Select Early American Digital Resources
Early American Databases: General
American Panorama: a "historical atlas" that includes a number of interactive maps that trace relevant social and political issues over time. Produced by the Digital Studies Lab at the University of Richmond, the maps are primarily nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century focused.
Keywords: Maps, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Contemporary
City Readers: Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library: Database containing a number of digital records and digital projects using the special collections material at the New York Society Library. Includes a site where you can browse the library’s circulation records from 1789-1805 as well as sites analyzing various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading patterns. Site is maintained by The New York Society Library.
Keywords: Eighteenth-Century, Nineteenth-Century, Twentieth-Century, Libraries, Circulation, Early American, Primary Source,
Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets: a resource from the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA) that synthesizes a number of primary source documents on a particular topic. The primary source sets include teaching guides for class use and a number of the sets are focused on Early American topics. The DPLA is a non-profit organization funded by a number of foundations and government agencies. For a list of their supporters, see here.
Keywords: Teaching Guides, Primary Source, Early American,
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA): a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Site is sponsored by the University of Maryland's Library e-Publishing Initiative and developed with the support of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
Keywords: Early American, Fifteenth Century, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Primary Source, Transatlantic
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA): "a highly interactive digital scholars lab for the collaborative research and study of pre-C20 Caribbean literature." Site is a partnership with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLOC) and housed in Northeastern University's NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (NULabTMN).
Keywords: Early American, Early Caribbean, Primary Source,
The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD): an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. The site is sponsored by the McNeil Center of Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Keywords: Early American, Datasets,
Mapping Colonial Americas Publishing Project: a project that "aims to visualize New World printing over geographic space and across literary genres from European contact to 1800." The site was created by scholars at Brown and uses documents from the American Antiquarian Society, the John Carter Brown Library, and the John Hay Library.
Keywords: Early American, Maps, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Early Caribbean, Primary Source, Transatlantic
Mapping the Republic of Letters: a site run by Stanford University containing a number of case studies illustrating the circulation of letters by a number of different authors including Condorcet, Voltaire, Franklin, Locke, etc. The case studies range from the 16th through the 20th century and include maps, images, and other forms of digital analysis of the letters and networks created through correspondence.
Keywords: Early American, Transatlantic, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century
Newberry Library’s Digital Collections for the Classroom:
New England's Hidden Histories: Colonial-Era Church Records: Digital collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England congregational church records. A collaboration between the Congregational Library and the Jonathan Edward's Center at Yale.
Keywords: Puritans, New England, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Church Records, Congregationalism, Primary Source
Early American Databases: Specific Topics
Colored Conventions Project: a collection of digital exhibits and records cataloguing African-American political and reform movements from 1830 until after the Civil War. This site is run by a larger team of researchers and is currently hosted by the University of Delaware. The site includes primary source documents, online exhibits, and teaching resources.
Keywords: Nineteenth Century, African-American, Early American, database, pedagogy, politics
Digital Paxton: a digital project focused on the 1763 Conestoga Massacre in which 20 Susquehannock Indians were murdered by the Paxton Boys -- a group of Scots-Irish settlers, in central Pennsylvania.. The project is sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Pennsylvania. Included on the site are a digital collection of primary source documents relating to the event and its significance, as well as contextual essays and educational materials.
Keywords: Eighteenth Century, Pennsylvania, Early American, Native American, Susquehannock, Pedagogy, database, pedagogy, print culture,
Manuscript Cookbooks Survey : "a database of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks held in U.S. public institutions as well as a database of kitchen artifacts used at the time these manuscripts were written." The project is run by the Pine Needles Foundation of New York. For a list of contributors, see here.
Keywords: Cookbooks, Early American, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, database, food, Primary Source
Mapping Early American Elections: a site that intends to produce "interactive maps and visualizations of Congressional and state legislative election from 1787 to 1825. The project makes available the electoral returns and spatial data underlying those maps, along with topical essays on the political history of the period and tutorials to encourage users to use the datasets to create their own maps." The project is funded by the NEH and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. For more information about the project participants, see here.
Keywords: Early American, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Maps, dataset, politics
Papers of the War Department 1784 to 1800: A site run by George Mason's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media that recreates the papers of the War Department lost in a fire in 1800. Contains "some 42,000 documents of the early War Department many long thought irretrievable but now reconstructed through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public."
Keywords: Early American, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, military history, politics, primary source,
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913: A “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” Though mostly a British archive, some of the accounts describe colonial and transatlantic experiences. Site is run by the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Keywords: Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Transatlantic, Trials, Criminal Courts, London, Britain
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: A database housed at Emory University tracing, mapping, and graphing almost 36,000 slaving voyages that took place between 1514 and 1866. Also includes pedagogical resources and links. For the full project team, see here.
Keywords: Transatlantic, slavery, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, dataset, maps, Early America, Caribbean,
Early American Databases: Specific Author
The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online -- "a collection of writings and articles from Jonathan Edwards. The collection contains edited published works and raw manuscripts." The site is run by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. For a list of staff members, see here.
Keywords: Eighteenth Century, Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Primary Source,
The Benjamin Franklin Papers: a site run by the Library of Congress that includes digitized versions of Benjamin Franklin's papers and associated documents from 1726 to 1907, with the majority of documents dating from the 1770s and 1780s. The site also includes teaching resources and finding aids.
Keywords: Benjamin Franklin, Early American, Eighteenth Century, Primary Source
The Occom Circle: "a freely accessible, scholarly digital edition of handwritten documents by and about Samson Occom (1723-1792) housed in Dartmouth College." The site is run by staff members at Dartmouth.
Keywords: Samson Occom, Eighteenth Century, Primary Source, Early American, Native American, Mohegan, Dartmouth
Digital Stowe: the "digital home for Harriet Beecher Stowe Studies," the site includes Stowe's writings, as well as images, pedagogical tools, and a forum for scholarly discussion about Stowe and her works. The site is supported by the Fordham University Graduate Digital Humanities Working Group. For a list of contributors, see here.
Keywords: Nineteenth Century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, primary source documents, images, pedagogy,
