The inaugural online presentation of the Aaron Copland Collection at the Library of Congress celebrates the centennial of the birth of the American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990). The multiformat Aaron Copland Collection from which the online collection derives spans the years 1910 to 1990 and includes approximately 400,000 items documenting the multifaceted life of an extraordinary person who was composer, performer, teacher, writer, conductor, commentator, and administrator. It comprises both manuscript and printed music, personal and business correspondence, diaries, writings, scrapbooks, programs, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, awards, books, sound recordings, and motion pictures.

The first release of the online collection contains approximately 1,000 items that yield a total of about 5,000 images. These items date from 1899 to 1981, with most from the 1920s through the 1950s, and were selected from Copland's music sketches, correspondence, writings, and photographs.

"African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of particular importance in African-American history. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Emanuel Love, Lydia Maria Child, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington, among others.

The 800 + titles in the collection include sermons on racial pride and political activism; annual reports of charitable, educational, and political organizations; and college catalogs and graduation orations from the Hampton Institute, Morgan College, and Wilberforce University. Also included are biographies, slave narratives, speeches by members of Congress, legal documents, poetry, playbills, dramas, and librettos. Other materials focus on segregation, voting rights, violence against African Americans, the colonization of Africa by freed slaves, anti-slavery organizations and investigative reports. Several of the items are illustrated with portraits of the authors.

This site offers 12 hours of interviews recorded in the days and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor from more than 200 individuals in cities and towns across the U.S. Audio and transcripts of the interviews are provided.

This site contains correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting the invention of the telephone, his involvement in the first telephone company, family life, interest in the education of the deaf, and aeronautical and other scientific research. Included is his notebook containing the entry from March 10, 1876, describing the first successful experiment with the telephone, during which he spoke the famous words, Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you.

This site provides song sheets (lyrics without music) for 4000 songs that were popular before the advent of the phonograph and radio. During this time (1850 - 1870), song sheets were the way that many Americans learned the latest songs.

This site features motion pictures that showcase work, school, and leisure activities in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century. The site includes films of the U.S. Postal Service from 1903, cattle breeding, fire fighters, ice manufacturing, logging, calisthenics and gymnastic exercises in schools, amusement parks, boxing, expositions, football, parades, swimming, and other sporting events.

This site contains links to thousands of the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. The Farm Security Administrations's photographs cover the Great Depression, while the Office of War Administration's photographs look at the mobilization effort for World War II.

This presentation features selected documents from the American Colony in Jerusalem Collection. The full collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress represents well over 10,000 items stemming from the history of the American Colony, a non-denominational utopian Christian community founded by a small group of American expatriates in Ottoman Palestine in 1881.

A collection of over two hundred social dance manuals at the Library of Congress published from ca. 1490 to 1929. Along with dance instruction manuals, this online presentation also includes a significant number of antidance manuals, histories, treatises on etiquette, and items from other conceptual categories. Many of the manuals also provide historical information on theatrical dance.

This site consists of 59 sound recordings of speeches by American leaders at the turn of the century. Speakers include Warren G. Harding, James Cox, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John J. Pershing.

This site presents 2,900 life histories from 300 writers from 24 states. These histories describe individuals' families, incomes, occupations, political views, religions, diets, and observations.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

This site provides 253 narratives describing travels in the colonies and U.S. The collection includes works by authors not widely known as well as by Matthew Arnold, James Fenimore Cooper, Dickens, Washington Irving, Sir Charles Lyell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other major figures. The collection is searchable and can be browsed by not only by author and title, but also by subject.

The collection consists of over 62,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the nineteenth century. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred music and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

The Printed Ephemera Collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the Collection comprises 28,000 primary source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompassing key events and eras in American history. Among them are a variety of posters, notices, invitations, proclamations, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, menus and business cards. They capture the experience of the Revolutionary War, slavery, the western land rush, the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, and the Industrial Revolution from the viewpoint of those who lived through them.

This is a multimedia anthology illustrating the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini.

In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's best-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese Americans interned there during World War II. The collection presents for the first time side-by-side digital scans of both Adams's 242 original negatives and his 209 photographic prints, allowing viewers to see his darkroom technique and in particular how he cropped his prints. Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style of landscape photography. Although a majority of the photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities.

The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection is comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Subjects are concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States, especially the New York City area, and Florida. Included are the homes of notable Americans, such as Raymond Loewy, and of several U.S. presidents, as well as color images of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Many of the photographs were commissioned by architects, designers, owners and architectural publications, and document important achievements in American 20th-century architecture and interior design.

This site makes available for viewing the nearly nine hundred images of modes of transportation taken by American photographer William Henry Jackson in North Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. The site allows searches by subject and Keyword, and gives archival information about it.

This collection makes available examples of a brilliant style of brass band music that flourished in the 1850s in the United States and remained popular through the nineteenth century. Bands of this kind served in the armies of both the North and the South during the Civil War. The collection includes both printed and manuscript music (mostly in the form of "part books" for individual instruments) and features over 700 musical compositions, as well as 8 full-score modern editions and 19 recorded examples of brass band music in performance.