More than 600 primary sources — charters, laws, speeches, treaties, and letters — that tell the story of America in the words of the people who made it. Browse by era.
The voyages and conquests that opened the Americas to Europe.
13 documents →Charters, laws, and writings of Britain’s American colonies.
25 documents →The documents of independence — from the Stamp Act to the Treaty of Paris.
23 documents →Founding the republic: the Constitution, early laws, and the first presidencies.
45 documents →Slavery, reform, and westward expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
43 documents →Secession, the Civil War, and emancipation in the words of those who lived it.
30 documents →Rebuilding the Union and the struggle over the rights of the freed people.
28 documents →The Gilded Age of railroads, trusts, labor, and reform.
15 documents →America steps onto the world stage, from empire to the First World War.
38 documents →Prosperity, prohibition, and the cultural ferment of the Jazz Age.
18 documents →The Great Depression and the New Deal that remade the federal government.
36 documents →America in the Second World War, at home and abroad.
25 documents →The early Cold War, prosperity, and the dawn of the civil rights era.
16 documents →Civil rights, Vietnam, and the upheavals of the 1960s and early ’70s.
20 documents →From Watergate to the twenty-first century.
75 documents →Speeches, memos, and records from the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, including the response to 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
23 documents →Speeches, addresses, and records of the Clinton presidency.
52 documents →Treaties, messages, and diplomatic papers of the early American republic.
38 documents →Take HistoryCentral with you. Our apps put American history and centuries of the human story in your pocket.