American Indian Histories and Cultures is a collection of digitized material from the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library, focusing on material relating to American Indian history in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Document types, digitized in full colour, include:
- An extensive collection of manuscripts ranging from the early 16th to the mid-20th centuries
- A striking collection of artwork including rare American Indian ledger art
- Speeches and petitions written by American Indians
- Diaries, essays, travel journals and ledger books from early European expeditions
- Correspondence, notes and minutes relating to important treaties
- Early linguistic studies and ethnographic accounts of American Indian life
- Thousands of photographs
- Historic maps and atlases
- Rare printed books
- American Indian newspapers from the 1960s-1990s
American Indian Histories and Cultures is fully cross-searchable with the American West collection, another collection on Western Americana sourced from the Newberry Library’s prestigious Everett D. Graff Collection.