A collection of documents from the African-American slaves who built the Capitol in Washington. You can see images of the original documents and also read the transcription.
The scrolls and scroll fragments recovered in the Qumran environs represent a voluminous body of Jewish documents, a veritable "library", dating from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. Unquestionably, the "library," which is the greatest manuscript find of the twentieth century, demonstrates the rich literary activity of Second Temple Period Jewry and sheds insight into centuries pivotal to both Judaism and Christianity.
The online version of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress comprises a selection of 4,695 items (totaling about 51,500 images). This presentation contains correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell's invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, his family life, his interest in the education of the deaf, and his aeronautical and other scientific research. Dates span from 1862 to 1939, but the bulk of the materials are from 1865 to 1920
"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts. The collection covers the dramatic decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century.
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes twelve thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs." That's what they say. Run by the University of North Carolina.
Has a massive and easily searchable bank of primary documents on British history. Quite amazing some of the stuff in there, especially primary documents on that Empire (capital 'E') that the sun was never going to set on... Forgive my impertinent colonial humour. I've got Irish blood.
This section contains reproducible copies of primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives of the United States, teaching activities correlated to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government, and cross-curricular connections.
Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 will present this collection of more than 55,000 documents in a free, online format with extensive and searchable metadata linked to digitized images of each document, thereby insuring free access for a wide range of users.
'Welcome to the Bureau of Land Management(BLM), General Land Office (GLO) Records Automation web site. We provide live access to Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States, including image access to more than five million Federal land title records issued between 1820 and the present. We also have images related to survey plats and field notes, dating back to 1810. Due to organization of documents in the GLO collection, this site does not currently contain every Federal title record issued for the Public Land States.'
The BBC archives offers free access to themed collections of radio and TV programmes, documents and photographs. These are thematic selections of primary sources from an archive which began over 70 years ago.
The British School at Rome Archive (BSR) thanks to the Getty Foundation, made freely available digital copies of the John Bryan Ward-Perkins photographic collection. A website of the "BSR digital collections was created to present not only the photographic material (Photographs) but also other types of resources which follow into different categories: Maps, Prints, Documents, Postcards, Drawings, Paintings and Manuscripts".
But "the majority of the digital images displayed on the website are represented by the photographic prints and negatives from unique historic collections, including calotypes, glass and film negatives, slides and lantern slides."
Seems to focus more on the history of the British School at Rome rather than Roman history. Should revise the tags at this point but this summer heat here in Queensland is making me lazy...
"The Open Society Archives (OSA) at the Central European University in Budapest is an archival laboratory. While actively collecting, preserving, and making openly accessible documents related to recent history and human rights, they continue to experiment with new ways to contextualize primary sources, developing innovative tools to explore, represent, or bridge traditional archival collections in a digital environment."
The Margaret Thatcher Foundation's web site offers "free access to the full texts of thousands of documents relating to the politics of the last quarter of a century".
The Letters of Philip II, King of Spain, 1592-1597 a digital collection available within the Special Collections Department of the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA, is made of "... 174 letters and documents, all in Spanish : 172 manuscript, 2 printed.