American Studies

The Museum's encyclopedic collection offers visitors the broad sweep of American history as told through great works of art. The central gallery focuses on the themes of freedom, exploration, and expansion that pervaded America during the mid-nineteenth century. Other subjects, themes, and periods presented in the new galleries include: Colonial Portraiture, the American Revolution, the Young Republic, the Civil War Era, Art in the Folk Tradition, the Hudson River School, the West, the Cosmopolitan Spirit, and American Impressionism.

The collection of the American Art Museum captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world, representing over 7,000 artists.

The Department of American Art includes more than 1,000 paintings and sculptures from the 18th century to 1950 and nearly 2,500 decorative art objects from the 17th century to the present.

DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. The cultural institutions participating in DPLA represent the richness and diversity of America itself, from the smallest local history museum to our nation’s largest cultural institutions.

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.

The landmark American National Biography offers portraits of more than 18,700 men and women-- from all eras and walks of life-- whose lives have shaped the nation. More than a decade in preparation, the American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.

"America's Story from America's Library" wants you to have fun with history while learning at the same time. We want to put the story back in history and show you some things that you've never heard or seen before. The stuff you see comes from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Library is the largest in the world and has millions of amazing things that will surprise you.

Geography is central to the work of the Census Bureau, providing the framework for survey design, sample selection, data collection, tabulation, and dissemination. Geography provides meaning and context to statistical data. Given the diversity of our population, our economic activities, and our geographic areas, use of the latest and best geographic methodologies is critical to the Census Bureau’s ability to serve as the leading provider of statistical and geospatial data. Our geographic area concepts, information, and statistical data must keep pace with the needs of the researchers and analysts who work to understand the changing distribution and characteristics of our people, places and economy.

Print maps, atlas explorer, atlas puzzles

As one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Geospatial Program, The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation.

Access to a variety of state specific facts and other useful information.

These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

The materials on this Web site include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multmedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a database of annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images.

History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web was first developed in 1998 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media & Learning, City University of New York, and the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, with initial funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Over the past several years, it has become a highly regarded gateway to web resources as well as a repository of unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents, and guides to analyzing historical evidence for high school and college students and teachers of American history.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper.

Through incomparable collections, rigorous research, and dynamic public outreach, we explore the infinite richness and complexity of American history. We help people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future.

This set of pages is a collection of links to sites on the Internet dealing especially with English and American literature, excluding most single electronic texts, and is limited to collections of information useful to academics.

Detailed overview of American Literature, beginning with the colonial period.

This timeline provides a short chronology of events in American history and literature. It is linked to course pages and bibliographies as well as to a set of more general linked resources: pages on American authors, literary movements, and American literature sites.

The Library of America was founded in 1979 to undertake a historic endeavor: to help preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writing in durable and authoritative editions.

A thriving media organization at the forefront of digital innovation, NPR creates and distributes award-winning news, information, and music programming to a network of 975 independent stations. Through them, NPR programming reaches 26 million listeners every week.

The Performing Arts Encyclopedia (PAE) is a guide to performing arts resources at the Library of Congress. The PAE provides information about the Library's unsurpassed collections of scores, sheet music, audio recordings, films, photographs, and other materials.

AFI is America's promise to preserve the history of the motion picture, to honor the artists and their work and to educate the next generation of storytellers. AFI provides leadership in film, television and digital media and is dedicated to initiatives that engage the past, the present and the future of the moving image arts.

The goal of the Reel American History Project by students at Lehigh University is to stimulate students to think critically about the ways movies construct our history.

Through incomparable collections, rigorous research, and dynamic public outreach, we explore the infinite richness and complexity of American history. We help people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future.

In 2012, the American Theatre Wing is celebrating 95 years of service to the American Theatre. For nearly a century, the mission of the Wing has been to serve and support the theatre by celebrating excellence, nurturing the public's appreciation of theatre, and providing unique educational and access opportunities for both practitioners and audiences.

Lyric Opera of Chicago, founded in 1954, is one of the world's greatest opera companies. It is renowned internationally for its artistic excellence and financial strength.

The Independence Hall Association (IHA) owns the website ushistory.org, which supports their mission to educate the public about the Revolutionary and Colonial eras of American history.

Learn how America's federal, state and local governments work to enact the will of the people, and how President Obama and his administration collaborate with the Legislative and Judicial branches to govern the United States.

As the U.S. government's official web portal, USA.gov makes it easy for the public to get U.S. government information and services on the web. This site provides trusted, timely, valuable government information and services when and where you want them.

Voting America encourages users to think about US political history by allowing two types of comparison. Animations of a single type of map--say, measuring the winner of presidential elections at the county level--allow for comparisons across time.

These pages link to selected collection content available online at the Library of Congress, arranged by broad categories. The Library's online content represents only a small percentage of its physical holdings.

This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.

The Museum researches, collects and exhibits the contributions of women to the social, cultural, economic and political life of our nation in a context of world history.

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of women whose commitment to nature and the planet have proved invaluable to society.