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Links to Ethnic History Resources in the United States


Jewish Women's Archive, Brookline, Massachusetts
The legacy of this archive is to uncover, chronicle, and transmit the history of Jewish women in North America and their contributions to the world. Website includes an online database of 500 archival images and records on 250 women. The virtual archive allows researchers to locate artifacts in many different formats in repositories across the continent, at http://www.jwa.org/

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library, Archives & Special Collections
Collections include Portuguese American Archives, which provides access to historical material documenting the experience of Portuguese-Americans in the United States, with a particular regional focus on southeastern Massachusetts, and the Archives of the Center for Jewish Culture, an extensive collection of manuscript records and artifacts documenting many aspects of the Jewish communities of Fall River and New Bedford, at http://www.lib.umassd.edu/ARCHIVES/Archives.html

They Found Their Way: Generations of Jewish Life in Waterbury, Connecticut (an exhibit of the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury), at http://www.mattatuckmuseum.org/collections/jewish_history_project/

Ethnic Heritage Center at Southern Connecticut State University. An association of five different ethnic historical societies founded in 1988 and united by the desire to collect, preserve and disseminate their histories, and to use these histories to celebrate cultural differences and similarities, at
http://www.southernct.edu/ethnic/

Connecticut Polish American Archive, Central Connecticut State University. The Connecticut Polish American Archive (CPAA) collects, preserves and makes accessible documents related to the history of the Polish American community, with a special emphasis on the history of the Polish Americans in Connecticut and New England. CPAA is located in the Elihu Burritt Library at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut, and is an integral part of CCSU's Polish Studies Program, at http://library.ccsu.edu/about/departments/cpaa/

Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, Connecticut
http://www.jhsgh.org/

Hartford Black History Project, a Community-based non-profit that celebrates the contribution of the black community to Hartford, Connecticut's, history, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/HBHP/index.html

Tobacco Valley: Puerto Rican Farm Workers in Connecticut, by Ruth Glasser. From Volume 1, no, 1 (Fall 2002) issue of Hog River Journal, at http://www.hogriver.org/issues/v01n01/tobacco_valley.htm

American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island, New York. Between 1892 and 1924 over 22 million passengers and members of ships' crews came through Ellis Island and the Port of New York. This database allows you to search through passenger records from ships that brought the immigrants, at http://www.ellisislandrecords.org/

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York, New York. http://www.tenement.org/index.htm

Museum of Chinese in the Americas, New York, New York. http://www.moca-nyc.org/

Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, New York. http://www.mjhnyc.org/

The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Balch Library supports student study, advanced research, and genealogical investigation. Balch holdings contain material on more than 80 ethnic and racial groups, primary sources on more than 30 groups, including resources virtually undocumented elsewhere, and a body of research materials on multiculturalism, immigration, and diversity in the United States. The library contains approximately 60,000 volumes, 6,000 serial titles, 5,000 linear feet of manuscript collections, 6,000 reels of microfilm, 12,000 photographs, and other resources, at http://www.hsp.org/

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. http://www.nmai.si.edu/

Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. http://www.library.miami.edu/umcuban/cuban.html

Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative, Texas Tech University Libraries, Lubbock, Texas. http://aton.ttu.edu/

Western Reserve Historical Society Archives, Cleveland, Ohio. http://www.wrhs.org/library/

Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Audiovisual Urban Collections. These collections focus on urban, industrial America with emphasis on the historical evolution of the Detroit metropolitan area during the twentieth century. Of special interest is the role of ethnic minorities in urbanization, including European-, African-, Asian- and Latino-Americans. The urban collections also contain collections from three major newspapers: The Detroit News, The Detroit Times, and the Detroit Free Press, as well as related materials, at http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/AV/avurban.html

Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota. The IHRC collects, preserves, and makes available archival and published resources documenting immigration and ethnicity on a national scope. These materials are particularly rich for ethnic groups that originated in eastern, central, and southern Europe and the Near East -- those who came to this country during the great wave of migration that gained momentum in the 1880s and peaked in the first decades of the 20th century. The IHRC also sponsors academic and public programs and publishes bibliographic and scholarly works, at http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/index.php

Portals to the World: Links to Electronic Resources From Around the World, a web resource produced by the Library of Congress, at http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html

Ethnic Heritage Resources on Other Web Sites, compiled by the National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/heritage/


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