Digital Resources

This exhibition presents an overview of the Mexican Revolution as a historic event in which individuals, groups, and social classes pursued diverse goals to achieve political, economic, and social change. It also highlights several definitive political and military moments during the Revolution, as well as the people who witnessed and shaped it.

This collection illuminates the expanse of visual material on American Indian history and culture found within the Library’s world-renowned Edward E. Ayer Collection.

This exhibition highlights the ways in which architectural books were developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to display the military and political power of European rulers and states.

Today most Americans remember the War of 1812 for inspiring Francis Scott Key to write “The Star Spangled Banner.” Many of the conflict’s most familiar events—the battle of New Orleans, impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, and the British assault on Washington.

ChicagoAncestors is a project of the Genealogy and Local History section of the Newberry. The project is intended to help genealogists and local historians discover and share historical information about Chicago.

This project aims to provide a more complete understanding of the complex nexus of issues, events, and people that contributed to the causes and effects of the Civil War.

This digital collection contains a selection of unique photographs discovered in the Newberry Library’s unprocessed 20th century Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad archives about ten years ago. Except for the few photographs published in Granger Country: A Pictorial Social History of the Burlington Railroad (1949), the images have never been published.

This exhibition explores the life and reign of Elizabeth I, examining how her unique personality was forged and why her legend has endured.

This exhibit contains a selection of unique black and white photographs focusing on Illinois scenes, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and its workers.

This exhibit traces the emigration of French Canadian populations to the Midwest. Following some key French Canadians like Pierre Menard and Father Chiniquy, this project looks at the influence they had over time and how French Canadian settlements developed in the Midwest throughout the Nineteenth century.

This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The Newberry has contributed several manuscripts to this collection together with other institutions such as, the British Library, the New York Public Library and many others. *Access to this subscription database is only available on-site through any of the Newberry’s public computers.*

Historic Maps in K-12 Classrooms is a resource for teachers and students developed by the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography.

This exhibit displays excerpts from over twenty illuminated manuscripts that span the century 1450 to 1550.

The materials displayed here represent important periods in the intertwined histories of American Indians and the European and American settlers who began to arrive in the region in the late seventeenth century. The archival materials presented reveal a story of change and continuity; a necessary paradox for American Indians.

Based on an exhibition originally mounted at the Newberry, this website explores how two histories, that of the United States and that of Indian peoples along the expedition route, came together two hundred years ago and how they remain intertwined today.

In images and text, this digital exhibit examines how The Plan of Chicago, or the “Burnham Plan,” contributed to the development and aspirations of the Chicago’s urban landscape.

This exhibit provides an overview of exploration and early European cartography from 1534-1710.

This exhibit is meant to encourage civic engagement with the struggles over democracy and citizenship, which have occupied Chicagoans for the duration of the city’s political history.

In an effort to make the Popol Vuh more widely available and reduce non-essential handling of the text, the Newberry has worked with Ohio State University to make this invaluable text available through this online resource.

This exhibit situates Pullman within a broad narrative, exploring how the neighborhood illuminates the centrality of labor, race, and urban development in the history of industrial America.