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The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of primary source materials related to New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire are provided for most of the collections listed below.
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.
The 800 + titles in 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. Several of the items are illustrated with portraits of the authors. Browse the collection by location to locate three items for New Hampshire.
The Alan Lomax Collection includes ethnographic field documentation, materials from Lomax's various projects, and cross-cultural research created and collected by Alan Lomax and others on traditional song, music, dance, and body movement from around the world.
The collection contains more than 11,100 items. This online release presents more than 1,300 items with more than 4,000 images and a date range of 1824-1931. It includes the complete collection of Stern's contemporary newspapers, Lincoln's law papers, sheet music, broadsides, prints, cartoons, maps, drawings, letters, campaign tickets, and other ephemeral items. The collection contains ten items pertaining to New Hampshire.
This collection spans the period from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1880s, although a majority of the song sheets were published from the 1850s to the 1870s.
This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940. The collection contains more than fifteen items for New Hampshire.
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 are recorded
The Andrew Jackson Papers is one of twenty-three presidential collections in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The Jackson archival collection contains more than 26,000 items dating from 1767 to 1874. Included are memoranda, journals, speeches, military records, land deeds, and miscellaneous printed matter, as well as correspondence reflecting Jackson's personal life and career as a politician, military officer, president, slave holder and property owner.
The Blackwell Family Papers span the years 1759-1960, with the bulk of the material dating from 1845 to 1890. Consisting of approximately 29,000 items (58,002 images), most of which were digitized from 76 reels of microfilm, the collection predominantly represents two generations of the Blackwell family and twenty individual family members. Nearly two centuries of the family's daily lives are documented in correspondence, diaries, speeches, and other papers, exemplifying the family's long commitment to social reform movements, such as abolition; women's rights, including the right to equal education; women's suffrage; and temperance.
The papers of suffragist, political strategist, and pacifist Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (1859-1947) span the years 1848-1950, with the bulk of the material dating from 1890 to 1920. The collection consists of approximately 9,500 items (11,851 images), most of which were digitized from 18 microfilm reels. Included are diaries, correspondence, speeches and articles, subject files, and miscellaneous items, including photographs and printed matter. The collection reflects Catt's steadfast dedication to two major ideals--the rights of women, particularly the right to vote, and world peace.
This collection consists of a linked set of published congressional records of the United States of America from the Continental Congress through the 43rd Congress, 1774-1875. Search the full-text using the term New Hampshire for items relating to the state.
The Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) is "the codification of the general and permanent rules by the department and agencies of the Federal Government." This is a historical collection of the Code of Federal Regulations dating from 1938 - 1995. To access the Code of Regulations from 1996 - present, please visit the Government Publishing Office site, GovInfo.
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 United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
This collection documents the historical formation and cultural foundations of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage. Search the full-text option using the term New Hampshire to locate items related to the state.
This online presentation includes items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, photographs, posters, playbills, programs, and playscripts, including productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles, and Power, a topical drama of the period. The collection includes fifteen items pertaining to New Hampshire.
The papers of Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), army officer, representative and senator from New Hampshire, and fourteenth president of the United States, contain approximately 2,350 items dating from 1820 to 1869.
The papers of nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher, consist of approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), most of which were digitized from 34 reels of previously produced microfilm.
Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training at the Library of Congress makes available interview transcripts from the oral history archives of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST). These transcripts present a window into the lives of U.S. diplomats and the major diplomatic crisis and issues that the United States faced during the second half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st.
This collection consists of approximately 65,000 items (176,000 pages). Correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries and journals, reports, notes, financial account books, and military papers accumulated by George Washington from 1741 through 1799 are organized into nine series.
The papers of author, educator, political philosopher, and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) constitute a large and diverse collection (25,000 items; 82,597 images) reflecting a complex career.
The papers of James K. Polk (1795-1849), governor of Tennessee, representative from Tennessee, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and eleventh president of the United States, contain approximately 20,500 items dating from 1775 to 1891, with the bulk falling in the period 1830-1849. The collection includes correspondence, presidential letterbooks, diaries, speeches and messages, account and memorandum books, family papers, financial and legal records, printed matter, portraits, and other papers relating chiefly to Polk's political career in Tennessee and on the national level.
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.
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 fifteen items for New Hampshire.
The Martha Graham Collection is comprised of materials that document the career of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and traces the history of the development of her company and school. The Collection contains over 350,000 items and includes a significant assembly of manuscript music scores, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, choreographic notebooks, publicity and production materials, correspondence, programs, and business papers.
This collection consists of over 15,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1820 to 1860. Browse the collection by location to locate two pieces of sheet music for New Hampshire.
This collection consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Browse the collection by location to locate three pieces of sheet music for New Hampshire.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection is a library of nearly 800 books and pamphlets documenting the suffrage campaign that were collected between 1890 and 1938 by members of NAWSA. The collection consists of a variety of materials including newspapers, books, pamphlets, memorials, scrapbooks, and proceedings from the meetings of various women's organizations that document the suffrage fight.
The collection consists of approximately 26,700 items (52,078 images), most of which were digitized from 73 microfilm reels. These records reflect NAWSA's multifaceted history, including the activities of precursor organizations involved in the abolition and women's rights movements, state and federal campaigns for women's suffrage, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and international women's suffrage organizing.
This collection portrays the states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries through first-person accounts; biographies; promotional literature; local histories; ethnographic, antiquarian, and colonial archival documents, and other texts drawn from the Library of Congress' General Collections and the Rare Books & Special Collections Division.
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. The collection contains more than 300 items for New Hampshire.
This collection assembles a wide array of Library of Congress source materials from the 1920s that document the widespread prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass consumer economy, and the role of government in this transition.
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. The collection contains five digitized books for New Hampshire.
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. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 200 digitized books for New Hampshire.
This collection consists of 105 library books and manuscripts, totalling approximately 8,700 pages drawn principally from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, with a few from the General Collections.
The complete Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 27,000 documents ranging in date from 1606 to 1827. Correspondence, memoranda, notes, and drafts of documents make up two-thirds of the papers.
The United States Reports is a series of bound case reporters that are the official reports of decisions for the Supreme Court of the United States. A citation to a U. S. Supreme Court decision includes several elements that are needed to retrieve the case. Search the collection on the term New Hampshire to find more than twenty United States Reports for the state.
The William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection (ca. 500 items) spans the years 1773 to 1987, with the bulk of the material dating from the Civil War period, 1861-1865. The collection consists of correspondence, pay vouchers, orders, muster rolls, enlistment and discharge papers, receipts, contracts, affidavits, tax records, miscellaneous military documents, and printed matter.
The sheet music collection represents the intersection of this rich output of popular song and the consciousness of a nation at war that was itself emerging, as a major world power. The collection contains more than ten pieces of sheet music for New Hampshire.
The visual material collections at the Library of Congress contains thousands of images documenting the history of New Hampshire. Selected images of New Hampshire are provided for each collection listed below. Search on terms such as or names of cities, towns, and sites, etc. to locate additional images.
In 1954 the Library of Congress purchased from Alice H. Cox and Mary H. Evans, the daughters of Levin C. Handy approximately 10,000 original, duplicate, and copy negatives. The collection contains three images of Hon. Jas. Pike of New Hampshire.
Offers more than 9,000 original drawings for editorial cartoons, caricatures, and comic strips spanning the late 1700s to the present, primarily from 1880 to 1980. The cartoons cover people and events throughout the world, but most of the images were intended for publication in American newspapers and magazines. Browse the collection by location to locate six cartoon drawings for New Hampshire.
Herbert L. Block (1909-2001), known to the world as Herblock, was one of the most influential political commentators and editorial cartoonists in American history. His long chronicle of major social and political events began to appear in newspapers in 1929, and he continued to document domestic and international events for 72 years. The bulk of the 14,000 original ink and graphite drawings in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division date from 1946 through 2001, when Herblock worked for the Washington Post. The collection contains four cartoon drawings for New Hampshire.
This assemblage of more than 800 prints made in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encompasses several forms of political art.
Explore the faces, places and events of the U.S. Civil War through photographs, prints and drawings.
The Selected Civil War Photographs Collection contains 1,118 photographs. Most of the images were made under the supervision of Mathew B. Brady, and include scenes of military personnel, preparations for battle, and battle after-effects. The collection also includes portraits of both Confederate and Union officers, and a selection of enlisted men.
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. The collection contains portraits of congressmen from New Hampshire.
This collection of photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection includes over 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints, mostly of the eastern United States. Browse the collection by place to locate more than 870 images of New Hampshire.
The Documentary Drawings category includes more than 3,000 drawings made between 1750 and 1970. Eye-witness sketches made during the U.S. Civil War are the most frequently used images
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. The collection contains more than 900 black-and white of New Hampshire.
Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working. The collection contains six color photographs of New Hampshire.
About 85,000 prints created as art works, ca. 1450-present (most dating between 1800 and the present). Prints by American printmakers and artists (e.g., Paul Revere, Mary Cassatt, Jim Dine, Joseph Pennell) predominate, but creators in many other countries are also represented (e.g., Albrecht Dürer and Marc Chagall). Subjects vary widely, for example, portraits, religious themes, historical events, and street scenes. Browse the collection by location to locate two prints for New Hampshire.
The William A. Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs provides almost 350 images showing African Americans and related military and social history. The Civil War era is the primary time period covered, with scattered examples through 1945. Most of the images are photographs, including 270 cartes de visite.
The Gottscho-Schleisner 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. The collection contains more than fifteen photographs for New Hampshire.
Photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. Browse the collection by location to locate more than 540 photographs for New Hampshire.
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. The collection contains more than 250 items for New Hampshire.
The Theodor Horydczak Collection (about 14,350 photographs online) documents the architecture and social life of the Washington 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.
Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) was one of the first American women to achieve prominence as a photographer. Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, she studied photography upon her return to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1880s and opened a professional studio circa 1890. mages 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.
This collection contains more than 5,000 special portrait photographs, called ambrotypes and tintypes, and small card photos called cartes de visite represent both Union and Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
The Look Magazine Photograph Collection is a vast photographic archive created to illustrate Look Magazine and related publications produced by companies founded by Gardner Cowles. The cataloged portion of the collection totals some four million published and unpublished images made by photographers working for Look, most dating 1952-1971. The collection contains six images for New Hampshire.
Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. The NCLC photos are useful for the study of labor, reform movements, children, working class families, education, public health, urban and rural housing conditions, industrial and agricultural sites, and other aspects of urban and rural life in America in the early twentieth century. The collection contains more than seventy photographs for New Hampshire.
This collection contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. The images date from 1851 to 1991 and depict scenes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The collection contains more than fifteen images for New Hampshire.
This collection contains almost 6,000 views of Europe and the Middle East and 500 views of North America. Browse the collection by location to locate five prints for New Hampshire.
This 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. Browse the collection by location to locate more than fifteen historical prints for New Hampshire.
The Yanker Poster Collection includes more than 3,000 political, propaganda, and social issue posters and handbills, dating 1927-1980. The collection contains five posters for New Hampshire.
This collection represents a wide range of quiltmaking techniques, from highly traditional to innovative. The quilts pictured exhibit excellent design and technical skill in a variety of styles and materials.
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 collection contains more than ninety stereographs for New Hampshire.
The photographs in this collection document the National Woman's Party's push for ratification of the 19th Amendment as well as its later campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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.
The collection represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean. Browse the collection by location to locate ten maps for New Hampshire.
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. The collection contains more than fifty maps for New Hampshire.
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. Browse this category by location to locate more than five maps for New Hampshire.
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. Browse the collection by location to locate more than forty maps for New Hampshire.
This 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. Browse the collection by location to locate three maps for New Hampshire.
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 the collection by location to locate more than 360 maps for New Hampshire.
These maps document the development and status of transportation and communication systems on the national, state, and local level. Transportation maps can depict canal and river systems, cycling routes , railway lines and systems, roads and road networks, and traffic patterns. Communication maps illustrate the location and distribution of telegraph routes, telephone systems and radio coverage. Browse the collection to locate seven maps for New Hampshire.
The Library oversees one of the largest collections of motion pictures in the world. Acquired primarily through copyright deposit, exchange, gift and purchase, the collection spans the entire history of the cinema. The following moving image collections contain materials related to New Hampshire.
This presentation features 104 films which record events in Roosevelt's life from the Spanish-American War in 1898 until his death in 1919.
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.
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge.