Primary Sources: Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1929

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.

The American Variety Stage is a multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. This collection illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini. Groups of theater posters and additional sound recordings will be added to this anthology in the future

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 site from Columbia University features collections of photographs, manuscripts and oral histories that, taken together, illustrate the politics, arts, culture and neighborhood characteristics of Harlem.

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 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.

The mission of Labor Arts is to "… to present powerful images that help us understand the past and present lives of working people." In this virtual museum you'll find digitized copies of photographs, posters, buttons, banners, flyers, paintings and sculpture.

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.

The Prelinger Archvies, housed at The Internet Archive, represents a collection of tens of thousands of advertising,educational, industrial and amateur films.

From the NARA website: "The National Archives was established in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt, but its major holdings date back to 1775. They capture the sweep of the past: slave ship manifests and the Emancipation Proclamation..."

This collection from the National Archives tells the story of the 20th century United States in pictures. Among the images you'll find here are pictures of an Easter Parade on New York's 5th Avenue in 1900 and one of President Bill Clinton playing a saxophone.

This site, from the U.S. Library of Congress, contains photographs, correspondence and personal narratives from participants in World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

This collection, from the University of Washington's Digital Collections, includes a selection of World War I and World War II posters. Subjects addressed in these placards include war bonds and national security.

This wiki, from the library at Brigham Young University, serves as a primary source portal for World War I resources. The Wiki links to sites which provide access to a host of primary sources such as treaties, government documents, diaries, memoirs, images, and more.

ARTstor has collaborated with the University of Minnesota Libraries to distribute approximately 5,700 images depicting posters and postcards from World Wars I and II. Works by artists such as James Montgomery Flagg, James H. Daugherty, Ben Shahn, Gil Spear, Otto Fischer, and others are represented. The collection is international in scope and contains posters from a range of governmental, commercial, and charitable organizations.

Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including: 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets, 1,200 photographs. This site is part of Harvard University Library’s Open Collections Program.