Looking for women's history materials online at the Library of Congress?
A wide array of digitized primary sources highlighting aspects of American women's livesincluding manuscripts, pamphlets, books, maps, photographs, moving images, and sound recordingsare accessible through the Library's
American Memory Historical Collections Web site.
The American Women Research Guide provides links to some of these digital materials, but you will find many more by searching American Memory directly.
|Search across all collections to figure out which ones interest
you; then use individual collections' search and display features
to delve more deeply.
|Use the Collection
Finder to narrow your search by subject, date range, region, or
original format of materials.
|Search collections by keywords, but also try browsing by subject,
author/creator name, title, or geographic location (see Choosing
|Consider the fullest range of applicable keywords, and be aware
that usage has changed over time: "woman," "lady," "girl," "missus,"
"Mrs." and "Miss" all yield unique search results.
|Full-text searching is available within specific text-rich collections
Text Search Options)
|See American Memory search
tips, and visit the Learning
Page, for more ideas about searching.
|See The Learning Page
for K-12 resources for teachers and students, as well as pathfinders,
collection connections, and workshops of interest to all American
Memory users. March
2003 featured a women's history forum.
|The Library of Congress Online
Catalog includes digital resources as well as books. And don't
forget the books!
Titles of some American Memory sites readily suggest that they contain
information about women:
The presence of material relating to women is less apparent when skimming
the titles of other American Memory collections, but women's experiences
and perspectives are richly represented throughout the collections. Examples
- a confidential
letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to the executive secretary of the
NAACP (1936) (Words and Deeds)
- a Yiddish play, The
Mother's Sin: [An] Historical Operetta in 4 Acts, in original
manuscript (1910) (American Variety Stage)
- an etiquette book, The
Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility by Emily Thornwell (1857)
(An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca.
- Depression- and World War II-era photographs by Marjory
Lange, and Marion
Post Wolcott (America From the Great Depression to World War
- the life history collected in 1937 of Amanda
Tellis, an African American woman born a slave (Born in Slavery)
comments from four women reacting to the attack on Pearl Harbor
in December 1941 (After the Day of Infamy)
- a film
showing the opening of the second New York State suffrage campaign
on September 8, 1917, featuring Theodore Roosevelt talking to suffrage
leaders Vira B. Whitehouse, Helen Rogers Reid, and Harriet Burton Laidlaw
(Early Motion Pictures, 1890-1927)
- a mid-nineteenth-century diary
of an unknown woman describing a sea journey and life in Santa Barbara,
California (Westward by Sea: A Maritime Perspective on American
Jefferson's letter to his daughter Martha Jefferson, spelling out
the duties of a wife (1790) (Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library
The discussion below will help you navigate American Memory resources
with a special eye towards researching women's history effectively online.
It also addresses some frequently asked questions about using American
Memory materials, pointing to sources of further information. Chances
are that as you travel through the American Memory site, you will encounter
intriguing and informative materials that you didn't even know you wanted.
Keep in mind that the Library's online collections are representative
rather than comprehensive, and that they principally contain collections
of primary materials. These materials are generally grouped by
collection and are accompanied by special features to provide context
for researchers and aid in the interpretation of the items. What you won't
find here are text-book style summaries of historical persons, events,
When you type search strings into an American Memory search page, it is
helpful to understand what data is being searched. Generally, there are
two types of data that American Memory searches:
- Descriptive Information: Many collections include "descriptive
information" or "bibliographic records," which are essentially
summary descriptions of the items. Each summary may include:
- title of the item
- names of people and organizations involved in creating the item
- date the item was made
- physical medium of the original item
- information about subjects represented in the item
Some parts of the description (for example, the title and some notes)
may use words found on or with the original material. Other parts
of the description (for example, subject headings) have been supplied
by Library staff to help relate items to one another or to explain
something about the item. In addition to the summary information,
the record includes a link for viewing or listening to the item.
- Full Text of Materials: Many collections featuring textual
materials offer full-text searching of each item. For instance, collections
that feature full text in which you will see women's experiences particularly
well reflected include:
* With few exceptions, bibliographic records, rather than full texts,
are used for cross-collection searches (see the American Memory help document,
What American Memory
resources are included in this search? for further information about
* At this time, Special Presentations and other contextual materials
accompanying the collections are generally not included in American Memory
searches, although they may be searched using the Advanced
Search feature that links from the Library's home page.
* When you are searching a single collection that offers both a "Descriptive
Information" and a "Full Text" search, you should try using
both types of searches for maximum results.
There are several ways to search in American Memory. For best results you
will want to try a number of the options described below.
Try cross-collection and single-collection searching
In most cases, you will want to start with a cross-collection keyword
search before moving to more specific searches or "browses" within individual
collections. Use the cross-collection search to identify collections with
materials of interest to you. Another way to locate collections of interest
is to use the Collection
Finder categories (Broad Topics, Original Format, Time, Place, Library
Division, and so forth), which will provide a list of collections relevant
to the category. Note that searches started from A Collection Finder page
limit results to the collections listed on that page.
Focusing on a single collection will enable you to take advantage of
special features such as:
- browse lists of subjects, titles, names of authors or others involved
in creating the materials, and geographic locations
- full-text searching of the items in the collection
- special display or sorting features the collection may offer
- Special Presentations and background material
When searching individual collections use both "Search Descriptive
Information" and "Search Full Text," if available
Most American Memory collections offer keyword searching. A keyword search
simply matches the words or phrases you enter to text associated with
an item. The text may be in the bibliographic record ("Descriptive
Information") or in the full text, depending on which type of search
you choose. Keep in mind that searching full text for events, places,
and people may uncover material relevant to you but peripheral to the
main theme of the work (and therefore, not mentioned in the summary Descriptive Information).
Example: Try searching Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals for references to Fanny Kemble.
--> Enter fanny kemble in the Search Descriptive Information
(Bibliographic Records) box. You retrieve a handful of documents in
which the exact phrase "fanny kemble" appears either in the
title or as the author of the work.
--> Enter fanny kemble in the Search Full Text box. By setting
the options to retrieve a maximum of a thousand documents or parts of
documents (see below), you retrieve more than two hundred references
to Fanny Kemble found in the text of the documents themselves.
Use keywords typical of the time period you are researching
Particularly when you are keyword searching the full text of items in
a collection, try likely synonyms, keeping in mind the terminology of
the time period you are researching and selecting the "match any
of these words" option.
Consult the American Memory help document, Choosing
Search Words, and the Learning Page Synonym
List for more ideas.
--> Words that might refer to women are: girl, lass,
lady, wife, Mrs., Miss, mistress,
mother, grandmother, aunt, niece, female,
maid, maiden, matron, feminine.
--> Terms that may yield materials relating to childbirth (or events
likened to childbirth) might include: childbed, midwife,
birthing, pregnancy, and parturition.
Start with specific terms and then expand to more general terms if necessary
First try the specific names of the persons, organizations, or places
you are researching. If you do not get enough results, add more synonyms
or use broader subjects.
--> If you are looking for missionary women, try women missionaries
before you try women religion.
--> If you are exploring the activities of actress Fanny Kemble, try
Fanny Kemble before you try actresses or theater.
Consult the American Memory help document Choosing
Search Words for more ideas.
Adjust search options to broaden or narrow your search
American Memory's keyword search allows you to enter multiple words and
gives you the option of searching at various levels of precision:
Your results will list first those items that matched your search most closely,
followed by those that matched less closely but that might still be useful.
Depending upon the results you are getting, you may want to adjust one or
more of these options to make your search more inclusive or more precise.
- You can match any of the words you enter, match all
of the words in any order or placement, or match the exact phrase.
- You can choose to search for variations of your words, such as plurals,
or confine the search to the exact terms you enter.
- You can specify the maximum number of records to return to you, up
to five thousand.
- You can select to search collections limited to certain formats of
material (e.g., photos and prints; maps; motion pictures)
- In some collections you can specify which parts of the bibliographic
record you wish to search (e.g., author/creator fields, subject fields)
or retain the default to search all of the available fields.
--> Try entering women's suffrage, setting the options to "match
this exact phrase" and "match the words exactly." The
resulting records are all probably quite relevant, including quite a
number labeled "Woman Suffrage Collection" (Votes for Women: Selections
from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921).
--> Now repeat the search, but change the options to "include
all the words," "include word variants," and "return
a maximum" of 5000 records (don't use a comma when entering the
number). Your search will retrieve many more hits. More than one hundred
additional items from the woman suffrage collection are found this way.
Paging through the entries, it may not always be immediately apparent
where the words "women/woman/women's" and "suffrage" appeared in the
retrieved material, but you can read quite far into the list of retrieved
records before you find something like the Senate Journal for
Tuesday, Jan. 5, 1864, which mentions "suffrage" but not in connection
See American Memory help documents Bibliographic
Record Search Options and Full
Text Search Options for further information.
Take advantage of subject headings that gather related material
In some collections, those who prepared the collection have assisted
in identifying items with related subject matter or that take a similar
form by including subject terms (e.g., Women--Employment) or genre
terms (e.g., Diaries) in the bibliographic records. Sometimes these
terms are taken from the Library of Congress Subject Headings
(LCSH), a standard list often used in library cataloging
of books and other materials; sometimes the headings are drawn from other
One way to take advantage of these subject and genre terms is to consult
the "browse by subject" pages included with many collections. If you find
an item that seems applicable to your topic, you can also use the linked
subject headings in its bibliographic record or other description to find
any additional items assigned the same heading.
The "Cataloging the Collection" or "Building the Digital
Collection" documents accompanying each American Memory collection
usually contain information about subject headings and other cataloging
matters. For a discussion of subject and genre headings, in general, and
how to find them, see Searching LC Catalogs.
Use alternate display options
American Memory search results are displayed as a "List View"
by default, but the "Gallery View" option is an important tool
for multiformat research. Select the "Gallery View" button to
see thumbnail images of visual materials and icons indicating the format
of others. Gallery View can help you find a specific image quickly or
visually sort your results by medium rather than by title or collection.
Bookmarking what you find
When you search American Memory Historical Collections, the results are
returned to you as a temporary Web page that displays only the links you
have requested. These temporary search results last only a few hours before
disappearing. If you find something in American Memory that you would
like to revisit, you will need either to repeat the original search or
to access and note what is known as the page's "permanent URL." For instructions
on finding the permanent URL see Linking
& Bookmarking in American Memory.
If you find useful materials online, you may want to make a copy for
yourself for further reference, either in the form of an electronic file
or as a paper printout. Saving American Memory resources to your local
hard disk (or a removable storage media such as a Zip disk or CD-RW) is
fairly straightforward, although the details vary slightly depending on
your browser and operating system.
In all cases, one distinction is important.
- If the data you wish to save is in the form of a Web page or a text-only
display, you should use the browser's "save as" feature, which is usually
under the "file" menu.
- If the materials you wish to save are image, sound, or moving image
files (this includes page images of textual sources), you should right-click
on the item itself (or click-hold using a Macintosh computer) and use
the browser's menu to "save image as" or "save file as" accordingly.
Some browsers give you the option of viewing an image file without any
surrounding text ("view image"), which can be useful for checking what
exactly will be saved.
For more on accessing the various file formats used in American Memory,
see How To View.
Printing directly from your browser window will usually give you a useful
working image, but in some cases you may wish to print a primary page image
only, hiding from view the textual framing materials that American Memory
associates with it. To do this you will need to download the images to your
computer (see above) and open them in an imaging program such as the Windows
Imaging accessory, or Photoshop.
Multiple versions of the same image may be available. Because "dots per
inch" vary widely between the typical computer screen and the typical
printer, for quick printing or onscreen viewing you will want to use the
".jpg" version, but for high-quality printed copies, you may want to download
and save the "high resolution" TIFFs where available.
Citing American Memory resources
Most of what you need to know about citing American Memory resources
can be found on the Learning Page's Citing
If, even after using the techniques suggested above, you do not find the
number or kinds of materials you expect, it may be because they are not
available on the American Memory site or because you need additional information
to locate them. You might consider consulting:
- Library of Congress Online Catalog:
Contains records for many, but not all, of the Library's books, serials,
computer files, manuscript collections, cartographic materials, music,
sound recordings, and visual materials, including some digital items
not found in American Memory (see Searching
LC Catalogs for searching tips)
- American Women Research Guide: Provides
in-depth descriptions of Library of Congress resources, both digital
and non-digital, relating to women's history, with tips about searching
various Library collections
- Online Exhibitions: Include
many digital images of items from the Library collections presented
in thematic contexts (see Searching Online
Exhibitions for searching tips)
- Search the Library of Congress Web
Site: Searches the Library of Congress's
Web pages generally, excluding specific databases such as the Online
Catalog and American Memory's digitized holdings but including contextual
documents such as Special Presentations that accompany American Memory
- American Memory reference staff through the online Ask
a Librarian service.