Nineteenth Century and Earlier
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EEBO: Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, and the tumult of the English Civil War.
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Early American Imprints, Series I (1639-1800) This link opens in a new window
Basic primary document set for research involving 17th and 18th century American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and foreign affairs. Search by author or keyword in text, title, subject, or publisher. Can also browse by genre, subjects, author, and more. Digitization is ongoing so collection will continue to grow.
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Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) This link opens in a new window
A basic primary document set printed from 1801 to 1819, covering American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and foreign affairs. Search by author or keyword in text, title, subject, or publisher. Also, offers browse by genre, subjects, author, and more. Digitization is an ongoing process, so the collection will continue to expand.
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Civil War Primary Source Documents This link opens in a new window
This collection is presented through the EBSCOhost interface and drawn from the holdings of the New York Historical Society, with over 110,000 pages from such primary sources as letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs and illustrations showing Northern and Southern perspectives.
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American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection This link opens in a new window
EBSCOhost access to digitized primary source documents from the late 17th through early 20th centuries in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection. It includes over 8 million items from several thousand magazines, journals, and other periodical publications from 1684 through 1912, covering "advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, industry and professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more."
You can also choose any of 50 different more focused thematic collections of these periodicals. To combine multiple collections together, after you click through into one, click "Choose Databases" at the top and select additional collections to add to your search set. -
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Digital images, fully text searchable, of 150,000 books printed in the 18th century, primarily in Great Britain. General subject areas include: history and geography, social sciences and fine arts, medicine, science, and technology, language and literature, philosophy and religion, law, and general reference. Includes the complete works of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, Alexander Pope, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Swift. 3 million pages total.
Twentieth Century
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Federal surveillance of African Americans, 1920-198488,021 images of documents from 1920-1984 from the FBI's widespread and persistent investigations of important African-Americans such as Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Marcus Garvey, Jesse Jackson, Elijah Muhammed, and others, as well such groups and incidents as the NAACP, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Mississippi Burning murders, and more.
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JFK's foreign affairs and international crises, 1961-196364,126 images of documents from 1958 to 1964 from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on topics such as the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, Cuba, American relations with Third World countries and Latin America, balance of payments and foreign trade, nuclear weapons and testing, NATO, Southeast Asia and regional security, foreign aid and military assistance, civil defense, hijacking incidents,and the international space race.
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U.S. relations with the Vatican and the Holocaust, 1940-195035,023 images from 1940-1950 of telegrams, despatches, reports, letters, memos, and interviews between the president’s representative to the Vatican and his staff, the State Department, other U.S. government agencies, the Vatican, and the Italian government. Explores such themes U.S.-Vatican relations, the Vatican’s role in World War II, Jewish refugees, Italian anti-Jewish laws during the papacy of Pius XII, and the pope’s personal knowledge of the treatment of European Jews.
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The American Indian Movement and Native American radicalism14,195 images of documents from 1968-1979 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Library detailing the activities of this radical organization founded in Minnesota in 1968.
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Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees : The West's Response to Jewish EmigrationOver 30,000 images from the records of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), organized1938 to address the problem of racial, religious, and political refugees from central Europe. Covers the years 1938-1947.
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Foreign Relations between Latin America and the Caribbean States, 1930-1944105,704 images of pages from the U.S. National Archives coveirng foreign relations interactions between Central American and South American countries and countries in the Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The collection includes cables, memoranda, correspondence, reports and analyzes, and treaties. 1930-1944.
Library of Congress American Memory collections
The Library of Congress has many digitized documents available in collections that can be searched by keyword or browsed by topic, author, time period, geographic area, or document type.
A few particularly notable collections include:
- Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789
- The Thomas Jefferson Papers
- The James Madison Papers
- The Frederick Douglass Papers
- The Abraham Lincoln Papers
- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
- Women's Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911
- The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers
- The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
This is just a small sample of the collections offered there.
Other notable online collections
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Digital Public Library of AmericaMillions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
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The Portal to Texas HistoryDigitized letters, books, archival materials, and newspapers from Texas history. Dozens of collections and thousands of sources.
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The Civil Rights Digital Librarydigitized archival materials "on the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s" in over 140 collections held by 91 entities in the U.S. Many ways to search and to browse.
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The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online"...consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, the HPSSS includes vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions."
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Salem Witch Trials Documentary ArchiveDigitized images of and transcriptions of documents from various sources.
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Bexar Archives Online-- Briscoe Center for American History at UT AustinDocuments the "military, civil, and political life of the Spanish province of Texas from 1717 to 1792" with "over 5,000 original documents (23,000 pages) that have been digitized from microfilm. Researchers may browse, by year, the originals and translations, or compare an original and its translation side-by-side. Full-text searching of the translations is also supported.
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Tejano VoicesOral histories presenting the personal recollections of 173 Tejanos and Tejanas and their struggle against racial discrimination in post-World War II Texas
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Texas Slavery ProjectThe Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850." Has a good amount of primary source texts, database, and maps.
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Full WT guide to web collections of primary sourcesOver 60 publicly available online collections of digitized primary source documents. Collections organized here by place, era, and topic.