LibGuides: United States History: Home

Introduction

This page is a starting point for finding databases, websites, and other digital collections for United States History. Key resources include America: History and Life for scholarly articles and American Memory, the Library of Congress digital archive of primary source texts, historical photographs, sound recordings, videos, and much more. American National Biography is a source for 18,000 biographies on notable Americans from history, and the Oxford Companion to US History and Oxford Research Encyclopedia: American History provide detailed thematic articles on all aspects of American history. America's Historical Newspapers is one of many newspaper archives, and HeritageQuest, which contains (among other things) searchable U.S. Census forms from 1790-1930, is just one example of a specialized historical data collection. For books, of course, use UC Library Search, UCSD's catalog. Look in Roger for links to Circuit, the San Diego-wide book catalog, and Melvyl, the UC-wide catalog. Click on the tabs above to find other resources.

NEW ARRIVAL: ProQuest History Vault with 45 digital primary sources modules drawn mostly from U.S. archival collections.

News Navigator
Newspaper Navigator is a project being carried out by the Innovator in Residence Program at the Library of Congress. The goals of Newspaper Navigator are 1) to extract visual content from 16+ million pages of digitized historic American newspapers in Chronicling America and 2) re-imagine how you, members of the American public, can search the visual content using machine learning techniques. The first phase (extracting the visual content) was completed in April, 2020, and resulted in the full Newspaper Navigator dataset. The second phase of Newspaper Navigator consists of the application that you are currently using. All Newspaper Navigator photos in the app and dataset are in the public domain.
Q: What can I do with this Newspaper Navigator application?
A: This application enables you to search and explore historic newspaper photographs. You can search by keyword over the photos' captions (extracted from the OCR of each newspaper page), as well as search by visual similarity. The visual similarity search capability retrieves relevant photos by empowering you to train a machine learning algorithm by selecting photos that you are interested in. The application contains 1.56 million photos from the Newspaper Navigator dataset, consisting of all extracted photos in the dataset published between 1900 and 1963 with confidence scores above 90%. Advertisements are considered a separate category in the Newspaper Navigator dataset, but you may still find some advertisements using this application (the visual content recognition model was not 100% perfect at classifying visual content type, and there are also lots of advertisements that include photographs!.

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Contact Info

Harold Colson

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Contact:

Geisel Library
858.534.0619

Subjects: International Studies, United States History