State Spotlight: California

Last Updated on December 16, 2020

California stories from America’s Library

California primary source set with teacher’s guide

California resource guide

Curated collections

• California maps
• Pictorial Americana: selected images of California
• California images
• California books & articles
• California correspondence, reports, printed ephemera & other texts
• California historic newspapers
• California sheet music
• California songs and oral histories
• California legislation
• California Guide to Law Online

Library collections

• California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900
• California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties
• Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar
• Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941

More California primary source collections

• California Folk Music Project
• Gold Discovered in California
• Rock Springs Massacre
• Missions of Old California
• John C. Frémont
• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• San Francisco

Teaching resources related to California

• Featured Source: The Way They Go to California guided primary source analysis
• Learning from the Source: Zooming into Documentary Photography
• Learning from the Source: Media & Migrant Laborer Perspectives

More U.S. state primary source collections