This collection comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920.

This collection comprises 139 books selected from the Library of Congress's General Collections and two books from its Rare Book and Special Collections Division. It includes first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs.

As noted in the 2008 HBO mini-series chronicling the life and career of John Adams (1735-1826), as a young lawyer the future president served as counsel for the defense in the trial of eight British soldiers accused of murder during a riot in Boston on March 5, 1770. The Law Library of Congress has copies of reports and transcripts of the court proceedings published in 1770, 1807, and 1824, as well as a history of the Boston Massacre "consisting of the narrative of the town, the trial of the soldiers, and a historical introduction, containing unpublished documents of John Adams, and explanatory notes," published one hundred years later in 1870. Adams’s impassioned speech in defense of the soldiers resulted in their acquittal: it was reprinted in a "character sketch" by John Willard published in 1903.

The Printed Ephemera Collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the collection comprises 28,000 primary source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompassing key events and eras in U.S. history, including the American Revolution.

The collections housed in The Rare Book and Special Collections Division amount to nearly 800,000 books, encompassing nearly all eras and subjects maintained in well over 100 separate collections. All of these collections offer scholarly documentation about the western and American traditions of life and learning.

This is a growing collection of selected books and other materials from the Library of Congress General Collections that can be made openly available. Most of the materials in this collection were published in the United States and are in English. The collection features thousands of works of fiction, including books intended for children, young adults, and other audiences. There are also some materials in foreign languages that were published in other countries. The materials in this collection can be read online or downloaded.

This collection contains the records of Congress from 1774 to 1875, including journals, debates, bills, and laws. The Journals of the Continental Congress and Letters of Delegates to Congress can be researched to examine the role of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution.

This collection contains 277 documents relating to the work of Congress and the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Items include extracts of the journals of Congress, resolutions, proclamations, committee reports, treaties, and early printed versions of the Declaration of Independence and the preliminary articles of peace ending the Revolutionary War.

The collection represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean. Most of the items presented here are documented in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee in 1981. The bibliography contains approximately 2,000 maps and charts.

This category contains maps showing campaigns of major military conflicts including troop movements, defensive structures and groundworks, roads to and from sites of military engagements, campsites, and local buildings, topography and vegetation. Some of the maps are manuscripts drawn on the field of battle, while others are engraved including some that have manuscript annotations reflecting the history of the battle or campaign.

The collection consists of 40 manuscript and 26 printed maps, and a manuscript atlas, the originals of which are in the Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division. The Rochambeau Map Collection contains cartographic items used by Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), when he was commander in chief of the French expeditionary army (1780-82) during the American Revolution. The maps were from Rochambeau's personal collection, cover much of eastern North America, and date from 1717 to 1795. The maps show Revolutionary-era military actions, some of which were published in England and France, and early state maps from the 1790s. Many of the items in this extraordinary group of maps show the importance of cartographic materials in the campaigns of the American Revolution (1776 to 1783) as well as Rochambeau's continuing interest in the new United States.