Digital Collections

The Rare Book Division has an on-going effort, in cooperation with the Library’s digitization initiative and external partners, to digitize select items of high research value from its collections. We have several digitization initiatives to not only disseminate the material, but also to preserve the material. Included in these digitized collections are some of the oldest, scarcest, and most valuable pieces in the Division, as well as contemporary materials in the public domain that cover all manner of topics and offer insights into the study of multiple facets of modern life.

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    African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection "African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of...
    • Date: 1875

    Collection Items: View 904 Items

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    The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana 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 books and pamphlets in this collection are scheduled for digitization at...
    • Contributor: Library of Congress - Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana (Library of Congress) - Stern, Alfred Whital
    • Date: 1824

    Collection Items: View 1,535 Items

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    America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets Contains 4291 song sheets. Included among these American songs are ninety-seven British song sheets from Dublin and London. The collection spans the period from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1880s, although a majority of the song sheets were published during the height of the craze, from the 1850s to the 1870s. Held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of...
    • Contributor: Library of Congress. National Digital Library Program - Library of Congress. Rare Book and Special Collections Division
    • Date: 1999

    Collection Items: View 4,292 Items

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    Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789 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. Most broadsides are one page in length; others range from 1 to 28 pages. A number of these items contain...
    • Contributor: Continental Congress Broadside Collection (Library of Congress) - United States. Continental Congress
    • Date: 1774

    Collection Items: View 326 Items

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    Early Copyright Records Collection, 1790 to 1870 The documents in this collection are the result of the first federal copyright laws in 1790 and 1831 (as amended) and contain the early copyright records and material held by the federal district courts and numerous government offices in Washington, DC. This practice ended with the copyright act of 1870 which consolidated in the Library of Congress all copyright registration and deposit activity, and...
    • Date: 1790

    Collection Items: View 578 Items

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    Jay I. Kislak Collection The Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas is composed of important archaeological artifacts, rare books, manuscripts, maps and graphic works of art, which survey the earliest history of the lands that would become known as the Americas. Jay I. Kislak donated the collection to the Library of Congress in 2014. The dates of the collection items range...

    Collection Items: View 363 Items

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    Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection In 1943, at the height of WWII, Lessing J. Rosenwald (1891-1979) announced that he would donate the entirety of his graphic arts collection, as well as all future purchases, to both the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art. Then Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, noted the gravity of the gift and its timing. In an open letter to Mr. Rosenwald, MacLeish...

    Collection Items: View 1,703 Items

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    Lewis Carroll Scrapbook An original scrapbook that was kept by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Better known as Lewis Carroll, the Victorian-era children’s author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford. The scrapbook contains approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and a limited number of manuscript materials, collected between 1855-72. A timeline, authored...

    Collection Items: View 10 Items

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    National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection 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 and donated to the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress on November 1, 1938.
    • Contributor: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady - Catt, Carrie Chapman - Stone, Lucy - Blackwell, Alice Stone - National American Woman Suffrage Association - Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell) - Howe, Julia Ward - National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress)
    • Date: 1800

    Collection Items: View 1,936 Items

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    Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera 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 material dates from the seventeenth century to the present day and covers innumerable topics.
    • Contributor: Printed Ephemera Collection (Library of Congress) - Library of Congress. National Digital Library Program - Library of Congress. Rare Book and Special Collections Division
    • Date: 2000

    Collection Items: View 10,761 Items

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    Rare Book Selections 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. All of these collections offer scholarly documentation about the western and American traditions of life and learning. The Division’s collection of nearly 5,700 incunabula (fifteenth-century imprints) is the largest such grouping in the Western Hemisphere....

    Collection Items: View 4,797 Items

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    Sir Francis Drake (Kraus Collection) Sir Francis Drake Sir Francis Drake's accomplishments as an explorer and naval strategist were unparalleled. His most notable feat was circumnavigating the earth from 1577-80, the first such voyage since Magellan's in 1522 and the only one up to that time captained by the same man from start to finish. Drake's expeditions to the Caribbean and the Pacific, undertaken during the circumnavigation and in...
    • Contributor: Hans and Hanni Kraus Sir Francis Drake Collection (Library of Congress) - Library of Congress
    • Date: 2005

    Collection Items: View 104 Items

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    St. Mark's Poetry Project Audio Archive Funded by money originally earmarked for the socialization of juvenile delinquents, the newly formed Poetry Committee declared St. Marks Church-in-the-Bouwerie in Manhattan’s East Village as their new home. Among the founders was poet and translator Paul Blackburn, whose commitment to the shared experience of poetry prompted him to capture readings on a tape recorder. These recordings initiated the Poetry Project archive of recorded poetry....

    Collection Items: View 421 Items

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    The United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Cultures This online collection contains digitized items from the Library of Congress collection that was originally made available as The United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Cultures/Brasil e Estados Unidos: Expandindo Fronteiras, Comparando Culturas, as part of the Global Gateways initiative.

    Collection Items: View 81 Items