HST 390 - Food in World History: Main Course - Digital Collections

The NALDC offers rich searching, browsing and retrieval of digital materials and collections, and provides reliable, long-term online access to selected publications. NALDC includes historical publications, U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research, and more.

This artificial online collection includes food and cooking related materials from the collections of the State Archives of North Carolina.

The University of Iowa collection includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations (the majority are listed in this index). Dating from the late 19th century to the present, this advertising ephemera reflects the evolution of the modern American diet.

This collection includes five different digital collections: All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing and Costume; Carson Gulley Cookbook Collection; Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison; Playing House: Homemaking for Children; Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime.

A Museum on Main Street, Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition.

HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available.

Many of these publications are from the library's Culinary History Collection They have been scanned by Digital Imaging and are available online as PDF PDF logo files. The average file size is 50 MB and may take some time to download.

Digitized books on cooking, gastronomy, food production, etc

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata — or information describing an item — and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.

Vintage cocktail books from the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spirituex. A museum dedicated to the History of Wines and Spirits.

Located at MichiganState, the Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century.

University of Iowa digital collectoin of handwritten cookbooks, circa 1600s-1960s, documenting culinary history in America and Europe and how tastes have changed over the years

The University of Southern Mississippi project showcasing Mississippi churches, youth groups, teacher-parent associations, and other community groups published over a hundred community cookbooks. The recipes in these cookbooks—each attributed to the person who submitted it—offer complex and often surprising insights into the ways Mississippians ate and how they thought about their hometowns, their state, and even the world.

Containing more than just recipes, these cookbooks provide a look at how food has played a role in campus culture and identity. Whether designed for fundraising or for promotional purposes, they capture a snapshot view of campus organizations of yore and the cultural environment surrounding them.

Cookbooks from the 19th Century

Cookbooks published in the United States from 1800 to 1920

The digitized historical cookbooks in this collection date from the 1700s to the 1900s. Mostly American and British, they contain not only recipes, but also elegant engravings of table settings and cooking paraphernalia, home remedies and cure-all tonics, instructions on managing servants, and more. In short, these gastronomical treasures reveal much about the societies and economic times that created them.

The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.

Little Cookbooks contains thousands of food and cookery related publications produced primarily by companies in the United States from the late nineteenth century up to the present.