Civil Rights Revolution and the Law

For a book to be legally digitized and to be publicly available online, either the holder of the copyright has to give permission for the digitization, or the book needs to be in the public domain. In the U.S., books in the public domain are usually those that were published prior to 1923, although under certain limited conditions later works may also be in the public domain. Books that are freely available online will be those that are in the public domain.

Hathi Trust

A shared digital repository with over 17 million full-text digitized volumes, almost 7 million of which are in the public domain.

Google Books

Google has partnered with a number of universities to scan the full-text of public domain books in the university library collections. In addtion to the full-text of the books in the public domain, for many titles Google allows you to view snippets or selected pages from books still under copyright.

Internet Archive

Search the "Texts" files for specific titles or books on particular subjects.