Portals to Primary Sources
Don't know where to start? Try one of the following database portals. They allow researchers to search across multiple databases produced by the same publisher.
- Digital Public Library of America (Portal to Library and Archival Collections Across the Web)
- Archive Explorer (Publisher: Adam Matthew)
- Artemis (Publisher: Gale)
- Archive of Americana (Publisher: Readex)
Image, Flicker, Cutty Sark, "question mark"
Oral Histories
American Slavery: A Composite Biography Library of Congress website containing WPA slave narratives.
Books & Periodicals
Top 3 databases:
Not finding what you need? Try these databases:
- Proquest's American Periodicals Series (APS) Historically significant periodicals from the 18th and 19th century.
- EBSCO's American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodical Collection Extensive collection of historical periodicals dating from 1693 to 1865.
- America's Historical Imprints Digital collection of early American imprints, broadsides and ephemera. Based on the American Antiquarian Society's collections. Includes an African American Imprints Series.
- Harper's Weekly, 1857-1912 Contains scanned images of all of the pages of Harper's Weekly together with a series of indexes.
- American Periodicals from CRL Council of Research Libraries Digital collection of trade magazines, labor and trade publications.
- Sabin Americana A fully searchable online collection of books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas, from the time of their discovery to the early 1900s.
- Making of the Modern World (Goldsmiths'-Kress) Digitized version of Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature, the most comprehensive collection for researching the literature of economics and business from 1450 to 1850.
Newspapers
Top 3 databases:
- America's Historical Newspapers Large online collection of historic American newspapers. Part of the Archive of Americana, a collection of various newspaper databases, by Readex.
- Proquest Historical Online database of major 19th and 20th century US newspapers (NYT, AJC, etc.)
- African American Newspapers Online collection of the most extensive African American newspaper archives in the United States—those of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. Also part of the Archive of Americana by Readex.
Not finding what you need? Try these databases:
- Accessible Archives Digital collections of important 19th century African American and Civil War newspapers.
- Chronicling America Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages.
- Nineteenth Century US Newspapers Digital collection of 19th century newspapers from a broad range of urban and rural regions.
- Google News Archive Digitized newspapers crawled from miscellaneous web sources.
- Proquest Civil War Era Online collection of newspapers and pamphlets covering the American Civil War from 1840-1865.
Digital Manuscript Collections
- History Vault: Collection of digitized microfilm. See especially: The Records of Southern Antebellum Plantations
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive Huge collection of primary sources related to slavery and abolition.
- Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 Digital documents and collections covering the period 1490-2007 from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Part I of III available.
- American Civil War Letter and Diaries Online archive of more than 1,000 sources of diaries, letters and memooirs from the Civil War Era.
- Voyages: Tras-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Online database of four centuries of tras-Atlantic slaving voyages.
- Ancestry Library Edition Major source of census and other records of interest to historical, social and genealogical researchers.