U.S. Environmental History

This website makes available the text of the celebrated Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, edited by Gary E. Moulton. Moulton's edition—the most accurate and inclusive edition ever published—is one of the major scholarly achievements of the late twentieth century. The site features the full text—almost five thousand pages—of the journals. Also included are a gallery of images, important supplemental texts, and audio files of selected passages plus Native American perspectives.

The American Environmental Photographs collection consists of 4,500 photographs documenting natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.
The photographs in the collection were created between 1891 and 1936 by faculty members and students in the Department of Botany of the University of Chicago. The research and field studies of these Chicago botanists, including Henry Chandler Cowles (1869-1939) and George Damon Fuller (1869-1961), are considered to be among the most influential contributions to the development of modern ecological studies.

A project created by the University of Cambridge. Although this project does not have a U.S. focus, Darwin's correspondence might have information and provide context for some of your research projects.

From the Special Collections Research Center of the NCSU Libraries. Radial, tangential, and cross-sections of 350 North American woods from the 14-volume rare book The American Woods, published between 1888 and 1910 by the author, Romeyn Beck Hough. The images can be accessed by volume number or by the scientific or common name of each tree.

Ship's log kept by Georg [George] S. Johnson aboard the schooner Antarctic documenting two whaling voyages out of Provincetown, Massachusetts, between November 10, 1881, and July 11, 1884. This is a digitized version available in the University of Delaware's institutional repository.

The Joseph Hoare Beale journals, 1796-1848, consist of nine volumes kept by a world traveler of the late eighteenth to late nineteenth-centuries. Beale, who may have been of Irish origin and served as secretary to Lord Thomas Pitt in Ceylon before traveling to America, recorded weather observations, activities, and expenses in the five "daily weather diaries." He also produced a holograph of Sir Thomas Moore's "Sacred Melodies."

Ship's log kept by Georg [George] S. Johnson aboard the schooner Antarctic documenting two whaling voyages out of Provincetown, Massachusetts, between November 10, 1881, and July 11, 1884.

This volume is a farm diary kept by Chauncey P. Holcomb of New Castle County, Delaware, between 1843 and 1850. Holcomb recorded information related to his crops and livestock, as well as references to the weather, his health, and his involvement in agricultural reform.

This volume, entitled “Arbres de l’Amérique,” consists of 157 original pencil drawings (exact copies reduced to one third of the originals) of engraving taken from paintings by P.J. Redouté and Pancrace Bessa done for Francois-Andre Michaux’s North American Sylva, Paris, 1817-1819.