Digital Public Library of America

Discover 51,911,756 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States

DPLA provides free digital access to banned books

DPLA has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that all readers have access to the books they want to read. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers nationwide via the free Palace e-reader app.

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Online Exhibitions

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Race to the Moon

A History of US Public Libraries

Building the First Transcontinental Railroad

From Colonialism to Tourism: Maps in American Culture

Primary Source Sets

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights Movement in Rural Mississippi

Second Ku Klux Klan and The Birth of a Nation

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

The Equal Rights Amendment

How can I use DPLA?

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Education

Educators and students explore our Primary Source Sets to discover history and culture through primary sources and ideas for classroom use.

Family Research

Genealogists use our search tools to find free materials for their family history research projects.

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Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learners enjoy browsing by topic and viewing Online Exhibitions to learn more about their interests.

Scholarly Research

Scholarly researchers use DPLA to find open access sources from archives across the country through a single portal.

If you’re new to DPLA, these research guides will give you a head start using our site. The guides reflect a few key activities that attract visitors to DPLA, but you can explore many other interests here too.

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DPLA News

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🥂 So Much Accomplished, So Much More to Come
December 20, 2024
A Year-End Note from the Staff of DPLA Here at DPLA, we are capping off an eventful 2024 and looking forward to an even more momentous year to come. We’re…
An Update on the Future of Our Cultural Heritage Work
October 31, 2024
Very soon, DPLA will announce the new home of our cultural heritage program, and so we wanted to take a moment to get you up to speed on our progress.…
AI & Public Libraries: An Overview
October 8, 2024
This is a guest post by Ben Lee, Assistant Professor, University of Washington Information School. In the context of public libraries, artificial intelligence (AI) has elicited a wide spectrum of…