History Fair

A project of the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library and Northwestern University, this online version of the award-winning print encyclopedia is a first stop for research into any topic on Chicago's past.

Find encyclopedia articles in a variety of subject areas from more than two hundred reference titles.

Access five resources on specific aspects of history:

• African-American History Online
• American History Online
• American Indian History Online
• Ancient and Medieval History Online
• Modern World History Online

Search all five at once or browse them individually. Each includes articles from reference works, primary sources, biographies, timelines, images, and maps, charts and tables. Recommended for grades six and up.

Articles from general-interest magazines and scholarly journals. Search two separate databases (MasterFILE Complete and OmniFile Full Text Select) covering more than 3,500 publications.

Older issues of more than 2,000 scholarly journals in a wide range of interest areas. Coverage begins with the first issue, but recent issues are not included. Recent issues of some of these journals are available in EBSCO Magazines & Journals.

Full text, including display and classified advertisements, of this nationally significant African American newspaper from 1910 to 2010. (To search for articles in this paper from 2011 to present, use Black Newspapers or Illinois Newsstand.)

Photographs from Chicago Public Library's special collections. View photos of Civil War artifacts, Millennium Park's construction, Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago neighborhoods. Search the Chicago Examiner newspaper and playbills from Chicago's early theaters.

Full text of the Chicago Tribune, including classified and display advertisements, from 1849 to 2015.

Full text of more than 4,000 U.S. newspapers from 1756 to 1963. Chicago-area papers are The Broad Ax, an African American newspaper digitized from 1895 to 1927; The Day Book, E.W. Scripps' experiment in advertisement-free newspaper publishing digitized from 1911 to 1917 and The Chicago Eagle, a publication with a strong focus on municipal political affairs digitized from 1889 to 1922.

Find digital photographs, maps, oral histories, personal letters and more from libraries, archives and museums across the United States.

Locate archival collections and digital images from archives and libraries with Chicago history collections.