL DigiDocs: Scanned articles for MSt US History
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HFL DigiDocs: Set texts for SS Slavery and the Crisis of the Union
- Scanned texts for the Slavery and the Crisis of the Union special subject, available via the HFL’s weblearn site (Oxford log-in required)
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Digital collections at the Virginia Historical Society
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New Georgia Encyclopedia: History & Archaeology
- The New Georgia Encyclopedia is the first state encyclopedia to be conceived and designed exclusively for publication on the Internet. By opening a window to Georgia’s rich history, diverse culture, and still-unfolding story, the New Georgia Encyclopedia is an authoritative and important resource. As an online endeavor, the NGE is an organic, “living” project—content can be continually added, and existing content can be updated, as resources allow.
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The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories (The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)
- This portal principally focuses on making available information about relevant audiovisual collections throughout the country. Because the collections reside at a wide range of institutions, we are not able to provide access to the collections themselves. The repositories include local historical societies, university special collections, and public libraries. The database will allow users to search for and locate information about collections in the following ways: by broad topic listings, by Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), by the name of the collection or the repository, and by the geographic location of the repository. In some instances one can locate interviews by searching on the names of individual CRM participants, if the repositories have made such information available through their websites and/or finding aids.
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Presidential Timeline
- The Presidential Timeline provides a single point of access to an ever-growing selection of digitized assets from the collections of the thirteen Presidential Libraries of the National Archives. Among these assets you’ll find documents, photographs, audio recordings, and video relating to the events of the presidents’ lives.
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U. S. Congressional Serial Set: Finding List by Agency
- Listing of reports/documents by agency included in the Serial Set, with volume numbers.
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The Vault – FBI
- The Vault is our new electronic reading room, containing more than 3,000 documents that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office. Included here are more than 25 new files that have been released to the public but never added to this website; dozens of records previously posted on our site but removed as requests diminished; and files from our previous electronic reading room. Since the launch of the Vault in April 2011, we have also added more than 30 new, previously unreleased files.
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Washington State Library – Washington Rural Heritage
- Washington Rural Heritage is a collection of historic materials documenting the early culture, industry, and community life of Washington State. The collection is a project of small, rural libraries and cultural institutions throughout Washington, in partnership with the Washington State Library
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Castle Garden
- This free site offers access to an extraordinary database of information on 11 million immigrants from 1820 through 1892, the year Ellis Island opened. CastleGarden.org is an invaluable resource for educators, scholars, students, family historians, and the interested public. Currently the site hosts 11 million records, and support is needed to complete the complete digitization of the original ship manifests.
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Connecticut State Library Digital Collections : Newspapers
- The Newspapers of Connecticut collection is a sample collection of historical newspapers covering the various regions, perspectives and topics of the Civil War era in Connecticut. Newspaper titles are being added on an ongoing basis. Titles included to date are: Connecticut Fifth (1862) Connecticut War Record (1863-1865) Soldiers’ Record (1868-1871) Stafford News Letter (1859 & 1865) Tolland County Press and Stafford News Letter (1867) Tolland County Press (1871, 1873, 1875-1876) Twenty-sixth (Camp Parapet, La. and New London, Conn.) (1863-1865)
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Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries
- Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries is an online guide to thousands of items—diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, legal documents, University records, drawings, maps, student notebooks, scientific observations, and lecture notes—that form the documentary history of Harvard and serve as one of the great social history collections on the evolving United States. Together, these materials provide insight into the material culture of colonial life, the legal and social concerns of citizens, the costs of goods and services, the books that influenced thought and education, and myriad other aspects of the material and intellectual life in New England. In addition to detailed records on these holdings, researchers will find that more than 13,000 pages from these holdings have been digitized and are available online.
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NATO Archives
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Historic Oregon Newspapers
- Digitised archives of 30 Oregon newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Civil War in the American South
- In recognition of the sesquicentennial of the start of the American Civil War, Civil War and the American South provides a central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). ASERL members hold deep and extensive collections documenting the history and culture of the American South, developed over hundreds of years to support scholarly research and teaching. Many of the special or unique manuscripts, photographs, books, newspapers, broadsides, and other materials have been digitized to provide broader access to these documents for scholars and students around the world. Civil War and the American South is a collaborative initiative to provide a single, shared point of access to the Civil War digital collections held at many individual libraries.
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South Carolina Digital Library
- The South Carolina Digital Library (SCDL) is a collaborative effort that includes South Carolina’s schools, libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. SCDL’s mission is to encourage our collaborators to create, maintain, and promote digital collections that represent South Carolina’s historical and cultural resources while following state-level guidelines that are based on national standards and best practices.
http://delicious.com/vhllib