Researching and documenting local histories can be difficult work, as any genealogist or amateur historian can attest to. Barbara Stewart and her colleagues at the University of Massachusetts have created a valuable Web-based resource for people interested in researching Franklin County in Massachusetts. Essentially, the Archive Index allows users to search for articles (organized by subject) from...

This 1881 reference book was designed to help nineteenth-century households stay healthy and productive. Need to know how to winter your bees? Build a barometer? Bleed a patient with leeches? Your answers are here. The site, a part-time project of freelance webmaster Matthew Spong, evokes a time when many households were largely self-sufficient, and the value of a book explaining how to amputate a...

For the past few years, the staff of the Special Collections Division at the University of Missouri at Columbia have been scanning a number of important texts, and creating a rather helpful collection of online materials contained within this site. Many of the texts available here are early accounts of local and regional history, including William Bryan's recollections of the pioneer families of...

The Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society have teamed up to create this excellent online collection of letters, speeches, and other writings from a diverse set of people who settled throughout Wisconsin during the 19th century. The documents featured here are available as scanned images (when possible) and as transcriptions in the instances where the...