The Making of America (MOA) Cornell University

Free:

The Making of America,

Cornell University.

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/index.html

This is one place that you should start searching first because I do not think that it gets indexed by Google bots and you just might find a goldmine of background or specific information about a subject, location or a person that you are researching.

From their website description: The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

In the search box I entered the term “Civil War” and checked “search books only” and came up with 784 matches in 206 reference titles. Using the same seach term and looking at both “Journals and Books,” there are 10,755 matches in 6,271 titles.

There are many thousands of titles available in full electronic format. Here are some exciting ones I use often: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894 - 1922)
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880 - 1901)

You can limit the range of dates that you are interested in also.
Check out the list of titles, it’s staggering.

Dick Hillenbrand
Upstate New York Genealogy
www.unyg.com