Digital resources

The journals of Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. from 1837 to 1840. Sewall attended John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and boarded in the Thoreau household during this period.

Digital collection of over 200 letters written by Abigail Adams (1744-1818) , the wife of John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States.

Digital collection of 32 folders of correspondence of Abigail Kelley Foster (1811-1887). Kelley was a noted antislavery partisan and women’s rights advocate.

Digital collection of 345 music manuscripts inscribed before 1910 that are mainly American in provenance, with contents that are preponderantly vernacular in style. This is a collaborative project between the Center for Popular Music and AAS.

Digital collection of all 105 color plates inside lithographer Julius Bien’s rare edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1860 in New York.

Digital collection of more than 100 of some of the most interesting, important, and unusual cookbooks published in the United States, almost all before 1877.

Digital collection of 65 British and American satirical prints published between 1796 and 1807.

Digital collection of 28 boxes of material dating from 1799 through the early 20th century by and relating to David Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865), noted cartoonist and humorist.

Digital collection of 550 drawings in graphite, pen, ink and wash, chalk, watercolor and charcoal. The collection ranges from the late 1700s to the early 20th century.

Digital collection of over 200 European prints dating from 1720 to 1843.

Digital collection containing over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States.

Digital collection of over five hundred letters written by Grant-Burr family members between 1827 and 1892. Central to the collection is the correspondence between Daniel Grant (1818-1892) and his wife Caroline Burr Grant (1820-1892). 

Digital collection of 33 engravings produced by students at the Lahainaluna School on the island of Maui. A mission press was introduced at this institution about 1828.

Digital collection of  books, diaries, newspapers, and poems by 18th and 19th century American children. Research tools and recordings of past programs to explore children's lives more deeply. Teachers will find a variety of guides and lesson plans to help bring the past to life for their students.

Digital collection of 180 glass plate negatives document the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, as it looked from about 1905 to 1910.

Digital collection of over 800 broadside ballads. Supplemented with 300 mini-essays, offering a unique and comprehensive view of the broadsides that Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) collected in early nineteenth-century Boston.

Digital collection of catalogs, prices lists, and order forms issued by the McLoughlin Bros. publishers.

Digital collection of the Society's over160 painted portraits, miniatures and sculpted portrait busts.

Digital collection of Paul Revere's (1735-1818) separately published prints, currency, receipts and bookplates, illustrations and plates, and political pieces.

Digital collection of over 200 photographs of Indigenous peoples of North America. People from the Sioux, Creek, Crow and Arapaho tribes, as well as many others, are identified.

Digital collection of 853 negatives (mostly glass plate negatives) depicting seventeenth and eighteenth century structures throughout central and eastern Massachusetts. Harriette Merrifield Forbes (1856-1951) photographed these structures from1887 to 1945.

Digital collection of glass plate negatives taken by Benjamin Thomas Hill (1863-1927), at the Worcester County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds in the early decades of the 20th century.

Digital collection of 56 photographs depicting life in and around Tuskegee Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama, ca. 1890-1915, taken by an unknown photographer.

Digital collection of over 170 badges ranging in date from 1824 to 1900.

Digital collection for new series volumes 1 (December 1880) through 118 (October 2008).  The Proceedings has been a source for members' obituaries, articles, bibliographies, and tools for scholarship within the general area of American history and culture through 1876. 

Digital collection of 209 silhouettes.

Digital collection of more than 400 American watch papers ranging in dates from the 1790s to 1910. These were inserted into a watch case to protect the delicate mechanisms from dust and debris.

Digital collection of 164 glass plate negatives taken by the photographer Theodore C. Wohlbrück (1879–1936) of family and friends. 180 glass plate negatives of Worcester, Massachusetts, as it looked from about 1905 to 1910.

This directory contains 2,600 entries documenting the activity of individuals and firms involved in the manufacture and distribution of children's books in the United States chiefly between 1821 and 1876. 

New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Black Self-Publishing is an ongoing collaborative research project based on a working list of books that are known to have been or may have been self-published by people of African descent who resided in North America and either were born before 1851 or first published before 1877. 

This resource examines and emphasizes the close relationship between early British North America or the United States and the Caribbean World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A union catalogue describing engravings issued as separate publications or as illustrations in books and periodicals from the early eighteenth century through the year 1820. 

Clarence is an item-level catalog which provides detailed information on the newspaper and periodicals holdings of the American Antiquarian Society. 

An inventory of 29 boxes and 8 oversized folders of material dating from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries with the bulk of the collection falling between 1870 and 1890.

GIGI, the American Antiquarian Society's digital asset database, is a storage and retrieval system for the Society's digitally-created collections and surrogates.

Scholarly transcriptions of early texts, with basic editing and apparatus.  

Scholarly transcriptions of African American literature, with basic editing and apparatus.  

Data detailing the work of 6,145 printers, publishers, editors, binders, papermakers, and others involved in the American printing trade through 1820. Although the data is unindexed and therefore difficult to search, it can be found in spreadsheet and JSON formats.

This resource broadly explores the interconnectedness of American news media, in all its formats, with changes in technology, business, politics, society, and community from 1730 to 1865.

Online exhibition supplementing The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History by Philip F. Gura.

Online exhibition showcasing of the unique print culture items on the subject of dance within the Society's holdings.

Online exhibition presenting architectural resources in the collection include design books, drawings, lithographs, engravings, periodicals, and photographs.

An exhibition of the work of the creative artist fellows who have used AAS collections to create original works.

Online exhibition that both catalogs and contextualizes the twenty-two pieces of the Ridgway dinner service “Beauties of America” – a subset of the Society' collection of Staffordshire.

Most of the prints in this online exhibition were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how 19th century Americans thought about the world in which they lived.

Online exhibition examining Revere’s many skills as a craftsman who stood at the intersection of social, economic, and political life during the formation of the new nation.

Online exhibition using lithographs, chromolithographs, trade catalogues, trade cards, and product labels to show the way Americans in the North produced and sold their food in the second half of the 19th century.

This online exhibition follows books, donated with the William C. Cook Jacksonian Era Collection, through the process of being integrated into the Society's collection.

This exhibition explores the contributions of those who labored in translating and printing works in the Algonquian family of native languages.

This exhibition celebrates the generosity and farsightedness of some of the many collectors, book dealers, and librarians who have, each in his or her own way, contributed to the greatness of AAS.

This online exhibition explores Cooper's manuscript material at AAS, the American and foreign illustrations from Cooper's novels, and some of the books used to produce the Cooper Edition.

This exhibition tells the story of Prang during the height of his career in chromolithography during the second half of the nineteenth century.

An online exhibition designed to show the evolution of the Valentine's Day card.

This online exhibition explores images, roles, activities, and social expectations of men in the U. S. in the first half of the 19th century.

This online exhibition highlights the culture and working conditions of the mills and the actions the women took to better their lives through self-advocacy from approximately 1834 to 1870.

This online resource documents conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War. 

This exhibitions uses images and objects from the AAS collections to illuminate the spaces where reading happened in early America.

This exhibition features the images of thirty-one Worcester residents depicted in the Society's portrait paintings, miniatures, and sculpture collections.

This exhibition documents the working practice of McLoughlin Brothers by associating its products with many of the tools used during the production process, such as printing blocks, designer mock-ups, and watercolor illustration art.

This online exhibition effectively creates a digital archive of several Algonquian-language printed books and pamphlets, or wussukwhonk as they are called in the Nipmuc language. The manuscript collections featured here include town records, land deeds, and account books.

This exhibition explores portrayals of Turner in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This online exhibition considers the ways William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) characters were pictured inside the covers of literary annuals and gift books in the 19th century.

This exhibition brings together a selection of images from the Society's collections that illustrate the most popular and most beautiful New England destinations for summertime visitors.

Online exhibition of lithographs, watercolors, and drawings of artist David Claypoole Johnston.

Online exhibition showing the practice of exchanging valentines was a distinctly modern tradition, first popularized in the U.S. in the 1840s.

Online exhibition showing an array of Christmas images from the Society's collections.

Online exhibition exploring the connections between American and French lithography in the early days of this printing technology.

A look at women's work, from before the American Revolution through the Industrial Revolution, using selected images from the Society's collection.

Online exhibition exploring the AAS collection of dime novels, of melodramatic fiction (most paperbacks cost only ten cents) popular in the U.S. from about 1860 until the early 1900s.

African American Newspapers provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers.

African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956 complements and expands on African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998. The more than 75 newspapers in Series 2, are written for or by African Americans.

Covers the history of Africa and its diverse people over nearly 400 years. More than 1,300 books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.

African Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1800-1925, offers coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped the continent during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

One of the world's preeminent collections for African-American studies. Books, pamphlets, and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints. Spans nearly 400 years, from the early 16th to the early 20th century.

America's Historical Imprints provides access to a number of Readex's historical collections, including American Broadsides and Ephemera,  under one umbrella, making it possible to search collections simultaneously.

Millions of fully text-searchable issues. Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820  provided the foundation for the original filming project, the core of which is formed by the AAS collection of colonial and early national period newspapers.

Works by authors of African or African-American descent. A fascinating look at the creative efforts of black authors over three centuries. Compiled by the curators of the acclaimed Afro-Americana Imprints collection.

More than 150 newspapers, including major publications from every region of the U.S.

More than 8,000 works about crime, criminal law, and the criminal justice system 1664-1819, featuring text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

This digital series has been designed for the use of K-12 educators.

Offered via a partnership with the New York Historical Society.

More than 7,000 works about early American Science and Technology 1663-1819, featuring text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

Nearly every printed work, including sermons on politics, society, religion, and family life. More than 8,000 sermons, 1652-1819, featuring text exploration tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

More than 3,500 printed works, all digitized in full color Includes books, pamphlets, graphic materials, and ephemera.

Over 2,000 works covering every aspect of the American theater, with text-analysis tools and suggested search paths for browsing and discovery.

A retrospective republication of approximately 6280 numbered publications, largely Congressional but also containing Executive Department materials, the American State Paper volumes, issued from 1832-1861, were published in ten classes in a total of 38 folio volumes.

The newspapers in American Underworld: The Flash Press covered the seamier aspects of urban life: crime, scandal, brothels and blackmail, combined with reviews of the bawdiest theatrical performances on offer and reports on sporting events such as cock-fighting, boxing and horse racing. The more than sixty papers, dating 1826-1876, were collected by AAS and are among the rarest of all American newspapers.
 

Works by authors of African or African-American descent. 

The experience and impact of African Americans as recorded by the news media, 1704 to today.

Covers the diverse history of Caribbean islands over nearly 400 years. Includes books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.

Includes more than 66 newspaper titles from 22 islands published in the 18th and 19th centuries. Created in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society

Rich with illustrations; includes song sheets, poems, envelopes and more. Scarce documents shed new light on the war... and beyond. Illuminates the struggles of the soldiers and the families they left behind.

Containing nearly every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1800, Evans Digital Edition consists of more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images. Based on Charles Evans' comprehensive American Bibliography and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, the collection was first published by Readex in cooperation with AAS as a microform set. Evans Digital Edition will include every item previously produced on microform plus more than 1,200 additional works located, cataloged and digitized since completion of the earlier effort.

Contains newspaper titles from 14 states between 1808-1980.

Readex AllSearch allows users to search seamlessly across all Readex digital collections and document types, including historical imprints, newspapers, and government documents. 

Journals of the executive proceedings of the United States Senate 1789 to 1980, covering the first Congress through the 96th Congress.

Search or browse the reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Representing the largest fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from around the globe, the World Newspaper Archive will advance research and offer opportunities for fresh insight across wide-ranging academic disciplines. 

An amateur journal is a periodical created to afford pleasure to its readers as well as to its editor and its publisher. The rage to publish, rather than profit, is the motive that most often induces people to become amateur journalists; and, throughout the history of the genre, most but not all amateur journalists have been juveniles. The Amateur Newspaper collection at the American Antiquarian Society consists of about 50,000 issues. There are more than 5,500 titles, from every state except Alaska and Hawaii, thus making the Society’s holdings among the largest and most extensive in the United States.

American Fiction, 1774-1920, demonstrates the utility of having more than 18,000 works of fiction in one place, in a consistent format. Titles up until 1900 are sourced from Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction: A Contribution Towards a Bibliography. Titles after 1900 are sourced from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction and the Geoffrey D. Smith bibliography.

Gale’s American Historical Periodicals, Series 6 and 7 provides all newly digitized material, bringing the previously published Series 1-5 more firmly into the 20th century, with titles running up to 1923. Series 6 and series 7 combine to contain over 500 titles, offering diverse primary source material for studying the thought, culture and life of the United States through contemporary eyes. These series include unusual and short-lived magazines as well as better-known titles with long runs. Topics encompass a broad spectrum including agriculture, anthropology, art, archaeology, education, family life, fashion, industrialization, literature, medicine, music, photography, politics, religion, science, sport, and temperance.

Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university level. Collections in Archives Unbound cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history

Children's Literature and Childhood provides a wide range of primary sources related to the experience of childhood in the long nineteenth century. Included in the archive are books and periodicals for children, primers and other material related to education, pamphlets produced by child welfare groups, documents and photos related to children and crime, newspapers produced by youths, and much more.

Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 presents a broad history of crime in the long 19th century derived from French, German, Spanish, Australian, British and U.S. sources. The collection includes trial transcripts, court proceedings, police and forensic documents, photographs, true crime literature and detective novels, and newspaper accounts.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) and more than 32 million pages, making ECCO the premier and irreplaceable resource for eighteenth-century research. Users of ECCO Part I and Part II can full-text search the collection via an intuitive user interface.

Browse all Gale research products available at the American Antiquarian Society reading room.

Access the following nine Gale databases in one interface.

• American Amateur Newspapers
• American Fiction
• American Historical Periodicals
• Archives Unbound
• Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture 1790-1920
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online
• Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
• Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

The Maps and Travel Literature archive includes a myriad of maps representing the long nineteenth century.

Selections have been culled from the vast map repositories of the British Library and the National Archives at Kew. In addition to these large map collections, maps representing the Americas, and in particular America's westward expansion, have been provided by the American Antiquarian Society. Maps depicting Canada and the polar regions have been generously provided by the University of Alberta.

With digital facsimile images of both full pages and clipped articles for hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers and advanced searching capabilities, researchers will be able to research history in ways previously unavailable. For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.

Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926 is drawn from Joseph Sabin's famed nineteenth century bibliography Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Book relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time. This digital collection offers a perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late fifteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Developed under the guidance of a board of scholars, it includes 3.0 million cross-searchable pages: 10763 books, 131 serials, 32 manuscript collections, 377 supreme court records and briefs and 194 reference articles from Macmillan, Charles Scribner's Sons and Gale encyclopedias.

Women's Studies Archive connects archival collections concerning women's history from across the globe and from a wide range of sources. Focusing on the evolution of feminism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archive provides materials on women's political activism, such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism, and on women's voices, from female-authored literature to women's periodicals.

Rare books, games, ephemera, and artwork from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that reveals the socio-cultural history of these times.

Digital collection containing visual, manuscript and printed materials gathered to help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.

Digital collection containing the stories of individuals and families who buillt new lives in North America and Australasia between 1800 and 1980. Unique primary source diaries, correspondence, photographs, oral histories and journals narrate the vivid realities of ocean travel and life in adopted homelands.

Taught by Literature is a collaborative project honoring Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s lifelong commitment to education.  Taught by Literature celebrates Dunbar-Nelson’s legacy by recentering Black women writers, beginning with Dunbar-Nelson herself and extending to other Black women from the Harlem Renaissance and earlier. 

A daily image of an advertisement published in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago that day.  Brief commentary accompanies each advertisement.

Access to records, including early American genealogical records, published genealogical research journals and magazines, and the only online source for records from Boston's Catholic Archdiocese.

DTA virtually merges disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects with a single search engine. 

Issues of Harper’s Weekly, America's leading 19th century illustrated newspaper, from its first publication in 1857 through 1912.

A digital project of the Congregational Library & Archives that digitizes and provides access to early New England Congregational church records. The project comprises an online collection of manuscript Congregational church records from approximately 1620 to 1850, which includes letters, sermons, diaries, conversion narratives (relations of faith), church disciplinary cases, account books, as well as lists of baptisms, members, marriages, and deaths.

5,000 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text editions from among the 40,000 titles available in the online Evans Early American Imprints which is based on Charles Evans' comprehensive <em>American Bibliography</em>.

Digitized maps of North America made between 1750 and 1800, including 138 maps from AAS collections

The Digital Library of the Caribbean is a multi-institutional, international digital library. It contains over 4 million pages of newspapers, maps, photographs, and more.