| Certain databases, listed as on-site access only are only accessible at the George Washington Presidential Library. Those listed as "Open Access" are available anywhere in the world. Please use the contact button to send in your research inquiry, or to request a research appointment. | Contact the library |
| Database | Description | Access |
|---|---|---|
| American Archives, Documents of the American Revolutionary Period | Northern Illinois University Library collection of digitized documents covering a wide range of aspects concerning the American Revolution from military operations to ideological arguments and minority experiences. | Open Access |
| American Founding Era Rotunda Collection | Published through the University of Virginia Press, Rotunda's American Founding Era Collection contains the papers of John and Abigail Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Dolley Madison, James Madison, John Marshall, the Diaries of Gouverneur Morris, the Pinckney-Statesman Papers, Eliza Lucas and Harriott Pinckney papers, and the Papers of George Washington. | On-site access only |
| American History, 1493-1945 (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History) | Over 50,000 primary source documents, including correspondence, diaries, government documents, business records, books, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, photographs, artwork and maps. Manuscripts about and by Tobias Lear, George Washington, and Martha Washington are especially useful in this collection. | On-site access only |
| America's Historical Imprints | Searchable books, pamphlets, broadsides and other scarce printed material of American history, literature, culture and daily life. (1639-1819). | On-site access only |
| America's Historical Newspapers | Searchable American newspapers from two series: American newspapers 1690-1900 and Caribbean newspapers 1718-1876. | On-site access only |
| American Revolutionary Geographies Online | In American Revolutionary Geographies Online (ARGO), discover the stories, spaces, and people of the American Revolutionary War era through maps, interpretive essays, and interactives. | Open Access |
| Ancestry Library | Ancestry Library Edition contains census data, vital records, directories, photos, and more. Inside the more than 7,000 available databases from North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. | On-site access only |
| ARTstor | Search and browse the over 1.5 million images in the ARTstor Digital Library. A useful database for visual and decorative arts. | On-site access only |
| The Chicago Manual of Style | Completely searchable full contents of the 16th and 15th editions. Provides recommendations on editorial style and publishing practices compatible with the needs of the digital age. | On-site access only |
| Dance Figures Index: American Country Dances, 1730-1810 | This database is a is a guide to the basic figures in all American printed and manuscript longways country dances in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources. It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| Dance Figures Index: English Country Dances, 1650-1833 | This database is a guide to the basic figures in major English printed longways country dances in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century sources. It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| Database of Mount Vernon's Enslaved Community | Use this database to learn about the lives of the enslaved community at Mount Vernon. | Open Access |
| Dolley Madison Digital Edition | A work in progress to be the first-ever complete edition of all of Dolley Payne Madison’s known correspondence. As of January 2015 it is complete through 1845, with a total of 2035 documents. Transcribed letters are easily searchable by topic, date, location, or content. | On-site access only |
| Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources, 1589-1839: An Index | This is a series of indexes derived from a data base of musical information compiled from primary sources covering the 250 years of the initial exploration and settlement of the United States. It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| Early American Songsters, 1734-1820: An Index | This database is an index of all of known songsters currently available based on Irving Lowens' Bibliography of Songster Printed in America Before 1821 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1976). It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| Early English Books Online | Database of English language works published from 1473-1700. | On-site access only |
| Eighteenth Century Collections Online | Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains more than 180,000 titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800. The majority of significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas included. | On-site access only |
| Financial Papers of George Washington | The George Washington Financial Papers Project (GWFPP) is an innovative digital documentary editing project that makes GW's business and household accounts freely accessible in a digital edition using an open-source editorial platform. | Open Access |
| Fold3 | This database contains significant amounts of military history material from the U.S. National Archives and War Department. Invaluable for researching military service records, unit histories, pension claims, and prize claims. | On-site access only |
| Founders Online | This database contains manuscript material related to George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. | Open Access |
| George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress | The George Washington Papers collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress constitute the largest collection of original Washington papers in the world. It consists of approximately 77,000 items accumulated by Washington between 1745 and 1799, including correspondence, diaries, and financial and military records. This database has the nearly complete collection scanned and available for free. | Open Access |
| George Washington LibraryThing Inventory | Using the transcription of George Washington's probate inventory and other sources, this database includes the titles in George Washington's library, and their current location (if known). | Open Access |
| Hathi Trust | Partnership of research institutions and libraries that makes available in a digital format public domain books and pamphlets within their collections. | Open Access |
| House and Senate Journals, Series I, 1789-1817 | This collection contains the Journals of the House of Representatives and Senate 1789 to 1817, covering the first 14 Congresses of the United States. | On-site access only |
| Internet Archive | Digital multimedia collection of public domain works. Includes copies of print works, video, and audio resources. Also allows limited exploration of archived websites from around the Internet. | Open Access |
| Invaluable | The world’s largest online auction marketplace of fine and decorative arts, antiques, collectibles, and estate sales. Useful for material culture research. | On-site access only |
| Journal of Architectural Conservation | Features policy, practice and science papers on historic buildings, monuments and places. Includes recent case studies and construction techniques. 1995-present | On-site access only |
| Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts | This journal provides scholarly research that highlights pre-1860 decorative arts in the Southern United States. | On-site access only |
| JSTOR | JSTOR digitizes millions of pages of scholarly journals for searchable access. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, The William and Mary Quarterly, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and The Journal of American Studies are especially useful. | On-site access only |
| Maryland Gazette | Digitized issues of the Maryland Gazette, hosted by the Maryland State Archives. The Maryland State Archives owns two microfilm collections containing images of the Maryland Gazette Collection from 1745-1839. | Open Access |
| Mount Vernon Museum Collections | The Museum collection includes paintings, prints, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, metals, glass, textiles, tools, clothing, and personal accessories owned by or related to George and Martha Washington and their family, as well as period pieces similar to original Mount Vernon objects. | Open Access |
| Naval Documents of the American Revolution | A growing collection of correspondence and other documents related to the naval aspect of the American Revolution. | Open Access |
| O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law, & Family | This site documents the challenge to slavery and the quest for freedom in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing freedom suits filed between 1800 and 1862, as well as tracing the multigenerational family networks they reveal. | Open Access |
| Oxford American National Biography Online | The Oxford American National Biography online database explores the individuals that have shaped the history of the United States. | On-site access only |
| Oxford Dictionary of National Biography | The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography explores the individuals that have shaped the history of the British Isles. | On-site access only |
| Oxford English Dictionary | An unsurpassed guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world. | On-site access only |
| Prices4Antiques | Prices4Antiques is a database of auction sales and contains descriptions and photographs of the items. Useful for researching material culture topics. | On-site access only |
| Project Muse | Database of digitized books and academic journals exploring a wide range of humanities topics. | On-site access only |
| Readex AllSearch | This weblink allows researchers to search across three of Readex’s databases, America's Historical Imprints, America's Historical Newspapers, and House and Senate Journals, Series I. | On-site access only |
| Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive | This historical archive encourages the scholarly study of slavery in a comprehensive, conceptual and global way. Explore 1.9 million cross-searchable pages: 7289 books, 79 serials, 16 manuscript collections, 377 Supreme Court records and briefs and 194 reference articles from Macmillan, Charles Scribner's Sons and Gale encyclopedias. | On-site access only |
| The Correspondence of Baron de Vioménil | The Correspondence of Baron de Vioménil Project is part of an effort at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon to transcribe and translate the manuscript papers of Vioménil, a French officer who served during the American War for Independence. It has been generously funded by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. | Open Access |
| The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium | This digital publication is a compilation of all of the dances, tunes and songs contained in The Dancing Master, from 1651–1728. It includes indexes for all of the editions, and a graphic image for each "unique" dance, with its printed music and dance instructions, 186 tunes without dances and three songs. It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| The Papers of Bushrod Washington | The Papers of Bushrod Washington is a digital documentary editing project focused on the personal papers of George Washington's nephew, Bushrod Washington. The digital edition includes documents scattered worldwide and thus largely unknown or overlooked in the scholarship of the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum eras. | Open Access |
| The Performing Arts in Early American Newspapers, 1690-1783 | This publication fills a major gap in access to eighteenth-century American sources for research in the performing arts and related humanities fields. It includes all references to music, poetry (lyrics), dance, and theatre in American newspapers, from the 1690-1783. It is hosted by the Country Dance and Song Library. | Open Access |
| The Revolutionary City | Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation's Founding is a one-stop-shop for students, teachers, scholars, and lovers of history to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America's revolutionary city, Philadelphia. | Open Access |
| Virginia Gazette | Digitized issues of the Virginia Gazette begin with William Parks' earliest known issue (September 10, 1736) and terminate with Clarkson & Davis' last issue printed in Williamsburg (December 9, 1780), hosted through Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. | Open Access |
| Worlds of Change | Worlds of Change, is a collection of more than 700,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America. This material was digitized as part of a multi-year project, formerly known as Colonial North America at Harvard Library. | Open Access |