Care, Henry. English Liberties: Or, the Freeborn Subject's Inheritance, Containing I. Magna Charta. First edition. 1682. One of the very first law books printed in colonial America presenting England’s “fundamental laws” as the inheritance of free subjects. Issued during the Exclusion Crisis, the work articulated principles of jury trial, religious.....
[African American][New Deal][Labor] Black Civilian Conservation Corps member photograph archives, showing an all-Black CCC unit in Pennsylvania, ca. 1937. These photographs document the experiences of Black participants in the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the central employment and public works initiatives created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Established.....
[Civil Rights] National Association for the Advancement of Colored People printed and photographic archive documenting organizational activism, legal strategy, and leadership within the American Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s through the late 1970s. The materials trace the NAACP’s work in litigation, membership organizing, public advocacy, and legislative lobbying during.....
[Engineering][Invention and Business] Felt, Dorr Eugene. British Patents for Improvements in Calculating Machines (1900–1904) document the development of one of the earliest commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculators, reflecting the rapid mechanization of clerical labor at the turn of the twentieth century. These patents relate to the Comptometer, first introduced in.....
[Japanese Internment][WWII] Framed original broadside issued April 24, 1942 by the Western Defense Command enforcing Executive Order 9066 by the compulsory removal of Japanese Americans from a designated district of Los Angeles. The broadside directs “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien” to present themselves for relocation, initiating.....
[Japanese American][Internment][WWII] Broadside issued April 24, 1942 by the Western Defense Command enforcing Executive Order 9066 by the compulsory removal of Japanese Americans from a designated district of Los Angeles. The broadside directs “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien” to present themselves for relocation, initiating their forced.....
[African American][Voting Rights] New Constitution for the State of Illinois. 1870 printing of the Illinois Constitution ratified after the Civil War documents Reconstruction-era legal reform in a Midwestern state that had previously enforced restrictive Black Codes despite its status as a free state. By the outbreak of the Civil War.....
[Civil Rights][MLK Jr.][Vietnam War][Anti-War] King, Martin Luther, Jr. Speeches by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. About the War in Vietnam (1968) marks a decisive and controversial moment in the Civil Rights Movement when the famed preacher and activist voiced a strong opposition to American military intervention in Vietnam.....
[Japanese Internment] [Law & Public Policy] Previously owned by Takako Saito; a documented Manzanar incarceree; this archive of three books titled National Defense Migration Hearings; intended for use by the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration; Parts 29–31; 1942; documents Congress’s investigation into the forced removal of Japanese Americans from.....
[WWII][Japanese American] Photo archive of Japanese American families and children confined in United States War Relocation Authority camps during the Second World War. These images, taken during the 1940s incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry following the issuance of Executive Order 9066, capture informal scenes of family life.....
Archive of Prohibition, temperance movement and alcohol regulation ephemera chronicling the political organizing, religious campaigns, and moral debates over alcohol consumption in the United States from the 1890s through the 1940s. Produced by temperance organizations, political advocates, physicians, government bodies, and reformers, the materials trace the public discourse surrounding alcohol.....
[Japanese Internment] Heart Mountain War Relocation Center materials documenting administrative theory alongside camp level cultural practice. The War Relocation Authority's political administration and daily life inside Japanese American incarceration during World War II, including a copy of Community Government in War Relocation Centers signed “Rachel Sady,” likely the anthropologist Rachel.....
Kemble Parochial School. Record Book, 1871–1904, constitutes a sustained documentary record of rural English education during the formative decades following the Elementary Education Act of 1870, commonly known as the Forster Act. Established in direct response to this legislation, which mandated compulsory elementary education for children aged five to thirteen.....
[Federal Agricultural Policy][Environmental Management][USDA] United States Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration records documenting federal agricultural credit, debt restructuring, and subsistence planning for a farmer in Cullohwee, North Carolina, 1940s, significant for providing direct documentation of New Deal rural relief programs aimed at aiding farms impacted by the Dust Bowl.....
Birth Control News newspaper edited by Marie Stopes and associates in 1923 advanced public discussion of contraception, family planning, and reproductive reform in Britain during the early twentieth century birth control movement. The publication served as the official organ of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, the.....
[Prohibition][Law and Policy] Correspondence on Prohibition and enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment between a New York lawyer and a clergyman, 1926. Eleven letters consisting of 27 pages, exchanged between Rev. W. Russell Bowie, rector of Grace Church in New York City and a prominent Episcopal clergyman, and Seymour van Santvoord.....
[New Deal][Labor] Civilian Conservation Corps photo archive, circa 1930s, documenting Black, white, and racially integrated labor units under the New Deal, with particular relevance to African American labor history, federal relief policy, and the administration of public works programs. These images provide direct visual evidence of how the CCC, one.....
[African American] Bruce, Blanche Kelso. Manuscript legal document, dated 1890, signed by prominent African American senator and former slave Blanche Bruce. The document is signed by Bruce in his role as Recorder of Deeds office in Washington, D.C. Bruce, born enslaved in Virginia and later elected U.S. Senator from Mississippi.....
Evacuation of the Japanese and National Policy (1942) records an official response by a Protestant denomination to the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Issued by the National General Council of Congregational Christian Churches, the document addresses the government policy that removed tens of thousands.....
Hurlbut, E. P. Essays on Human Rights and their Political Guaranties, 1845, a forceful antebellum treatise defending natural rights philosophy and explicitly advocating the legal equality of the sexes within American political thought. Written in the context of intensifying debates over democracy, reform, and the authority of utilitarian political theory.....
Civil rights political pamphlet archive documenting competing national and Southern responses to lynching, racial violence, and federal civil rights intervention during the immediate post–World War II period. Issued between 1946 and 1951, the publications capture a formative moment in the political struggle over civil rights legislation, federal authority, and racial.....
Steve Rose's photographic coverage of demonstrations, strike activity, broadcast spaces, and police control in New York City and Washington, D.C., circa 1969–1971, with dissent moving through street assembly, underground and movement media, institutional protest, and municipal enforcement. Rose, active in New York documentary photography during the early 1970s, photographed activists.....
Tanforan Assembly Center photographs dating from 1943 to 1944 document the transformation of a major Japanese American incarceration site into a United States military training installation during World War II. Tanforan, located in San Bruno, California, functioned as one of the principal temporary detention centers established after Executive Order 9066.....
[Cuban Refugees] [Caravan of Sorrow] Miami Herald press photograph archive, 1960 to 1966, documents Cuban exile political organizing, refugee displacement, and United States federal response in South Florida across the critical period between the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. The archive follows a defined sequence of.....
[War on Drugs] [Policing & Community Organization] Massachusetts drug enforcement and anti-crack protest press photo archive documenting narcotics policing, evidence display, neighborhood mobilization, and women’s rehabilitation in Boston, Springfield, Pittsfield, and Framingham from 1968 through the late 1980s, preserving direct evidence of how the drug crisis was made visible through.....
