Links to Early America
The following are annotated links to useful websites dedicated to subjects pertaining to colonial, revolutionary, and early national America that students may find helpful as they extend their study of this subject beyond what is normally provided in textbooks. Some are databases wherein one may read primary documents, view images representing early American life and prominent figures of the period, and peruse scholarly articles.
Always under compilation . . . check back often!
General
The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture--The homepage of the historical association dedicated to the study of Atlantic America from the pre-contact period to 1820. Links to the most recent issues of the William and Mary Quarterly and to the H-OIEAHC listserv discussion group are most valuable.
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies--Formerly the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, the McNeil Center is an important facility that offers pre- and post-doctoral fellowships to scholars specializing in the history of the mid-Atlantic region prior to 1850. It also publishes Early American Studies- An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Common-place--This is the premier web journal of early American studies, edited by Edward G. Gray (Florida State University) and funded by the American Antiquarian Society and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. A quarterly publication, it features crisply written articles and book reviews aimed at a wide-ranging audience of specialists and laypersons, and covering a diverse array of topics.
Archiving Early America--A very commercial website that can serve as a gateway for beginning students of early American history.
Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library--Located at the University of Georgia, this site is an excellent digital archive of over 800 maps covering the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The images are typically quite large, allowing for fairly close examination.
African American Voices--This well organized Digital History site offers a basic introduction to the subject of American slavery from 1619 to 1863, and includes many useful links to other relevant websites.
Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America--This excellent site is a marvelous repository of hundreds of popular songs and tunes of the Anglophone world, primarily of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Midi files play each tune, which can be downloaded and saved, and lyrics are provided so you can sing along! Songs are grouped by country and genre (i.e., love ballads, war songs, sea shanties, etc., etc.), and there is a good search engine for that one song you're looking for.
American Indian
Indian Country Today--This is the best online news source for American Indians and issues pertaining to them.
National Museum of the American Indian--Maintained by the Smithsonian Institution, this site only provides information about visiting the facilities in New York, Washington, D.C., and Suitland, Maryland, and general information about their collections, which are extensive.
New! First Nations Histories--This is a reasonably good historical introduction to a fair representative grouping of American Indian tribes, from the Abenakis to the Wenabagos.
American Society for Ethnohistory--The American Society for Ethnohistory is a preeminent scholarly society promoting the interdisciplinary study of the history and culture of the American Indians.
Native American Records as NARA--A well organized digital repository of selected documents from the National Archives and Records Administration. Their links page is very good, and offers pointers toward other relevant document collections at NARA.
The Avalon Project--Created and maintained by the Yale Law School, this site reproduces the treaties concluded between the United States and the Indian nations within its borders from 1778 to 1868.
American Indian Heritage Foundation--An outstanding site devoted to issues currently facing American Indians. Its tribal directory is most useful.
NativeWeb--A wonderful site devoted to American Indian and other indigenous people issues, featuring an events calendar, message boards, and links to statistical, historical, and news sources. It also has a great links page.
American Indian Movement--A site created and maintained by AIM, an activist organization dedicated to redressing long extant historical grievances against the United States government and persistent racism.
Native Languages of the Americas--A first rate introduction to the various linguistic groups and specific languages of North and South American Indian tribes, and additional links to the same.
Cahokia Mounds--An excellent site providing information about a relatively unknown pre-Columbian North American culture. The archaeology page is the most interesting, and there is a decent related links page.
Cultural Readings: Colonization and Print in the Americas--This University of Pennsylvania Library site is an extensive print and pictorial database dealing mainly with European perceptions of American Indians during the first two centuries of colonization, but also incorporating an impressive amount of Indian documents concerning their perceptions of the European colonizers.
Oneida Indian Nation: Culture and History--This website presents documents and studies focusing on the Oneida Nation during the Revolutionary War and its recent campaign to pursue land claims. There are treaties, government memoranda, and essays by historians to peruse, as well as excerpts from an oral history project in which thirteen tribal elders discuss Oneida heritage and culture.
Colonial Period
Virtual Jamestown--This excellent work-in-progress offers sixty-three primary sources relating to the English exploration and settlement of the Virginia coastal region (which then included present-day North Carolina) and the history of Tidewater Virginia to the early eighteenth century. There are also census records, law codes, maps, images, and a registry of servants sent to plantations from 1654 to 1686, as well as virtual reconstructions of the original settlement of 1607. An invaluable resource for those wishing to learn more about the first English attempts at New World colonization.
The Plymouth Colony Archive Project--This database compiled and maintained by the University of Virginia offers comprehensive and thorough information about one of the first English colonies in North America, including maps, images, grave art, and material culture along with court records and scholarly articles on the Plymouth Colony. Begun by Prof. Jim Deetz (1930-2000), historical archaeologist, the site stands as a tribute to his incredible work.
The Avalon Project--Created and maintained by the Yale Law School, this site reproduces the key documents of the early American period, as well as the whole of American history.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record--This is an excellent database of over 1,000 images compiled by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia. It has a good keyword search engine, and user-friendly thumbnail pages grouped by categories.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project--An excellent primary and secondary source repository on the bizarre tragedy that struck Essex County, Massachusetts in 1691-93. Built and maintained by the University of Virginia, it is a refreshing alternative to the more popular and irresponsible sites dedicated to the subject.
New! Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704--This is a well organized and comprehensive examination of the French and Indian raid upon the Anglo-American village of Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704, at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession. Viewed from multiple perspectives, visitors to this website will learn much about how Indian tribes and European colonists were forced to deal with one another in both peace and war.
Colonial House--See the interesting (though at times ridiculous) experiment of placing a group of twenty-first-century people into a reconstruction of an early seventeenth-century New England settlement. It is instructive in spite of--and also due to--its failures.
The Elizabeth Murray Project--This is an excellent biographical resource website authored and maintained by Patricia Cleary and Sean Smith of the History Department at California State University-Long Beach. Hers is an amazing, though by no means typical, story of an otherwise ordinary woman's experience in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Revolutionary and Early National Eras
The American Revolution--Created by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online and the PBS documentary series Liberty! The American Revolution, it serves as a good introduction to the Revolution and the War for Independence, and links to other useful websites.
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic--The Library of Congress has created this web exhibit devoted to the complex relationship between religion and politics during the American Revolution and early national period of U.S. history.
Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789--Another section of the Library of Congress' extensive "American Memory" site, it contains 253 broadsides pertaining to the Congress and 274 other documents relating to the work of the Congress and the Constitutional Convention.
The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers--Created by the Constitution Society, this digital archive of the newspaper debate over ratification of the Constitution provides those documents in a variety of formats--mainly HTML and Plain Text.
Home C.V. Course Syllabi FAQ Style Guide Links