Library & Cultural Services: Area Studies: United States

Digital Resources

American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Library of Congress & WBGH Boston project to digitally preserve the most important public radio & TV broadcasts since the 1940s
Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online
State-based repository of digitised documents, includes many important historical collections
Digital Public Library of America
Portal to US digitised cultural heritage
Documenting the American South
Excellent digitised resources primarily from the holdings of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, materials include books, posters, diaries, letters, artifacts, oral histories, songs.
JSTOR Open Community Collections
Rapidly growing platform for open access primary source material from institutions in the US and beyond, includes a strong visual component
JSTOR Reveal Digital
Collections of primary source material from under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent in the US, crowdfunded by libraries (collections become open access as funding targets are reached)
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Including the American Memory gateway to digitised historical materials, organised into more than 100 thematic collections
Making of America (Cornell)
Digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through to reconstruction
New York Public Library Digital Collections

Amistad Research Center
Houses the collections of the American Missionary Association (AMA). Includes some digital collections of documents & photographs, most relating to the fight against slavery, the civil rights movement, and AMA schools
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States
Free resource, with approximately 1,600 primary source documents from ProQuest databases, covering the period 1790-2000
Civil Rights Digital Library
Extensive resource assembled by the University of Georgia
Civil Rights History Project
Part of Library of Congress Digital Collections, with extensive video interviews with key figures
Hispanic Trends (Pew Research Center)
Includes major annual (2002-) National Survey of Latinos
Independent Voices (JSTOR)
Part of JSTOR's Reveal Digital program, Independent Voices gives expression to African American, Latino & Native American issues through digitised primary source material
Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) Alaska
Web archive of key websites of the Alaskan Inuit community
MLA Language Map
Uses data from the 2000 census and updates from the American Community Survey. Detail down to zip code level
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
Founded in 1909, the oldest & largest civil rights organisation

Proquest Historical Newspapers
As well as access to some major national newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post), this newspaper archive provides full text access to ten important US Black newspapers, making it an extremely valuable resource for research on all aspects of the 19th & 20th century African American experience
Institutional login

Southern Poverty Law Center
Major civil rights organisation
Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation & Freedom (Houghton Library, Harvard)
Growing digitised collection of primary sources from the Houghton Library (Harvard University) for African American history, focusing on the period 1780-1910

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
Important free market oriented institute. Some publications are freely available as full text documents
Pew Research Center
Respected nonpartisan centre carries out opinion polls and other data driven research to analyse issues and trends shaping America across these broad themes: US politics, media, social trends, religion, internet & technology, science, Hispanics. Useful source of reports & data
RAND
Important non-profit institution that aims to improve policy and decision-making in areas such as education, poverty, crime, and the environment, national security. Many of its publications are available online
Urban Institute
Free access to reports and data focusing on issues particularly relevant to metropolitan areas in the US