History of the United States

Provides access to over 471,000 historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland's government. Online access enables users to research such topics as Maryland's constitutions and constitutional conventions' proceedings, session laws, proceedings of the General Assembly, governors' papers, and military records. This project allows the Archives to place into electronic form and preserve for future generations records that are scattered among a number of repositories and that often exist only on rapidly disintegrating paper.

This collection includes documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina's settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution.

Access to a variety of digitized collections of documents from New Hampshire State history.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

This online collection contains books, maps, prints and photographs, manuscripts, and other documents from the Library of Congress collection that was originally made available as Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier/Historias Paralelas: España, Estados Unidos, y la Frontera Americana, as part of the Global Gateways initiative. Provided by the Library of Congress

Theodore De Bry's engravings of North America provided many Europeans with their first glimpse of the New World. De Bry's illustrated edition of A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, containing engravings that were based on the watercolors of John White, was published in 1590. The images shown on this site are from a rare hand-colored edition of the book in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Online access to books by Richard Hakluyt, an early chronicler of English exploration in the western hemisphere. Provided by the University of Pennsylvania.

Papers of the family of John Adams, 2nd President of the United States, provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Online copies of the diaries of John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States. Provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The papers of army officer and first U.S. president George Washington (1732-1799) held in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress constitute the largest collection of original Washington papers in the world. They consist of approximately 77,000 items accumulated by Washington between 1745 and 1799, including correspondence, diaries, and financial and military records. The collection documents Washington’s childhood education, his first career as a surveyor, his experiences as a militia colonel during the French and Indian War, his election as a Virginia delegate to the first and second Continental Congresses, his role as general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, his presidency of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, his two terms as president (1789-1797), and his retirement. Provided by the Library of Congress.

James Madison (1751-1836) is one of 23 presidents whose papers are held in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The Madison Papers consist of approximately 12,000 items, spanning the period 1723-1859, captured in some 37,714 digital images. They document the life of the man who came to be known as the “Father of the Constitution” through correspondence, personal notes, drafts of letters and legislation, an autobiography, legal and financial documents, and his notes on the 1787 federal Constitutional Convention. The papers cover Madison’s years as a college student; as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Continental Congress, and Confederation Congress; as a delegate to the 1787 federal Constitutional Convention and the Virginia ratification convention of 1788; his terms in the House of Representatives, as secretary of state, and as president of the United States. Also documented are his retirement and the settlement of his estate; matters relating to his family, including his wife, Dolley Payne Madison; and his home, Montpelier

Provided by the American Philosophical Society, Yale University and the Packard Humanities Institute.

Papers of the first Chief Justice of the United States, provided by Columbia University.

The papers of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), diplomat, architect, scientist, and third president of the United States, held in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, consist of approximately 25,000 items, making it the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Dating from the early 1760s through his death in 1826, the Thomas Jefferson Papers consist mainly of his correspondence, but they also include his drafts of the Declaration of Independence, drafts of Virginia laws; his fragmentary autobiography; the small memorandum books he used to record his spending; the pages on which for many years he daily recorded the weather; many charts, lists, tables, and drawings recording his scientific and other observations; notes; maps; recipes; ciphers; locks of hair; wool samples; and more.

The Massachusetts Historical Society presents the complete four volume set of Revolutionary-era Boston newspapers and pamphlets collected, annotated, and indexed by Harbottle Dorr, Jr., a shopkeeper in Boston.

Part of the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress, this site has digitized 15 million pages of American newspapers from 1789 to 1963.