WMU Research Guides: HIST 2110 : American History Since 1877: Library of Congress, Federal and Michigan Sites

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. WMU is now contributing unique materials to the DPLA.

Michigan Primary Sources

The Making of Modern Michigan is a collaborative project involving 52 Michigan libraries. It includes local history materials from communities around the state. Michigan's unique heritage is represented through over 4,500 different subjects of photographs, family papers, oral histories, genealogical materials, and much more. You can search by subject or institution.

Prints and Photographs Collection

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog is a searchable collection of over one million digital images representing a cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress.

New York Public Library Digital Images

The New York Public Library Digital Images Collection is a great place to find historical and current images. They have over 708,000 images, prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and streaming video, which have been fully digitized.

Veterans History Project

The Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress preserves and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans from World War I through the present day.

National Archives

Explore the Web site of the National Archives and Records Administration to find digitized primary documents and images from different eras in American history that are in the National Archives collections.

American Memory

The Library of Congress's American Memory site offers multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. It includes over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression-era photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell.

American Folklife Center

Located at the Library of Congress, the American Folklife Center contains collections of folk cultural material from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There are over 4,000 collections of images, sounds, written accounts, interviews, and more items of cultural documentation. This site is rich in primary sources relating to American history.

Some of the things you will find are accounts of men and women who were enslaved; documentation about the lives of American cowboys, farmers, fishermen, coal miners, shop keepers, factory workers, quilt makers, professional and amateur musicians, and housewives; and Native American song and dance traditions.