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 17th century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. The first release of the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection presented more than 7,000 items, while this release presents more than 10,000 items. While the broadside format represents the bulk of the collection, there are a significant number of leaflets and some pamphlets. Rich in variety, the collection includes proclamations, advertisements, blank forms, programs, election tickets, catalogs, clippings, timetables, and menus. They capture the everyday activities of ordinary people who participated in the events of nation-building and experienced the growth of the nation from the American Revolution through the Industrial Revolution up to present day. A future final release will include thousands of oversize items in the collection.

A collection of historical legends, myths, and stories pertaining to such subjects as war, religion, food, holidays, and pregnancy, among many others.

Alex Boese's The Museum of Hoaxes takes readers on a tour of hundreds of documented hoaxes, many published here for the first time. You'll read about the curiosities and cons of the most notorious hornswogglers and flimflam men of the nineteenth century; you'll be astounded at the impostors, pretenders, carnies, and tricksters of the twentieth.

Learn how Edgar Allan Poe got away with an astonishing literary deception. Or how P. T. Barnum turned hoaxing the public into big business. It's all here, from the origin of April Fools' Day to the Taco Liberty Bell, from Bigfoot to the War of the Worlds to recent Internet hoaxes. There's also a Gullibility Test that challenges readers to answer the question:"Would these hoaxes have fooled YOU?"

Alex Boese is a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, where he is completing his doctoral dissertation. He is the creator and curator of the website, which began in 1997 as research notes for his dissertation. His website has received acclaim from Yahoo!, as well as USA Today and other newspapers around the world. His book, The Museum of Hoaxes, has just been published by Dutton.

The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public responses to them. The Digital Archive will contribute to the on-going effort by historians and archivists to record and preserve the record of 9/11 by: collecting first-hand accounts of the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath (especially voices currently under-represented on the web), collecting and archiving emails and digital images growing out of these events, organizing and annotating the most important web-based resources on the subject, and developing materials to contextualize and teach about the events. The Digital Archive will also use these events as a way of assessing how history is being recorded and preserved in the twenty-first century and as an opportunity to develop free software tools to help historians to do a better job of collecting, preserving, and writing history in the new century.

This website features the Church Committee's various reports on its investigation of the FBI, as well as a COINTELPRO Document Index which contains images of over 350 pages of FBI documents, linked together with brief exerpts to identify what each document is about. The site also features The COINTELPRO Papers, as well as numerous other resources, including books and articles, written about the FBI's domestic" counterintelligence programs" of 1956-1971.

Created by the Chicago Historical Society in collaboration with Northwestern University, this website was designed to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire (1871). Curated by Carl Smith, a professor at Northwestern University, it offers an array of primary sources selected from materials in the Chicago Historical Society and arranged into two sections. “The Great Chicago Fire” examines the fire through five chronological chapters, while a second section, “The Web of Memory,” focuses more specifically on the ways in which the fire has been remembered. This section is organized into six chapters, each devoted to a particular theme, including eyewitness accounts, popular illustrations, journal articles, “imaginative forms such as fiction and poetry and painting,” and the legend of Mrs. O’Leary. Both sections furnish galleries of images and artifacts, primary texts, “special media” such as songs, a newsreel, and an “Interactive Panorama of Chicago, 1858,” and chapter-specific, authoritative background essays that explore the social and cultural contexts of this catastrophe. Also includes a bibliography of 20 sources. A well-designed and easily-navigable site that provides a wide range of diverse sources useful for studying Chicago in late 19th century and the ways that the story of the catastrophe subsequently has been culturally represented.

Sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College/Columbia University, NDN is a database of more than 20,000 items relating to the New Deal. A “Document Library” contains more than 700 newspaper and journal articles, speeches, letters, reports, advertisements, and other textual materials, treating a broad array of subjects relevant to the period’s social, cultural, political, and economic history, while placing special emphasis on New Deal relief agencies and issues relating to labor, education, agriculture, the Supreme Court, and African Americans. The “Photo Gallery” of more than 4,000 images is organized into five units—“Culture,” “Construction,” “Social Programs,” “Federal Agencies,” and miscellaneous, including photos from 11 exhibitions and five series of photoessays, and images of disaster relief and public figures. The site additionally offers featured exhibits, many with lesson plan suggestions. Includes approximately 100 annotated links to related sites. Of great value for teachers, students, and researchers interested in the social history of the New Deal era.

This database was begun in 1995 by James Heintze, Librarian at American University, Washington, D.C. Its purpose is to bring together in one source selected examples of Fourth of July celebrations that have occurred throughout our nation's history from 1776 to 2002. The goal is to capture a slice of the American cultural tradition--its pageantry, spectacle, music, and symbol--in the hopes that an examination of these events will add to our understanding of the American character and heritage.

The range of observances is broad and include unique, unusual, and little-known events. The selections represent both major cities and small rural towns throughout the United States, as well as some foreign countries, and are arranged by year and alphabetically by location. Entries include outlandish and unusual pyrotechnic displays, parades and processions, speeches, battle enactments, musical events, information on rabble-rousing, gun-toting crowds and protesters, balls, artillery salutes, mishaps and accidents, and expressions by ethnic groups. Currently the database includes descriptions of over 200 different celebrations, and its content is continually under development. Examples of what readers may expect to find include one of the last parades of War of 1812 veterans and the staged battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac in New York (1862), a grand explosion on top of Pike's Peak (1901), the reunion of Confederate soldiers in Chattanooga (1890), the mock atomic bomb explosion before a crowd of 25,000 in Baltimore (1951), and the Oklahoma City Fourth that included the raising of the American flag back to full-staff after the bombing of the Federal Building earlier that year (1995). Citations are taken from primary sources and, in many cases, full quotations are provided.

This site was started in response to the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. As ordinary citizens, we searched for a constructive way to deal with the grief and anger surrounding the attacks. The site is intended as a place to collect information that could help us to better understand the conflicts in the Middle East. Recent events have made it clear that we all have a vital interest in peace in the region.

We focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict because it is arguably the single most important source of tension in the region. Many in the region point to what they perceive as American bias in the conflict as their reason for applauding the attacks of September 11. A deeper knowledge of the conflict could help us to understand and respond to those criticisms.