Walt Whitman fans can peruse a number of of gems - including proofs, engraved images, and a handwritten letter to the poet from Ralph Waldo Emerson - with the University of Illinois Springfield's Walt Whitman Collection. This collection of 33 items, part of the Special Collections and Illinois Regional Archives Depository, contains a number of pieces authored by Whitman himself, including poems...

While it is fairly easy to find electronic full-text versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's tremendously important work "Uncle Tom's Cabin" online, visitors will want to first take a look at this very thorough exploration not only of the book itself, but also of American culture in the 19th century. Created and maintained by Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia (with funding from...

This rather fine website, a collaboration with New York University Libraries, complements the recent publication of "Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception." This work argues that "much of the valuable journalism since before the U.S. Civil War has emerged from investigations that employed subterfuge to expose wrong." The fascinating material here has been gathered into clusters,...

The University of San Francisco has a marvelous archive at their Gleeson Library, where holdings include hundreds of rare documents from the past five centuries penned by a diverse set of literati such as E.M Forster, Sherwood Anderson, and others. All told, the collection contains eighty items, and visitors can browse all of the items by keyword or via a more detailed search. Perhaps the most...

Back in 2001, the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah received a Library Services and Technology grant to research and demonstrate a newspaper digitization project. Since that time, they have successfully partnered with Brigham Young University to digitize over 240,000 pages of historic newspapers from Utah's past. Currently, the archive includes issues from over 25 newspapers,...

The recent past can often be overlooked by digital archive projects. Fortunately, that is not the case at the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections group. Recently, they digitized four student newspapers, including the Independent, the Ledger, the Daily, and the Commons. The papers come from the main campus in Seattle, and the other branches in Tacoma and Bothell. Visitors can...

The history of independent weekly newspapers in the United States is quite compelling, and it would seem that almost every American city has at least one of these types of papers. New York has many of these ferociously independent papers, the best known is most likely the Village Voice. Founded 50 years ago by a group of literary types (including Norman Mailer), the paper continues to be a vital...

The Women's Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University has been working on preserving and publishing early women's writing in English since 1988, and they have had an online presence since the late 1990s. Along with sponsoring an annual conference, they maintain this website, where visitors will find information about their digital publication schedule, their educational seminars, and other events....

While writing may often be thought of or portrayed as a solitary pursuit, the digital exhibition Writing in Company: Forms of Collaboration in Artistic Works and Scientific Knowledge, 1700-1914 points out that writers throughout history often collaborated in both formal and unnoticed ways, resulting in "collective creativity." These myriad forms of collaboration are explored in this exhibition...

During his long life, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an outspoken critic of slavery, military conflicts, and many other issues that dominated conversation in 19th century America. Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1823 and after attending Harvard Divinity School he became a Unitarian minister. Over the course of the next five decades, Higginson would find time to play a leadership...