Powerful KINGDOMS, beautiful sculpture, complex trade, tremendous wealth, centers for advanced learning — all are hallmarks of African civilization on the eve of the age of exploration.

Contributions by African Americans to the arts, education, industry, literature, politics and much more are well represented in the vast collections of the Library of Congress. The Library's digital collections, online exhibits, online catalog, databases and other online resources provide a broad range of multi-formatted digitized material available for research on the African American experience. The primary purpose of this guide is to introduce the user to digitized primary sources available online at the Library of Congress. To broaden the user's search beyond the Library of Congress, a list of suggested external websites is included.

The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.

It has been written that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could barely stand to be in the same room together. If Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had been contemporaries, they would have had difficulty being on the same planet with each other. The differences between Hamilton and Jefferson were to an extent differences between conservative and liberal philosophies. But Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Republican party, was by any definition an aristocrat, a thinker, a philosopher, a man who abhorred violence. He and Hamilton lived on the same social plane, though Hamilton's origins were more humble than those of Jefferson. Andrew Jackson, however, was a commoner, a man of humble origins, a fighter, a brawler who killed a man in a duel, and a figure who would have been distinctly out of place around Jefferson's table in the White House or at his home, Monticello. Andrew Jackson symbolized a new age, called by historians “the Age of the Common Man.”

Alexander Hamilton’s Final Version of the Report on the Subject of Manufactures [5 Dec 1971].

A person living in 1700 or 1800 or even earlier would not have been overwhelmed by the advances made during the previous century. But imagine Washington or Jefferson looking ahead about 100 years to the automobile, light bulb, telephone, cross-country railroads (200,000 miles by 1900), ocean-going streamships, airplanes, skyscrapers, factories full of heavy machinery and thousands of other advances. Although geniuses like Franklin and Jefferson might have foreseen such developments in their imagination, most people in 1800 could hardly conceive of such things. If one surveys the advance of science and technology over the centuries, it is apparent that for long periods the changes in the lives of working people were incremental. Sometimes, in fact, progress tended to reverse itself; the engineering achievements of the Romans, for example, were not replicated for much of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. And a person earning a living and in manufacture or farming in 1800 would not have led a life drastically different from the life of a small tradesmen or farmer a thousand years earlier. As many historians have pointed out, it is impossible to underestimate the impact that the growth of technology had on the lives of ordinary people.The rate of change in human society began to pick up in the early 1800s and has been accelerating ever since. Arguably, even the 20th century did not have such a profound impact on the way people lived their lives as the 19th.

The collection represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean.

Most of the items presented here are documented in Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789: A Guide to the Collections in the Library of Congress compiled by John R. Sellers and Patricia Molen van Ee in 1981. The bibliography contains approximately 2,000 maps and charts. Over the next several years many of the maps and charts in this bibliography will be added to the online collection each month.

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past.

In an increasingly digital world in which pedagogical trends are de-emphasizing rote learning and professors are increasingly turning toward active-learning exercises, scholars are fleeing traditional textbooks. Yet for those that still yearn for the safe tether of a synthetic text, as either narrative backbone or occasional reference material, The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. Unchecked by profit motives or business models, and free from for-profit educational organizations, The American Yawp is by scholars, for scholars. All contributors—experienced college-level instructors—volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.

This version of The American Yawp, Volume I is a modified version of The American Yawp, Volume I published by Stanford University Press and edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. The original textbook is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0, and this version is licensed in the same way.

In this CSCC version, the original book was modified by the addition of focus questions and key terms for each chapter. A pop-up glossary was also added. The book format was also adapted using the Kotobee authoring platform to create a web-based eBook. Additional material is adapted from Benjamin Pugno and Dea Boster, History of Western Medicine to 1700, Autumn 2017 ed. (Columbus, OH: Columbus State Community College, 2017).

The American Yawp, Volume 1 serves as the textbook for HIST 1151 American History to 1877. To take this course for credit, register at https://www.cscc.edu/.

The eBook can be viewed directly at:

https://csbooks.org/hist1151

A set of 30 primary source readings is also available to accompany this CSCC version of The American Yawp. The primary sources may be accessed at the following link:

https://ohiolink.oercommons.org/authoring/136-hist-1151-american-history-to-1877-primary-source-

Please attribute this work in the following manner:

"The American Yawp, Vol. 1" by Dea Boster, Christianna Hurford, and Jennifer Nardone, Columbus
State Community College is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 / A derivative from the original work found at http://www.americanyawp.com/.

These three documents, known collectively as the Charters of Freedom, have secured the rights of the American people for more than two and a quarter centuries and are considered instrumental to the founding and philosophy of the United States.

The American colonists had just fought a long and bitter war against a powerful centralized government; they were wary of creating another. The Second Continental Congress, which continued to function as the government of the new United States following the Declaration of Independence, drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777. They had Articlesorganized themselves sufficiently to conduct the war, but even during the fighting, the states werejealous of their own prerogatives. For example, when Washington's army was marching from Boston to New York early in the campaign, a welcoming party from the government of Connecticut approached the advance units and inquired by whose permission this "foreign army" was being brought into Connecticut. United in the cause of war, they still were separate political units jealous of their independence. Preoccupied as Congress was with the conduct of the war, and occasionally having to move to avoid the British Army, they failed to find sufficient agreement on the Articles until they were ratified on March 1, 1781.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

With the narrow approval of the Constitution in Virginia and New York, in June and July 1788, respectively, the Federalists seemed to have won an all-out victory. The relatively small states of North Carolina and Rhode Island would hold out longer, but with 11 states ratifying and all the populous ones among them, the Federalists had successfully waged a remarkable political campaign of enormous significance and sweeping change.

The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, on November 15, 1777. However, ratification of the Articles of Confederation by all thirteen states did not occur until March 1, 1781. The Articles created a loose confederation of sovereign states and a weak central government, leaving most of the power with the state governments. The need for a stronger Federal government soon became apparent and eventually led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The present United States Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation on March 4, 1789.

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee's attempt to invade the North.

The Battle of Antietam has been called the bloodiest single day in American History. By the end of the evening, 17 September 1862, an estimated 4,000 American soldiers had been killed and over 18,000 wounded in and around the small farming community of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Emory Upton, then a captain with the Union artillery battery, later wrote, “I have heard of ‘the dead lying in heaps,’ but never saw it till this battle. Whole ranks fell together.” The battle had been a day of confusion, tactical blunders, individual heroics, and the effects of just plain luck. It brought to an end a Confederate campaign to “liberate” the border state of Maryland and possibly to take the war into Pennsylvania. A little more than one hundred and forty years later, the Antietam battlefield is one of the best-preserved Civil War battlefields in the National Park System.

When Joseph Hooker had relieved Ambrose Burnside after the disastrous Fredericksburg campaign, he found the Army of the Potomac in a low state of morale. Desertion was increasing, and the army's own interior administration - never good - had deteriorated.

The battle of Chickamauga, fought on 19-20 September 1863, was the bloodiest battle in the western theater during the American Civil War. Along the banks of Chickamauga Creek in Northwest Georgia, less than a day's march south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Union Army of the Cumberland led by Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans clashed with Confederate General Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee in a two day mêlée that left almost 35,000 men dead, wounded, or missing.