Are you trying to find information about a historical event? Looking for online archives for news, music, popular culture, or movie information? I’ve put together a good, basic list of online archives for you, with everything from the National Archives to Papyrus Archives (ancient Egyptian hieroglypics!) to Simpsons Archives.
General Historical and News Archives
- US National Archives: Huge site with vast amounts of info. Prepare to spend a lot of time here.
- United States News Archives on the Web: Organized by state, this archive will help you search state news archives.
- International News Archives on the Web: Organized by country. You can find a ton of information here.
- Vanderbilt Television News Archive: Check out news and other information from the past.
- Internet Digital Archive: “Digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.”
- World History Archive: Organized by world region and then sub-categorized.
- Historical Text Archive: Search original documents, books, and links.
Specialized Archives
- Math Archives: Get all your math needs taken care of here.
- The Internet Classics Archive: A site put together by MIT. Great, searchable literary site.
- The National Security Archive: George Washington University’s archive of anything to do with national security.
- New York Times Article Archive: Search past issues of the New York Times.
- NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive: This is a fascinating site.
Music and Entertainment Archives
- Human Studies Film Archives: “Manuscripts, field notes, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars.”
- The Simpsons Archive: Everything Simpsons on this awesome site.
- Classical Music Archive: As a fan of classical music myself, this is a favorite site.
- Live Music Archive: A collection of live music available for download.
- Digital Music Archive: Lots of songs available on this site — at last count over 3000.
- TV and Movie Theme Database: Can’t get that jingle out of your head? Find another one to replace it.
- Movie Archive: Features films that focus mainly on everyday life in America.
- Online Guitar Archive: A huge library of guitar music files.
Art Archives
- Duke Papyrus Archive: “The Duke Papyrus Archive provides electronic access to texts about and images of nearly 1400 papyri from ancient Egypt.”
- The Archives of African American Music and Culture: “A repository of materials covering various musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era.”
- Smithsonian Archives of American Art: “16 million letters, photographs, diaries, sketches, scrapbooks, business records, and other documentation that supports the study of the history of the visual arts in America.”
- Digital Archives of Art: Anything from architecture to 19th century paintings here.
- Rock Art Archive: from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.
- Windows to the Universe Art Archive: Images of scientists and philosophers from ancient times with corresponding information. Lots of gorgeous sculptures here.
- Southeast Asia Art Foundation: Archive An enormous collection of SE Asian art.
War Archives
- The Anarchist Archives” “An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism.”
- The World War 1 Document Archive: Archives of primary documents from World War I.
- The Rutgers Oral History Archives – World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War: Features at the time of this writing over 395 separate oral histories.
- The American Civil War Homepage: Huge collection of primary documents, archival research, and photos.
- Joiner Center for the Study of War & Social Consequences: A gateway to other archives and databases about various wars throughout history.