Library of Congress Digital Collections
Internet Modern History Sourcebook and other Internet History Project Sourcebooks
"A (huge) collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly for educational use"
Includes sections on:
Colonial North America | American Independence |
US Civil War | US Immigration | 19th Century U.S | US Power | US Society and more
Internet Archive
Aims to offer "permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars...to historical collections that exist in digital format"
A collection of important civil war primary resources from College and Research Library News
American Folklife Center from the Library of Congress
Army Heritage Collections Online, from the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC)
Civil Rights History Project, an archive of oral histories and more from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian
Digital Archives from BlackPast.org (an online reference guide to African American history)
Documenting the American South: Oral Histories of the American South
eHistory: Center for Virtual History from the University of Georgia. Includes these projects: Pox Americana, IndianNation, CSI Dixie, Born Unfree, Common Tongues, Invasion of America
Fold3
Online access to US military records, "including the stories, photos, and personal documents of the men and women who served."
Founders Online, from the National Archives and Records Administration and the University of Virginia Press. Digital collection of primary source documents from the most prominent figures in early American history.
History Matters: Many Pasts
Over 1000 documents, annotated
Immigration History Research Center
From the University of Minnesota
Labor Archives
From the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. " Archival, print, photograph, film, and oral history collections describe the history of the labor movement and how it related to the broader struggle for economic, social, and political change."
Making of America
Includes, for example, these digitized Civil War documents
Mike Wallace Interview, from the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Digitized audio and film from the nationally televised interview program, 1957-1960
New York Heritage Digital Collections
NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online.
"A scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first." Aggregating over 990,000 peer‑reviewed digital objects from over 115 federated sites.
Our Americas Archive Partnership
Documents on the history of the Americas from a hemispheric perspective
Slavery and Abolition in the United States: Select Publications of the 1800s
The Valley of the Shadow (Civil War documents)
Virginia Center for Digital History
Links to several American History digital collections
Women in the Civil War (links to several collections)
Sets of links to digitized material
American Colonists' Library "Primary Source Documents Pertaining to Early American History"
U.S. History: Primary Source Collections Online from Sam Huston State University Library
Digitized African American History Sources
State Digital Resources: "Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections" from all the U.S. states
U.S. and Foreign Policy from the Council on Foreign Relations
Links to many documents
Research Using Primary Sources
from the University of Maryland Libraries
or Primary Sources at Yale: What are Primary Sources
(describes different kinds of primary sources)
These guides and tutorials are targeted at students from those universities, so some of the resources described will not be available to you. However, there is a lot of useful information in each about primary sources in general.
(personal narrative* or corresponden* or diar* or interview* or oral or eyewitness or letter* or document*)
and "civil war" and Vermont
(The * substitutes for whatever letters that might come next, so that the search includes any words that start with what's typed but might end differently. For example, diar* catches diary and diaries and diarist. Different catalogs use different symbols for this.)
Early American Imprints, 1639-1800
Shelved under the stairs
Poole's Index to Periodical Literature 1802-1907
REF 050.011 P785
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature 1890-2010
REF 050.011 R227
New York Times Index 1851-
REF 070.172 N42
Essay and General Literature Index 1900-
REF 800.011 Es73
Historical Abstracts 1955-1984
REF 900.016 H629
America, History and Life 1964-1982
REF 970.011 Am35
the evidence of history, first-hand accounts of an event or period of time created by participants or observers.
diaries, letters, news reports, interviews, recordings, photographs, etc.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
From the Library of Congress. Includes a newspaper title directory and over one million pages published between 1789 and 1922.
Make an account (through Castleton) for full access to the New York Times online.
|
After you do an initial search, you can specify a date or date range Or go directly to this search page. |
|
New York Times Historical
Full-text of the New York Times 1851-three years previous. PDF page images. Searchable by date, keyword, article type.
The New York Times is also available on microfilm dating back to 1851 in the Castleton library.
Instructions for viewing a particular date, and page 1 for that date, are available:
Early American Imprints, 1639-1800
|
How to use it: Includes a 13 volume paper index to what is included in each year. A 14th volume is an author and title index. Find the number of an item of interest. Find the microfiche with the corresponding number. Ask for help with the microfiche reader/printer. Located under the stairs in the library. |
|
ArchiveGrid from OCLC
Search multiple archives at once
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections from the Library of Congress
National Archives Catalog from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Find text, audio and video of speeches at
Follow the link to Site Search on the left to search for a topic.
Collections of speeches in ebooks
Notice the parentheses around the or phrase and the truncation
child* and (television or TV or television viewing) and violen*
See a guide to primary sources in Canadian history from Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.
Also see the
Primary Sources tab
on the World History Subject Guide.
After you click on a topic or do search, click on
Finding Historical Primary Sources
from UC Berkeley's library
American History Primary Source
from University of Washington's library
Digitized Primary American History Sources
from the University of Northern Iowa
Try searching Google with the term "digitized" in addition to your search terms.
GoogleBooks permits searching the full content of some books. Books in the public domain (not copyright protected) are available full-text online, including many primary source documents.
Also see the Wikipedia entry on your topic. Look at the External links at the bottom for links to primary sources.
Worldcat is a very large union catalog that includes the holdings of most U.S. academic libraries. For primary sources, in “Advanced Search,” you can limit “Format” to “archival material.”
American Decades Primary Sources
"Cross-disciplinary source spanning the 20th century. Each volume in the set includes full or excerpted primary sources representing the seminal issues, themes, movements and events from a decade. Includes oral histories, songs, speeches, advertisements, TV, play and movie scripts, letters, laws, legal decisions, newspaper articles, cartoons, recipes, and more."
Congress Investigates: A Critical and Documentary History
REF 328.7307452 C76
America's Founding Charters: Primary Documents of Colonial and Revolutionary Era Governance
REF 342.7300903 Am35
The American Republic: Primary Sources
REF 973 Am356
Documents of American History
REF 973 C735d9
America's Struggle with Empire: A Documentary History
REF 973 K155a
Milestone Documents in American History
REF 973 M598 (4 volumes) and online
100 Key Documents in American Democracy
REF 973 On2
Dictionary of American History, Volume 9, Archival Maps and Primary Sources
REF 973.03 D561
Encyclopedia of American Historical Documents
REF 973.03 En1935
Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, Volume 6, Primary Source Documents
Call Number: REF 973.0496073 En193 and online
Annals of America
(22 volumes of U.S. documentary history)
REF 973.08 An72
The American Nation: Primary Sources
REF 973.7 Am35
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, Volume 5, Documents
Avalon Project at the Yale Law School-American History: A Documentary Record. 1492-1973
Founders Early Access, from the University of Virginia Press is an effort to make early American documents available to the public before these documents have been edited and published. Documents included come from the six continuing Founding Fathers projects: the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, the Adams family, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
Primary Documents in American History from the Library of Congress
Some historical societies' catalogs, finding aids and digitized documents are online.
Here are links to some local and state historical societies:
Vermont Historical Society (Barre, VT) offers its catalog online.
AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials
A digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s from Duke University Libraries.
