From early topographical sketches and pioneers’ accounts, to photographs of Buffalo Bill and his ‘Wild West’ stars, explore the fact and the fiction of westward expansion in America from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Browse a wide range of rare and original documents including printed books, journals, historic maps, broadsides, periodicals, advertisements, photographs, artwork and more.

Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of sharecroppers and spent eighteen years of her adult life as a sharecropper and timekeeper on the Dee Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She was fired in 1962 because of her attempt to register to vote. The following year she became a registered voter and also became the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was instrumental in starting the Delta Ministry, and she was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She led a delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964. She became chairman of the board of the Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center founded in Ruleville, Mississippi, in 1970, by the National Council of Negro Women. She also served as a member of the board of the Sunflower County Day Care Center and Family Service Center and on the policy council of the National Women's Political Party of Mississippi. This collection comprises correspondence plus financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items.