United States History: A Guide to Library Research

Tips for using this collection are available in the Adam Matthew Digital Help Centre.

Includes these collections:
 

• African American Communities
   
• Age of Exploration
   
• America in World War Two
   
• American History
   
• American Indian Histories and Cultures
   
• American West
   
• Apartheid South Africa, 1948 - 1980
   
• Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan, 1834-1922
   
• Children's Literature and Culture
   
• China, America and the Pacific
   
• China: Culture and Society
   
• China: Trade, Politics and Culture
   
• Church Missionary Society
   
• Colonial America
   
• Confidential Print: Africa
   
• Confidential Print: Latin America
   
• Confidential Print: North America
   
• Defining Gender
   
• Early Modern England
   
• East India Company
   
• Eighteenth Century Drama
   
• Eighteenth Century Journals
   
• Empire Online
   
• Everyday Life and Women in America
   
• First World War
   
• Food and Drink
   
• Foreign Office Files for China
   
• Foreign Office Files for India
   
• Foreign Office Files for Japan
   
• Foreign Office Files for South East Asia
   
• Foreign Office Files for the Middle East
   
• Frontier Life
   
• Gender Identity and Social Change
   
• Gilded Age
   
• Global Commodities
   
• India, Raj and Empire
   
• J Walter Thompson: Advertising America
   
• Jewish Life in America c.1654-1954
   
• Leisure, Travel & Mass Culture
   
• Life at Sea
   
• Literary Manuscripts Berg
   
• Literary Manuscripts Leeds
   
• Literary Print Culture
   
• London Low Life
   
• Macmillan Cabinet Papers
   
• Market Research and American Business
   
• Mass Observation Online
   
• Medical Services and Warfare
   
• Medieval Family Life
   
• Medieval Travel
   
• Meiji Japan
   
• Migration to New Worlds
   
• Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive
   
• Perdita Manuscripts
   
• Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
   
• Race Relations in America
   
• Research Source - AS:China and Southeast Asia
   
• Research Source - AS:India
   
• Research Source - AS:Japan
   
• Research Source - Business, Economic and Labour History
   
• Research Source - CMS
   
• Research Source - Empire
   
• Research Source - Literary Studies
   
• Research Source - Medieval and Early Modern Studies
   
• Research Source - Missionary Studies
   
• Research Source - Women's Studies
   
• Research Source - World War Two Studies
   
• Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape
   
• Service Newspapers of World War 2
   
• Shakespeare In Performance
   
• Shakespeare's Globe Archive
   
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
   
• Socialism on Film: The Cold War
   
• The Grand Tour
   
• The Nixon Years
   
• Trade Catalogues and the American Home
   
• Travel Writing
   
• Victorian Popular Culture
   
• Victorians on Film
   
• Virginia Company Archives
   
• Women in the National Archives
   
• Worlds Fairs

Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.

Colonial State Papers (1574 - 1757) provides access to over 7,000 manuscript papers and 40,000 bibliographic records concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Colonial State Papers offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of early American history, British colonial history, Caribbean history, maritime history, Atlantic trade, plantations, and slavery. 

Colonial Legacies: Empire & Commonwealth Periodicals has over 30 periodicals concerning the 20th-century history of the British Empire, decolonization, and the history and culture of former colonies.

This archive offers a mixture of British publications about the empire and titles published in Commonwealth countries. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century to the 21st – these publications encompass the key events in the empire's later phase and its post-independence legacies.

Consists of over 45 themed collections of more than 90,000 declassified and FOIA'ed documents that led to U.S. policy decisions from 1942 to 2014. Includes collections on Afghanistan, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Iran, Japan, Korea, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. Topic collections include the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and more.

Contains documents created 1945-2015.

Includes these collections:

• American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society  
• Archives of Sexuality & Gender  
• Archives Unbound  
• Associated Press Collections Online  
• Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture  
• British Library Newspapers  
• China and the Modern World  
• Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896-2004  
• The Economist Historical Archive  
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online  
• Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2021  
• The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003  
• The Independent Historical Archive  
• Indigenous Peoples of North America  
• International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887-2013  
• Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950  
• The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991  
• The Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources, 1600-1970  
• The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926
• The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926  
• The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources  
• The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926  
• The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1823-1978  
• The Making of the Modern World  
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online  
• Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals  
• Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers  
• Picture Post Historical Archive  
• Political Extremism and Radicalism  
• Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890-1970  
• Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992  
• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection  
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive  
• Smithsonian Collections Online  
• The Sunday Times Historical Archive, 1822-2021
• The Telegraph Historical Archive  
• The Times Digital Archive  
• Times Educational Supplement Historical Archive, 1910-2000  
• Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive  
• U.S. Declassified Documents Online  
• Women's Studies Archive

Covers the administrations of Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Created by the University of Michigan Digital Library.

Sanborn maps, large-scale plans of a city or town, were created to assist fire insurance companies assess the risk associated with insuring a particular property. This collection includes 660,000 maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities.

Includes four parts: 

• Part I) Debates over Slavery & Abolition
• Part II) Slave Trade in the Atlantic World
• Part III) The Institution of Slavery
• Part IV) The Age of Emancipation

Searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books of instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. When complete, the collection will contain 150,000 pages that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.

Contains records of nearly 35,000 separate slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866, gleaned from original documents and historical publications located in archives, libraries, and other institutions throughout the world. Data from these historical records were collected over many decades and will continue to be updated as new documents are discovered. Individuals will be able to contribute their own research to this collaborative resource. Each record in the Voyages Database offers information on a single slaving voyage; some of the details include the country of origin, the individual(s) who sponsored it, the voyage itself (its itinerary, dates of travel, and outcome), captains, numbers of slaves transported, and the sources providing this voyage information.

From the website: “The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.”

Includes these collections:

• Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
• Women and Social Movements, International - 1840 to Present
• Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919 - 2019
• Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820

Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.