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Indiana: State Resource Guide

Digital Collections

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of primary source materials related to Indiana, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, photographs, sheet music, and sound recordings. Provided below is a link to the home page for each relevant digital collection along with selected highlights.

Written materials in the Library's digital collections include books, government documents, manuscripts, and sheet music. Examples of written materials related to Indiana are provided for most of the collections listed below.

Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress

The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consist of approximately 20,000 documents which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection

The collection include sermons on racial pride and political activism; annual reports of charitable, educational, and political organizations; and college catalogs and graduation orations from the Hampton Institute, Morgan College, and Wilberforce University. Also included are biographies, slave narratives, speeches by members of Congress, legal documents, poetry, playbills, dramas, and librettos. Other materials focus on segregation, voting rights, violence against African Americans, the colonization of Africa by freed slaves, anti-slavery organizations and investigative reports. Several of the items are illustrated with portraits of the authors.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana

This collection documents the life of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) both through writings by and about Lincoln as well as a large body of publications concerning the issues of the times including slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and related topics. Browse the collection by location to locate more than twenty items pertaining to Indiana.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940

These life histories were written by staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940. Included in the collection are fifteen titles of mostly first-person accounts of life in Indiana.

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750 to 1920

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.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

The collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. Browse by location to locate slave narratives from Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The James Madison Papers, 1723 to 1859

The James Madison Papers from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress document the life of the man who came to be known as the "Father of the Constitution" through correspondence, personal notes, drafts of letters and legislation, an autobiography, legal and financial documents, and miscellaneous manuscripts.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820 to 1910

This collection portrays the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's General Collections and Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

Selected highlight from this collection:

Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters, 1862-1912

This digital collection integrates two collections from the holdings of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Solomon D. Butcher photographs and the letters of the Uriah W. Oblinger family. Together they illustrate the story of settlement on the Great Plains. Browse the subject index to locate more than thirty items pertaining to Indiana.

Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

The collection contains, among other materials, posters, playbills, songsheets, notices, invitations, proclamations, petitions, timetables, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, ballots, tickets, menus, and business cards. There are more than 28,000 items in the collection with 10,172 available online. Browse the collection by location to locate more than forty items pertaining to Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929

This collection assembles a broad array of Library of Congress source materials documenting the prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass-consumer economy, and the role of government in this transition.

Selected highlight from this collection:

Rosa Parks Papers

The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000. The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 items in the Manuscript Division, as well as 2,500 photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division, documents many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827

The papers of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), diplomat, architect, scientist, and third president of the United States, held in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, consist of approximately 27,000 items, making it the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The visual material collections at the Library of Congress contains thousands of images documenting the history of Indiana. Selected images of Indiana are provided for each collection listed below. Search on terms such as or names of cities, towns, and sites, etc. to locate additional images.

Daguerreotypes

The Library's daguerreotype collection consists of approximately 600 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864. Portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio make up the major portion of the collection.

Selected highlight from this collection:

Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

The images in the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 900 photographs of Indiana.

Gottscho-Schleisner Collection

This collection is comprised of over 29,000 photographs primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States. Browse the collection by location to locate more than seventy images of Indiana.

Harris & Ewing Collection

This collection of photographic negatives includes glass and film negatives taken by Harris & Ewing, Inc., which provide excellent coverage of Washington people, events, and architecture, during the period 1905-1945. Harris & Ewing, Inc., gave its collection of negatives to the Library in 1955.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Highsmith (Carol M.) Archive

This collection contains photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. Browse by location to locate more than 900 images of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 400 items for Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Horydczak Collection

This collection documents the architecture and social life of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including exteriors and interiors of commercial, residential, and government buildings, as well as street scenes and views of neighborhoods.

Selected highlight from this collection:

Johnston (Frances Benjamin) Collection

Images in the collection span the period, 1850-1949, but the majority date between 1897 and 1927. Among the photographs from Johnston's early career are her coverage of American world's fairs; coal mining; the White House; openings of Congress; Admiral Dewey; and Progressive era educational efforts, including a survey of Washington, D.C., schools and such minority educational institutions as the Hampton Institute and the Tuskegee Institute.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Korab Collection

This selection of almost 800 photographs by Balthazar Korab (b. 1926) documents 19 projects designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961). Included are corporate headquarters, airports, university facilities, embassies, private residences, churches, a museum, and a monumental arch. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 170 photographs of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Lamb Studios Archive

This online presentation offers images of nearly 2,500 design sketches for stained glass windows, murals, mosaics, furnishings, metalwork, and interior architecture. The drawings feature striking watercolors created from the 1860s to the 1990s, primarily for churches, synagogues, and other sacred spaces.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs

This collections contain more than 1,000 special portrait photographs, called ambrotypes and tintypes, represent both Union and Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War (1861-1865). The photographs often show weapons, hats, canteens, musical instruments, painted backdrops, and other details that enhance the research value of the collection.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

National Child Labor Committee Collection

The collection consists of more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 100 items for Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

National Photo Company Collection

This collection documents virtually all aspects of Washington, D.C., life. Available online are the glass negatives and a selection more than 1,900 photographic prints for which copy negatives exist.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Panoramic Photographs

This collection contains approximately 4,000 images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. The collection contains more than seventy images of Indiana.

Photochrom Prints

This collection contains almost 6,000 views of Europe and the Middle East and 500 views of North America.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Popular Graphic Arts

The collection contains about 15,000 historical prints (ca. 1700-1900) created to document geographic locations or popular subjects and sometimes used for advertising and educational purposes.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Posters: Artist Posters

The online Artist Posters consist of a small but growing proportion of the more than 85,000 posters in the Artist Poster filing series. This series highlights the work of poster artists, both identified and anonymous. It includes posters from the nineteenth century to the present day from the United States and other countries.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Posters: World War I Posters

This collection makes available online approximately 1,900 posters created between 1914 and 1920. Most relate directly to the war, but some German posters date from the post-war period and illustrate events such as the rise of Bolshevism and Communism, the 1919 General Assembly election and various plebiscites.

Selected highlight from this collection:

Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978 to 1996

The collection contains 181 segments from recorded interviews with quiltmakers and 410 graphic images (prints, positive transparencies, and negatives) from two collections in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress: the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection (AFC 1982/00) and the Lands' End All-American Quilt Contest Collection (AFC 1997/011).

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Stereograph Cards

Stereographs consist of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, usually when viewed through a stereoscope. The online images feature cities and towns around the world, expeditions and expositions, industries, disasters, and portraits of Native Americans, presidents, and celebrities. Browse the collection by location to locate more than forty stereographs of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The Library of Congress has custody of the largest and most comprehensive cartographic collection in the world with collections numbering over 5.5 million maps, 80,000 atlases, 6,000 reference works, over 500 globes and globe gores, 3,000 raised relief models, and a large number of cartographic materials in other formats, including over 19,000 CDs/DVDs.

Cities and Towns

This category includes maps that depict individual buildings to panoramic views of large urban areas. These maps record the evolution of cities illustrating the development and nature of economic activities, educational and religious facilities, parks, street patterns and widths, and transportation systems. Browse by location to locate more twenty maps pertaining to Indiana.

Panoramic Maps

The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. The collection includes nineteen panoramic maps of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Railroad Maps, 1828 to 1900

This collection contains 623 maps chosen from more than 3,000 railroad maps and about 2,000 regional, state, and county maps, and other maps which show "internal improvements" of the past century. Included in the collection are ten maps of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

Sanborn Maps

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions. Browse by location to locate more than forty Sanborn Maps of Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The Library's sheet music collection include popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800 to 1922

This sheet music collection consists of approximately 9,000 items published from 1800 to 1922, although the majority is from 1850 to 1920. Browse by location to locate nine items for Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes:

The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America

The Songs of America presentation allows you to explore American history as documented in the work of some of our country's greatest composers, poets, scholars, and performers. From popular and traditional songs, to poetic art songs and sacred music, the relationship of song to historical events from the nation's founding to the present is highlighted through more than 80,000 online items. Browse the collection by location to locate more than ninety items pertaining to Indiana.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1820 to 1860

This collection consists of over 15,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1820 to 1860. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred and secular vocal music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and some music for band and orchestra. Browse the collection by location to locate twenty-five items for Indiana.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870 to 1885

This collection consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. Browse the collection by location to locate more than fifty items for Indiana.

World War I Sheet Music

From 1914 through 1920 the Library of Congress acquired over 14,000 pieces of sheet music relating to what ultimately became known as the First World War, with the greatest number coming from the years of the United States' active involvement (1917-1918) and the immediate postwar period. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 100 items for Indiana.

The Library of Congress holds the nation's largest public collection of sound recordings (music and spoken word) and radio broadcasts, some 3 million recordings in all.

After the Day of Infamy: "Man-on-the-Street" Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor

This collection contains 12 hours of opinions recorded following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from over 200 individuals across the United States. Browse the collection by location to locate six interviews for Indiana.

American English Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection

This collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. Browse the collection by location to locate four recordings from Indiana.

A selection of highlights from this collection includes: