Collections at Library of Congress

Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress

The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents. The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming ...

The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920

Digital collection of over 30,000 pages of manuscripts, printed text, and images from many separate Ohio collections presents the history of African Americans in Ohio from 1850 to 1920. Major topics ...

African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship

The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship showcases the Library's incomparable African American collections. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, ...

African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exhibition

The Paris Exposition of 1900 included a display devoted to the history and "present conditions" of African Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois and special agent Thomas J. Calloway spearheaded the planning, ...

African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907

351 pamphlets presenting a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years. Works include sermons on racial pride and political activism; ...

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: From the Collections of Brown University

Selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Consists of 1,305 pieces of American-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. Includes many songs from ...

The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939

The online version of the Alexander Graham Bell family papers at the Library of Congress comprises a selection of 4,695 items (totaling about 51,500 images). This presentation contains correspondence ...

America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945

The collection encompasses the images made by photographers working in Stryker's unit as it existed in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935-1937), the Farm ...

America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets

Collection of 4,291 song sheets for popular music from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. Consisting of lyrics produced between the turn of the nineteenth ...

America’s Story from America's Library

A web site designed for children and families. The site combines kid-friendly graphics with the incomparable American historical collections of the Library in more than 1,000 stories about our nation’ ...

An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490-1920

A collection of over two hundred social dance manuals beginning with a rare late fifteenth-century source, "Les basses danses de Marguerite d'Autriche" (c.1490) and ending with Ella Gardner's 1929 " ...

American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936: From the University of Chicago Library

Approximately 4,500 photographs documenting natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. ...

American Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the University of Washington Libraries

This digital collection integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the Northwest Coast and Plateau. ...

American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920: A Study Collection from the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Approximately 2,800 lantern slides representing an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. The collection represents the work of Harvard faculty, such ...

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940

These life histories were written by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940. Typically ...

American Memory from the Library of Congress

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American ...

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920 comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations ...

American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

The library of Peter Force, acquired by the Library of Congress in 1867, furnished the basis of the Printed Ephemera Collection. Force himself had secured many of the pieces assembled by an earlier ...

American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920

A multimedia anthology illustrating the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language ...

America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864

Selections from the Library's daguerreotype collection that consists of more than 650 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864. Portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio make up the ...

Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar

Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style of landscape photography. Although a majority of the photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural ...

Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955

The collection also provides a look at nature through the eyes of Samuel Gottscho. Another major highlight of the Gottscho-Schleisner collection are the images from the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. It ...

Around the World in the 1890s: Photographs from the World's Transportation Commission, 1894-1896

Images by American photographer William Henry Jackson showing railroads, elephants, camels, horses, sleds and sleighs, sedan chairs, rickshaws, and other types of transportation. Jackson also ...

Baseball Cards 1887-1914

Presents 2,100 early baseball cards from the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection. Dating from 1887 to 1914 and issued as black-and-white photographs or color prints, these forerunners to sports trading ...

BeCites+

The BeCites+ initiative is designed to substantially enhance traditional printed library bibliographies not only by placing them on the Web in electronic form but by including annotated citations, ...

Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916

Site offers a perspective on the effects the San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906 had on the development of the city. Seventeen films shot before the devastating events and seven shot ...

Brady-Handy Collection

E. and H.T. Anthony acquired Brady's Civil War negatives as payment for his debt to that photographic supply company. These negatives, distinguished by the prefix LC-B8, were purchased by the Library ...

Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982.

The Buckaroos in Paradise Collection presents documentation of a Nevada cattle-ranching community, with a focus on the family-run Ninety-Six Ranch. The documentation was largely the work of the ...

Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present

A collection documenting achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies ...

By Popular Demand : Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

Compilation of formal and informal portraits of United States presidents from the collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943

The By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 collection consists of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin ...

"California As I Saw It": First-person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history ...

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties

The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ...

The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925

The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925 comprises 139 books selected from the Library of Congress's General Collections and two books from its ...

Cartoon Prints, American

The prints illustrate the rise and decline of allegorical expression and the evolution of important symbols such as Uncle Sam, Liberty, and Justice. Because of the testimony they provide to earlier ...

A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875

Brings together online the records and acts of Congress from the Journals of the Continental Congress through The Congressional Globe, which ceased publication with the Forty-second Congress in 1873. ...

Civil War Maps, 1861-1865

The Civil War Map collection of the Geography and Map Division consists of reconnaissance, sketch, coastal, and theater-of-war maps which depict troop activities and fortifications during the Civil ...

Civil War Photographs

Civil War Photographs provides online access to about 7,000 different images made during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and in its immediate aftermath. The images were scanned from the Prints and ...

Collections of Historical Content with Digitized Items

Records with links to the web sites of American Memory collections.

Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964

The Carl Van Vechten photographs collection at the Library of Congress consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964. The bulk of the ...

Cyber LC: Cybercasts from the Library of Congress

Carries products captured, digitized and presented by Library of Congress ITS multimedia staff. The growing list includes symposia from the Globalization series; poetry readings; and a series of ...

Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection

Comprising nearly 1,700 flutes and other instruments, statuary, iconography, books, music, tutors, patents, and other materials mostly related to the flute, the Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection draws ...

Digitized Serials

Records with links to the web sites of digitized serials at the Library of Congress.

Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention 1774-1789

Selections from the Continental Congress Broadside Collection (253 titles) and the Constitutional Convention Broadside Collection (21 titles) contain 274 documents relating to the work of Congress and ...

Early Virginia Religious Petitions

Images of 423 petitions submitted to the Virginia legislature between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty counties and cities. Drawn from the Library of Virginia's Legislative Petitions collection, ...

Edison Motion Pictures

Edison's laboratory was responsible for the invention of the Kinetograph (a motion picture camera) and the Kinetoscope (a peep-hole motion picture viewer). Most of this work was performed by Edison's ...

Edward S. Curtis Collection

The Edward S. Curtis Collection offers a unique glimpse into Curtis's work with indigenous cultures. The more than 2,400 silver-gelatin photographic prints were acquired by the Library of Congress ...

The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920

Documents the historical formation and cultural foundations of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, through books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, ...

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection

A multi-format ethnographic field collection of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia. Recorded by folklorist Alan Jabbour in 1966-67, when Reed was over eighty years ...

First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920

This compilation of printed texts documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, ...

France in America

Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection

Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) was one of the first American women to achieve prominence as a photographer. Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, she studied photography upon her return to ...

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909

Presents 397 pamphlets published from 1824 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The ...

George Grantham Bain Collection

Available online are 39,744 glass negatives and a selection of about 1,600 photographic prints for which copy negatives exist. This represents all of the glass plate negatives the Library holds and a ...

George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress: 1741-1799

Correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account books, military records, reports, and notes from the approximately 65,000 items in the collection accumulated by ...

Global Legal Information Network (GLIN)

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) maintains and provides a database of laws, regulations, and other complementary legal sources. The documents included in the database are contributed by the ...

Hispano Music & Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection

An online presentation of a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. In 1940 ...

Historic American Sheet Music: 1850-1920

3,042 pieces of sheet music drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University and presenting a significant perspective on American history and culture through a ...

Historic Sheet Music, 1800-1922

Approximately 9,000 pieces of Sheet Music published from 1800 to 1922, although the majority is from 1850 to 1920. The bulk was published in many different cities in the United States, but some of the ...

History of the American West, 1860-1920: Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library

Over 30,000 photographs, drawn from the holdings of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library, illuminate many aspects of the history of the American West. Most of the ...

Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904

Site houses twenty-one early films held at the Library of Congress. Originally intended to showcase Westinghouse's operations, the films are today a testament to the conditions found at early American ...

Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies

Features motion pictures, sound recordings, photographs, and original magazine articles. Includes histories of Edison's invention and manufacture of motion pictures and sound recordings, and a special ...

John C. H. Grabill Collection

The collection includes a visual record of railroad development, coaches and wagons, mining, smeltering, and milling, freighting, emerging cities and towns, parades, cattle roundups and branding, ...

The Last Days of a President: Films of McKinley and the Pan-American Exposition, 1901

Presents twenty-eight films from the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress. Produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company from March to November 1901, these actuality motion pictures ...

Lawrence & Houseworth Collection

In 1867 the Library of Congress acquired a set of more than 900 albumen silver half stereographs published by Lawrence and Houseworth of San Francisco. The acquisition also included the third edition ...

The Learning Page...especially for teachers

Designed for teachers, the Learning Page is a companion Web site to the American Memory collections. It provides search and curricular guidance to teachers and students who use American Memory primary ...

The Leonard Bernstein Collection, ca. 1920-1989

The composer, conductor, writer, and teacher Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was one of 20th-century America's most important musical figures. The Leonard Bernstein Collection is one of the largest and ...

Library of Congress Web Archives: Minerva

Initiated in fiscal year 2000 to capture, save, and preserve collections from select Web sites for use by future generations of researchers. The collection comprises more than two million megabytes, ...

The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906

Site contains forty-five films from 1898 to 1906 highlighting the character of New York City around the turn of the century. A selected bibliography and information about early cameramen are also ...

Lomax Collection of Photographs Depicting Folk Musicians

Roughly 400 snapshot photographs made in the course of sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of ...

Map Collections, 1500-1999

The focus of Map Collections is Americana and Cartographic Treasures of the Library of Congress. These images were created from maps and atlases and, in general, are restricted to items that are not ...

Mapping the National Parks

Documents the history, cultural aspects and geological formations of areas that eventually became four US National Parks (Yellowstone, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Great Smoky Mountains). The collection ...

Maps of Liberia, 1830-1870

The Geography and Maps Division of the U.S. Library of Congress presents online images of its collection of maps of Liberia, dating from 1830 to 1870, as part of its American Memory Web resource. The ...

Meeting of Frontiers

70,000 images chronicling the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in settling their frontiers in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The bilingual Russian/English Meeting of Frontiers/ ...

Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library

Mr. Lincoln's Virtual Library highlights two collections at the Library of Congress that illuminate the life of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), the sixteenth president of the United States. The Abraham ...

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1860, 1870-1885

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music contains more than 62,500 pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright: more than 15,000 registered during the years 1820-1860 and more than 47, ...

National Child Labor Committee Collection

The collection consists of more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives, given to the Library of Congress, along with the NCLC records, in 1954 by Mrs. Gertrude Folks Zimand, acting for ...

National Photo Company Collection

Available online are a growing proportion of the glass negatives and a selection of about 1,900 photographic prints for which copy negatives exist. The scanned photographic prints represent a small ...

The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939

This online presentation includes over 13,000 images of items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, still ...

The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals

This collection comprises books and periodicals published in the United States during the nineteenth century, primarily during the second half of the century. Most of the materials were digitized ...

The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920: Photographs from the Fred Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collections

Over nine hundred black and white and hand-colored photographs taken from the collections of Fred Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak have been mounted on this site. Photos depict pioneer and town life from ...

"Now What a Time": Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943

Approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort ...

Omaha Indian Music

Omaha Indian Music features traditional Omaha music from the 1890s and 1980s. The multiformat ethnographic field collection contains 44 wax cylinder recordings collected by Francis La Flesche and ...

Origins of American Animation

Offers information on the origins of American animation from 1900-1921, provided by the U.S. Library of Congress. Details the animation of such subjects as automobiles, boys, family, flowers, World ...

Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929

Contains about 1,700 idealized schematic views of towns and cities in the U.S. and Canada. Offered as part of the American Memory online resource compiled by the National Digital Library Program of ...

Panoramic Photographs: Taking the Long View, 1851-1991

The Panoramic Photograph Collection contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. These panoramas offer an overview of the nation, its ...

Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier

Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier is a bilingual, multi-format English-Spanish digital library site that explores the interactions between Spain and the United ...

Photochrom Prints

Late 19th and early 20th century travel views primarily of Eastern and Central European destinations (including the former Austro-Hungarian Empire). Includes cities and towns in Austria, Belgium, ...

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910

Portrays the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ...

Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection

The collection contains fragments of the poem "Song of Myself," trial lines of poetry and prose, Civil War hospital notes, and personal jottings on a wide range of subjects. The wide range of topics ...

Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Unique in their scope and richness, the prints and photographs collections today number more than 13.7 million images. These include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and ...

Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929

Assembles a wide array of Library of Congress source materials from the 1920s that document the widespread prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass consumer economy, and the ...

Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives

Portrays the early history of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico through first-person accounts, political writings, and histories drawn from the Library of Congress's General Collections. Among the ...

Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978-1996

Quilts and Quiltmaking in America showcases materials from two American Folklife Center collections, the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection (1978) and the "All-American Quilt Contest" ...

Railroad Maps 1828-1900

Represents an important historical record, illustrating the growth of travel and settlement as well as the development of industry and agriculture in the United States. They depict the development of ...

Selected Civil War Photographs

Contains 1,118 black and white photographs of the Civil War selected from the collections of the Library of Congress. The three main areas of focus are: 1) the main eastern theater, 2) the Federal ...

The September 11 Digital Archive: Saving the Histories of September 11, 2001

Permanent digital archive of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Contains first hand accounts, emails, weblogs, audio and moving images, documents, and interviews. Also ...

Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

The collection is part of the American Folklife Center of the U.S. Library of Congress. Beginning in Port Aransas, Texas on March 31, 1939, and ending at the Library of Congress on June 14, 1939, John ...

The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures

68 motion pictures produced between 1898 and 1901 of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine Revolution. The Spanish-American War was the first U.S. war in which the motion picture ...

Stereograph Cards

The online Stereograph Cards category is limited to individual stereographs that have been cataloged online, generally because they have associated copy negatives, transparencies, or digital files. In ...

Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film

Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to have his career and life chronicled on a large scale by motion picture companies (even though his predecessors, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley ...

The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606-1827

The complete Thomas Jefferson Papers from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 27,000 documents. This is the largest collection of original Jefferson documents ...

United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Cultures

Veterans History Project

With Public Law 106-380, signed by President Bill Clinton in October 2000, Congress directed the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to develop and coordinate a program to collect and ...

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941

Presents "Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection," an ethnographic field collection that documented the everyday life of residents of the Farm ...

"Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Selection of 38 pictures includes portraits of many individuals who have been frequently requested from the holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division and the Manuscript Division. Also featured ...

Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921

Consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign. They are a subset of the Library's larger collection donated by Carrie Chapman Catt, longtime president of the ...

Washington As It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

Spanning from the mid 1920s through the 1950s, the Theodor Horydczak collection (about 14,350 photographs online) documents the architecture and social life of the Washington metropolitan area in the ...

"We'll Sing to Abe our Song!": Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War: From the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana

Collection of over two hundred sheet music compositions on the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Spanning the years from Lincoln's presidential campaign in 1859 through the centenary of ...

The William C. Brumfield Photograph Collection

William C. Brumfield, Professor of Russian Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, has extensively photographed and written about the wooden architecture of the Russian North, the ...

William P. Gottlieb Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz

The Music Division at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., owns the William P. Gottlieb Collection, which comprises over 1,600 photographs of celebrated jazz artists and documents about ...

Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years

In honor of the Manuscript Division's centennial, its staff has selected for online display approximately ninety representative documents spanning from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth ...

World War I Posters

The World War I posters include posters made in America and in France between 1914 and 1920 to advertise war efforts and issues.

WPA Posters

A collection of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the ...

Wright Brothers Negatives

Among the materials the Wright Brothers estate gave the Library of Congress in 1948 were 300 glass plate negatives and two nitrate negatives, most taken by the Wright brothers themselves between 1897 ...