Primary Sources: National Expansion & Reform, 1815-1860

This digital collection, from the University Libraries at the University of Washington, provides access to photographs and documents about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures.

Historical collections for the National Digital Library, from the Library of Congress. 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 experience.

This collection, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, contains more than 85,000 documents pertaining to the presidency. The items span all eras of American history and range from the public papers of George Washington to the victory speech of Barack Obama.

From the website: "This online exhibition of letters and audio, created by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Legacy Project, features correspondence from over 200 years of American conflicts, ranging from the Revolution to the war in Iraq.

This collection, from the Library of Congress, provides access to digitized copies of books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs and audiovisual footage.

This site contains collections of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants that were published in Virginia newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries. This project was developed at the University of Virginia.

Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression. Concentrating heavily on the 19th century, Immigration to the US includes over 400,000 pages from more than 2,200 books, pamphlets, and serials, over 9,600 pages from manuscript and archival collections, and more than 7,800 photographs.

This collection, from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, features images, texts and maps that illustrate the African-American migration experience.

This site provides access to a digitized version of the 7 volume "Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties". Those volumes cover the period between 1778 through 1971. This site, produced by Oklahoma State University, is searchable.

The Life photo archive, hosted by Google's Image Search, features millions of photographs from the magazine's archives. You can search the database keyword or by category. Those categories include: time period, people, places, events, sports and culture.

This digital public law library, a project of The Native American Rights Fund, is devoted to Federal native American and tribal law.

This collection comes from the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. According to the website: Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books published between 1772 and 1889.

The site, an initiative of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas Litte Rock, chronicles the westward journey, through Arkansas, of Southeastern native populations forced to move under the terms of American Indian Removal Act.

The collection comes from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. It includes dozens of texts and manuscripts, scores of contemporary reviews and articles, hundreds of images, and many different kinds of interactive exhibits.

This site, which is part of the California Digital Library, features more than 2300 letters written by Twain. Those letters are accompanied by detailed notes. Additionally you’ll find access the full text of Twain’s autobiography as well as the full Text of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. More digitized texts will be added in the future.

The National Archives and Records administration maintains a site devoted to Historical Election Results. Included on this page are the results of the electoral college votes dating back to 1789.