Did you ever wonder why you don't need a passport to go from New York to California, but if you were to move from one state to another, you would need a new driver's license? Or why you can use the same currency in all states, but not be subject to the same speed limits? Or why you have to pay both federal and state taxes?

Today many Americans take pride in their status as "independent voters," partly because they see parties as lacking vision for the country. Since many Americans have become disenchanted by partisan politics, they avoid identification as a "loyal Democrat" or a "staunch Republican." These negative attitudes toward parties are rooted in the roles that they play in American politics.

The influence of the media is increased by the fact that campaigns today have become more focused on the individual than on the party. In order to win primaries, individual candidates seek media attention to gain attention from voters. As a result, do voters hold political power, or has the media simply replaced political parties as the primary force behind candidate selection?

What is the difference between a liberty and a right? Both words appear in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The distinction between the two has always been blurred, and today the concepts are often used interchangeably. However, they do refer to different kinds of guaranteed protections.

1492. Columbus. The date and the name provoke many questions related to the linking of very different parts of the world, the Western Hemisphere and the Mediterranean. What was life like in those areas before 1492? What spurred European expansion? How did European, African and American peoples react to each other? What were some of the immediate results of these contacts?

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.

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.

n late June 1863, more than two years into the American Civil War, Union and Confederate military forces converged on the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After a series of military successes, Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia into Union territory in his second invasion of the North. He hoped that a Confederate victory in Pennsylvania would convince Northern politicians to abandon the war. The Union Army of the Potomac, led initially by General Joseph Hooker and then General George Meade, crossed the Potomac River to pursue Lee’s forces.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

The Virtual Tour for the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, Florida. Photos, maps, podcasts, and more!

For 400 years, playwrights and moviemakers, painters and sculptors, toy manufacturers and tobacco sellers have portrayed Pocahontas, shaping her appearance and narrative to suit their own purposes. To explore these depictions and compare myth to verifiable history, the Virginia Historical Society, led by curators William Rasmussen and Robert Tilton, assembled more than 40 paintings, prints, drawings, sheet music, and other objects. In this slide show, see a sampling of their remarkable exhibit.

This course uses an open textbook University of Michigan Chemical Engineering Process Dynamics and Controls. The articles in the open textbook (wikibook) are all written by teams of 3-4 senior chemical engineering students, and are peer-reviewed by other members of the class. Using this approach, the faculty and Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) teaching the course act as managing editors, selecting broad threads for the text and suggesting references. In contrast to other courses, the students take an active role in their education by selecting which material in their assigned section is most useful and decide on the presentation approach. Furthermore, students create example problems that they present in poster sessions during class to help the other students master the material.

Brings together materials from three premier collections: the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia. Among the reconnaissance, sketch, and theater-of-war maps are the detailed battle maps made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss for Generals Lee and Jackson, General Sherman's Southern military campaigns, and maps taken from diaries, scrapbooks, and manuscripts all available for the first time in one place.

Eastern National is celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War with electronic editions of eParks' National Park Civil War Series of books. Read them online or own your own paper edition by visiting our Civil War Series store.

The Compromise of 1850 was a series of acts that dealt with issues related to slavery and territorial expansion. This guide contains Library of Congress digital materials, external websites, and a print bibliography.

Imagination and vision played critical roles in the creative act of forming a self-governing United States of America. The collections of the Library of Congress are unquestionably the worlds best source for documenting that process. This exhibition offers a remarkable opportunity to learn in a fresh new way how the founding documents that emerged from this period were forged out of insight, invention, and creativity, as well as collaboration and much compromise.

This online collection presents digitized items from the Library of Congress collection originally made available as the France in America digital library project, a part of the Global Gateways initiative. Conceived in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France in America /France en Amérique was launched as a bilingual digital library made available by the Library of Congress. It explored the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. The original site was completed in fall 2006. Many of the items in this digital collection were digitized specifically for this partnership. To access materials from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, explore the Gallica External digital library platform.

The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the "Trail of Tears."