Related Resources

In American Memory

• Other Collections Featuring Maritime Content
• Other Collections Featuring Westward Settlement and the American West

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

This collection contains nearly nine hundred images of transportation including railroads, elephants, camels, horses, sleds and sleighs, sedan chairs, rickshaws, among others. See city views, street and, landscapes, local inhabitants, and Commission members as they travelled through North Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. See especially the collection of photographs on Harbor Scenes.

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

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. The collection includes a range of sail and motor vessels and shipyard buildings. See Schooners, Tugs, Skipjacks, Shipyards, and, more generally, Ships.

The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, 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 Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The collection includes first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs that capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Map Collections: 1544-1999

This collection form the Geography and Map Division and has captured maps and atlases organized according to seven major categories. See especially Discovery and Exploration and Cities and Towns.

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

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. Of particular interest is the special presentation of cartographic items that feature maps of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and its cities, and war maps from the Spanish-American War of 1898.

American Indians of the Pacific Northwest

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. These resources illustrate many aspects of life and work, including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, and employment. The materials are drawn from the extensive collections of the University of Washington Libraries, the Cheney Cowles Museum/Eastern Washington State Historical Society in Spokane, and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

"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 through eyewitness accounts. The collection covers the dramatic decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century. It captures the pioneer experience; encounters between Anglo-Americans and the diverse peoples who had preceded them; the transformation of the land by mining, ranching, agriculture, and urban development; the often-turbulent growth of communities and cities; and California's emergence as both a state and a place of uniquely American dreams. Of particular interest is Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast. This personal narrative, gives an account of Dana's expedition at sea. Leaving from Boston in 1834, he sailed as a common seaman on board the brig Pilgrim bound for the Pacific, and returned to Massachusetts two years later. It contains a rare and detailed account of life on the California coast a decade before the Gold Rush revolutionized the region's culture and society. He describes the lives of sailors in the ports and their work of hide-curing on the beaches, and he gives close attention to the daily life of the peoples of California: Hispanic, Native American, and European.

Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian: Photographic Images

The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced. Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. Curtis said he wanted to document "the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners." In over 2000 photogravure plates and narrative, Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. The twenty volumes, each with an accompanying portfolio, are organized by tribes and culture areas encompassing the Great Plains, Great Basin, Plateau Region, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. Featured here are all of the published photogravure images including over 1500 illustrations bound in the text volumes, along with over 700 portfolio plates.

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 photographs were taken between 1860 and 1920. They illustrate Colorado towns and landscape, document the place of mining in the history of Colorado and the West, and show the lives of Native Americans from more than forty tribes living west of the Mississippi River.

The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books

The books in this collection bear nineteenth century American imprints, dating mainly from between 1850 and 1880. They have been digitized by the University of Michigan as part of the Making of America project, a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and provide access to historical texts. Currently, approximately 1,500 books are included. The collection is particularly strong in poetry and in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. See especially Travel and Westward Expansion. In particular, see Sailing on the Great Lakes and Rivers of America, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast and The Great West and Pacific Coast.

Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters, 1862-1912

This digital collection integrates two collections from the holdings of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Solomon D. Butcher photographs and the letters of the Uriah W. Oblinger family. Together they illustrate the story of settlement on the Great Plains. Approximately 3,000 glass plate negatives crafted by Butcher record the process of settlement in Nebraska between 1886 and 1912. The approximately 3,000 pages of Oblinger family letters discuss land, work, neighbors, crops, religious meetings, problems with grasshoppers, financial problems, and the Easter Blizzard of 1873. In the eloquent letters exchanged between Uriah and his wife Mattie, and in letters to other family members, Oblinger expresses very personal insight into the joy, despair, and determination in their struggle to establish a home on the prairie.