History Day - Government Information Resources

Learn more about California state history, fun facts, and other important information.

Calisphere provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over two million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.

The collections in Calisphere have been digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.

The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 300 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.

This resource provides listings by county of buildings, structures, sites, or places that have been determined to have statewide historical significance.

An extensive database of local government documents across the state; if a document is not online, a scanned copy is hosted by the Berkeley IGS. Includes access to local municipal codes and charters, searchable by city; documents related to land use and development issues, searchable by jurisdiction, type of planning document and year (at both county and city level); and budgets and financial reports for Bay Area cities, county budgets and annual financial reports, and annual reports from county grand juries, all searchable by keyword. A tremendous resource.

A collection of over 200,000 images in the form of slides, negatives and photographic prints, with an additional 150,000 images transferred from various sources. The collections cover a broad range of California subjects including the history of the California State Park System, California's cultural and natural history, recreation, transportation, mining, geology, architecture, agriculture, plants and animals. As of 2014, over 109,000 images have been cataloged as part of the Department’s ongoing conservation efforts. This database currently exists as .pdf files. The files include indexes by park name, subject, the names of fungi, plants and animals, and even an index of campfire songs.

The Gladding McBean Company manufactured decorative terra cotta architectural elements at its factory in Lincoln, California from 1888 to 1966. This database is an index to over 6,500 of their job files, searchable by location, the building name, and the architect.

A gallery containing portraits, biographies, and inaugural addresses for each of our governors.

An exhibition of digital documents and images concerning Fascist activities around Los Angeles before and during World War II. Searchable by keyword.

One of the world's largest digital collections of guitar sheet music. Also included are correspondence, periodicals, and discographies of the thousands of obscure records in the collection, available at the Oviatt Library. Searchable by keyword.

A wonderful group of special digital collections related to Latino history in Los Angeles, including the papers of Rodolfo Acuña, the Community Service Organization (CSO), Culture Clash, the Mothers of East Los Angeles (Madres del Este de Los Angeles), and the Supreme Council of the Mexican American Movement. Searchable by keyword.

The California State Archives collection is composed of records from California state agencies, the governor's office, the state legislature, the State Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal, organized under the name of the agency or office that transferred the records to the Archives. The collections also include some private papers that have been donated to the Archives. Minerva provides access to summary descriptions of the California State Archives. Within more than 300 million items in the collection are documents from the state's first constitutional convention in 1849, land grant records of the Spanish and Mexican eras, campaign contribution statements, State Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal case files, legislative committee files, original laws, papers of many of the state's leading politicians, and large collections of photographs, maps, drawings, and audio/visual materials.

A searchable database of over a million folk remedies, collected from individuals and books since the 1940s. The remedies are searchable by keywords, condition, belief, method of treatment, gender, age and ethnicity of the informant, place, date and region collected, place or region of origin, and the citation name. '''This database is often offline.'''

Searches the online catalogue of most UC Berkeley Libraries, including subject libraries, the Pacific Film Archive, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Mark Twain Papers, the Center for Tebtunis Papyri, and the UC Archives.

An image database of significant documents, manuscripts, photographs and related graphic materials from public and private collections in the San Fernando Valley. Searchable by topic and keyword.

Established in 1982, the TV Archive preserves over 4000 hours of newsfilm, documentaries and other programs produced locally in the Bay Area and Northern California between 1939-2005. It is part of Leonard Library’s Department of Special Collections.