feel free to fork this, and contribute more resources as you find them
Here are some useful starting points, datasets that have already been collected, via Jason Heppler and Lincoln Mullen and Ian Milligan (protip: find the digital historians working in your area of interest, and see what they've put up on their blogs & open notebooks!). I've added some entries; feel free to fork this document and add more!
- National Historical GIS: “tabular U.S. census data and GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present.” link
- IPUMS-International: “harmonized data for 1960 forward, covering 560 million people in 258 censuses from around the world.” link
- IPUMS-USA: “Harmonized data on people in the U.S. census and American Community Survey, from 1850 to the present.” link
- IPUMS-CPS: “Harmonized data on people in the Current Population Survey, every March from 1962 to the present.” link
- North Atlantic Population Project: “Complete-count data from 1800s censuses of Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the U.S.”link
- Hathi Trust Digital Library data and APIs for digitized books and serials. link See also the features extracts.
- Digital Public Library of America API. link
- Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, 1789-present. link
- International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set: contains ships logs. link
- Historical Census Populations of Counties and Incorporated Cities in California, 1850–2010.link
- Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset.link
- Geonames: the GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge. link
- Project Gutenburg has plain-text versions of many public domain books. link
- Project GITenberg has many of the same book available via Git. link
- Canadiana Discovery Portal link
- Archaeology Data Service link
- History of the Federal Electoral Ridings, 1867-2010
- Soldiers of the First World War
- Birth registrations in Ontario (by location), 1912-2010
- Ontario top baby names (male), 1917-2010
- Ontario top baby names (female), 1917-2010
- Marriage registrations in Ontario (by location), 1927-2010
- Google Books Advanced Search
- Internet Archive Advanced Search
- Hathi Trust Advanced Search
- Latin texts on Internet Archive <- you'd feed this into wget a la exercise 4 to grab all this material
- The Digital Public Library of America is an amazing resource, a resource of resources. Here's a quick R script to query that API