Civil Rights Movements

View the UC San Diego Digital Collections by collection, including Chinese Cultural Revolution Posters, the Herman Baca Collection, Tell Us How UC It: History of Student Activism Timeline, etc.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.

The manuscripts and archives of Brown University are a rich and diverse resource for students, faculty, and other researchers from a variety of disciplines. The collections are particularly strong in the following areas: American literature (especially poetry and drama), American political and diplomatic history, Rhode Island history, women's studies, history of education, and history of science.

Search for photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke's collections. Some materials in this database may be protected by U.S. or international copyright laws or by privacy and publicity rights. Be sure to use the pull-down menu to view all the available collections.

The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Sixties Project: Primary Document Archive has several good links to primary source archives related to 1960’s civil rights movements, like the Black Panther Party, National Indian Youth Council, and the Young Lords Party.

The Teaching Decolonization Resource Collection provides a range of materials to support the study of decolonization in the classroom. This diverse collection of resources is, in part, an outgrowth of the National History Center's decade-long International Decolonization Seminar. Primary and secondary sources are organized by region and theme, this collection is about movements in the Americas.

The Crowded Page is an effort to test a theory: can digital technology give scholars a better understanding of the intricate network of relationships that bring works of art and literature into being? Can data mining and visualization tools reveal what might not be readily apparent through traditional methods of research? The datasets right now are focused on two discrete creative communities: the group located around Charles Pfaff's beer cellar in mid-nineteenth-century New York City; and the Greenwich Village "Bohemians" of the 1910s.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture.

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project in progress committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invites scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site.

The digital images of historical documents in this archive preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City. The letters, newspapers, broadsides, legal records, and maps presented here record events from the early years of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam through the British occupation of the city during the Revolution. Here you can explore the history of New York through the words of those who lived it.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published.

TCP provides access to subsets of the texts contained in three large historical text collections: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Texts in the TCP subsets have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable searching options more sophisticated than what is possible in the original databases.

The Civil Rights Movement Archive is a website dedicated to telling the history of the movement from the perspective of those who were there. For many years, the name of the website was "Civil Rights Movement Veterans." The name was changed in 2019 to "Civil Rights Movement Archive" to reflect its growing importance as a repository of up from below and inside-out history as seen and interpreted by thse who were on the front lines of the movement. The Civil Rights Movement Archive provides a history of the movement through photographs, digitized versions of original movement documents, personal stories and histories, narratives and interviews, as well as memorials and tributes to those who have passed on. The site also includes frequently asked questions (FAQs), poetry, a speakers list, veteran contact information, and an extensive movement-related bibliography and list of web links.

Items and collections related to civil rights movements, including arrest records of Rosa Parks, court documents related to Martin Luther King Jr., and others.

The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia.

The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia effort to document the history of prisoner activism and policy in our state. The site features a robust collection of prisoner-produced newspapers from the late 20th century; oral histories and testimonials about the Washington state prison system; research on local histories of punishment; and a text-adventure computer game designed inside a maximum security prison.

Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era. Started by Professor Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant in 2009, CPMR has traveled to over one dozen states to collect hundreds of hours of oral histories with notable Chicanas, Latinas, and allies. The project has also scanned personal archives for preservation and access.

This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.

This site offers an extensive collection of works by Chesnutt, including novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and poems. In addition to electronic versions of those works by Chesnutt that are readily available in print, our collection includes hard-to-find stories, reviews, essays, and poems, (including one transcribed from a manuscript in the Chesnutt collection at Fisk University). Many of the texts have been scanned directly from original print periodical versions. The site also includes a deep collection of reviews by others of Chesnutt's works, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Digital Thoreau is a resource and a community dedicated to promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau's works in new ways, ways that take advantage of technology to illuminate Thoreau's creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his words and ideas.

The diaries in this digital collection were written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.

American fiction was still in its infancy in the years 1851-1875, but this period saw publication of works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Herman Melville. Many of these authors, especially Twain, Harte and Howells, had just begun their writing careers during this period and went on to write their best known work later. However, most of the authors contained in the bibliography are little known.

Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

The Herman Melville Electronic Library (MEL) is an in-progress project that aims to be an online center for Melville studies. The "Editions" section currently includes digitized versions of the first British and American editions of Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

Radical Scatters, developed by Marta Werner and hosted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is a collection of digitized facsimiles and transcripts of over one hundred fragmentary texts composed by Emily Dickinson between 1870 and 1886. Documents can be searched and browsed in a variety of ways. The site also includes critical introductions to the fragments.

The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.

Charles Pfaff's beer cellar in lower Manhattan was a magnet for some of the most unconventional and creative individuals of nineteenth-century New York City, including Walt Whitman, poet and actress Adah Isaacs Menken, journalist and social critic Henry Clapp, playwright John Brougham, and artist Elihu Vedder. The Vault at Pfaff's is bringing together in one place the poetry, drama, art, fiction, and social commentary that the Pfaff's bohemians produced, including The New York Saturday Press, the weekly periodical that served as the group's literary organ during this period.

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents.