Explore Topics for Research
US Presidential Speaches
American Presidency Project (includes many speeches of US Presidents, including State of the Union addresses and Inaugural Addresses)
Political Button Collection
Glimpse U.S. history through Harvard's collection of political buttons featuring candidate campaigns, political demonstrations, and social movements. Political Buttons at Kennedy School Library, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/library-knowledge-services/collections/political-buttons
Political Speaches
American Rhetoric: the Power of Oratory in the United States
Vital speeches of the day, 1934- .Online Widener | Harvard Depository | P 405.8
Personal Writing
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 includes letters, diaries, and oral histories, together with posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and audio and video materials.
Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online is a unified search platform for cross-searching the following databases:
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries includes published and archival memoirs, letters, and diaries, plus supplementary chronologies, biographies, bibliographies, etc.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories (IMLD) (1800-1950.) includes 342 authors and approximately 37,500 pages of information, illustrating what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada.
Voting
Elections and Voting Data Guide: United States (U.S.) and International (Princeton guide)
CQ Voting and Elections Collection (1789 – present) offers historical data on elections (presidential, congressional and gubernatorial), campaign finances, voter demographics, voter turnout, political parties.
United States Elections Web Archive, 2000-
Clerk of the House Election Statistics offers biennial election data from 1920 to present. Vote counts for congressional and presidential elections.
American National Election Studies offers data from presidential and congressional elections, 1948-present.
Pennsylvania Election Statistics: 1789-2006 offers county level voting returns for statewide elections for President, Governor, and Senator, 1789-2004.
US Electoral College. Historical Election Results
Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008.
American National Election Studies offers public opinion surveys on voting
Voting and Registration Data (Census Bureau) (1964- ) offers age, sex, race, employment, and education of voters.
State-level information typically can be found on state Secretary of State websites
Women's Sufferage
Radcliffe College Suffrage research guide. Start your research on women's suffrage with this guide highlighting the Schlesinger Library's archival collections as well as periodicals, photographs, posters, and memorabilia. Some materials may also be available in digital format and links are included where available. To learn more about suffrage at Radcliffe College, please see the Radcliffe College Suffrage research guide.
https://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger/suffrage
North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from more than 600 women writing from Colonial times to 1950. Some 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials are included in addition to biographical information.
Blogs: Capturing Women's Voices includes samples of some 20 blogs selected and archived by the Schlesinger Library. a sample of approximately 20 blogs. These blogs illuminate the lives of African-American and Latina women, lesbians, and women grappling with health and reproductive issues, and typically reflect their engagement with politics, their personal lives and philosophies, and their work lives.
Black Abolition in America
Civil Rights History Project offers inventory of oral-history interviews with participants in the civil rights movement held in libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and other institutions. Links to catalog records and finding aids.
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 includes letters, diaries, and oral histories, together with posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and audio and video materials.
Black Women Oral History Project. Interviews, 1976-1981 (inclusive). 72 interview transcripts, 353 reels of audiotape.
Schlesinger | OH-31; T-32 Digitized items Brief description in HOLLIS record
African American Studies Center
Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 offers over 12,000 books, pamphlets and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints, from the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Black Abolitionist Papers is a digital edition of approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of nearly 300 Black abolitionists in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Germany, first issued on microfilm. Coverage: 1830-1865
Black Freedom Struggle and NAACP papers
Boston Abolitionists 1831-1865 (Massachusetts Historical Society) includes manuscripts, pamphlets, photographs, artifacts, broadsides, signage, and other ephemera.