Primary Source Websites for pre-20th Century U.S. History
(for use in classes of Dr. H. Paul Thompson, Jr.)
Portals:
These sites contain links to other sites with primary sources. You will need to spend some time looking around in these.
History Matters: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/
Internet Modern History Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook07.html
American Social History Online: www.dlfaquifer.org
Civil Rights Digital Library: http://crdl.usg.edu/
Digital Schomburg – The Black World: Research Tools:
http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/64/node/62877#17-19c
Virginia Center for Digital History: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/index.php?page=Projects
Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/
Digitized items from archives across the nation. Includes many out of copyright published items.
AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History: http://www.vlib.us/amdocs/
Online newspaper sites:
South Carolina Digital Newspaper Program: http://library.sc.edu/digital/newspaper/
Currently includes over 103,000 pages from 19 SC newspapers between 1860 and 1922.
Chronicling America: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Digitized American newspapers from 1860-1922
Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/atlnewspapers
14 Atlanta newspapers from 1847 to 1922.
Monroe County (NY) Public Library: http://www3.libraryweb.org/lh.aspx?id=1360
24 digitized newspapers from the Rochester, NY region, including some African American papers.
Portals which contain links to newspaper sites:
Links to free, full-text, online Historical Newspapers and Magazines:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ellengarvey/rsapresource1.html
Websites of digitized newspapers grouped by state (UPenn):
http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/guides/hist/onlinenewspapers.html
Sites Containing Digitized American History Documents:
South Carolina Digital Library: http://www.scmemory.org/index.php
Digitized items from various state affiliated archives and libraries.
Low Country Digital Library: http://lowcountrydigital.library.cofc.edu/
Contains a variety of materials from low country libraries, archives, and museums.
Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/
A Chronology of U.S. Historical Documents: http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/
Documenting the American South: http://docsouth.unc.edu/
American Journeys: http://www.americanjourneys.org/
Documents relating to the exploration of North America and colonial era.
Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/index.html
American Memory Digital Collection: http://memory.loc.gov
Abraham Lincoln Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: http://www.gilderlehrman.org
Click on “Historic Documents” to search
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition: http://www.yale.edu/glc
Click on “Scholars,” then “document library,” to search over 200 documents related to slavery.
Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org
Over 33,000 digitized books whose copyrights have expired.
Founders Online: http://founders.archive.gov
The papers of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that are held by the
National Archives.
Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, Wilson Special Collection Library
http://dc.lib.unc.edu/ead/archivalhome.php?CISOROOT=/ead
Digitized diaries, business records, letters, and photographs from 90 collections held by the library relating to southern history,
specializing in African American life and race relations from the 18th through the middle of the 20th centuries.
Black Past: www.blackpast.org
A huge collection of primary sources relating to African American history.
Booker T. Washington Papers: http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/index.html
Documenting the American South: http://docsouth.unc.edu/
Making of America (Cornell): http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/
This site contains 23 different 19th century magazines.
Making of America (Michigan): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/
This site contains many digitized 19th century books.
New York Historical Society: https://www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections/
A collection of 14 manuscript collections relating to slavery in New York, including diaries, account books, bills of sale, indentures,
etc.
Densho: www.densho.org
WW II-era oral interviews
Telling stories: www.tellingstories.org
WW II-era oral interviews
Our Documents: www.ourdocuments.gov
Contains 100 “milestone” documents relating to U.S. history.
American Slavery Debate: In the Context of Atlantic History: http://atlanticslaverydebate.berkeley.edu
Documents relating to foreign influences on the United States debate over slavery. Also includes helpful bibliographies of secondary sources.
Black Abolitionist Digital Archive: http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa/
800 speeches and 1000 editorials by black abolitionists
Family Tales: www.familytales.org
Contains many letters from famous historical figures that are now in the public domain. Searchable by name, year, and places.
Consource: www.consource.org
Contains an extensive amount of primary sources relating to the writing of the U.S. constitution.
The Founder’s Constitution: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/
Many primary sources related to the discussions about writing the constitution.
Boston Public Library: http://www.bpl.org
Click on “online collections” tab and you will be able to search digitized items from their Anti-Slavery collection and over 1,000
items from John Adams’ personal library.
19th Century School textbooks: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/n/nietz/
This site contains the full text of 140 textbooks from the Nietz Old Textbook Collection
Massachusetts Historical Society Online: http://www.masshist.org/online/
Adams Family Papers, papers of Thomas Jefferson, documents on African Americans and slavery.
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition (Brown U.): http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/about.html
Communism & Radicalism in 20th c U.S. (Weisbord Archives): http://www.weisbord.org/
Contains Communist magazine Class Struggle for 1931-37
American Civil War Resources @ VA Tech: http://spec.lib.vt.edu/civwar/
Gerrit Smith Broadside & Pamphlet Collection: http://library.syr.edu/digital/collections/g/GerritSmith/
The correspondence of a man deeply involved with temperance, abolition, and other antebellum reforms.
SC Dept of Archives & History: http://archives.sc.gov/digital.htm
A limited collection of official legal records pertaining to the state.
Elizabeth C. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project: http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/index.html
Contains 14 documents (or excerpts thereof) from the published writings of these two major women’s rights reformers.
The Complete Works of Jonathan Edwards: http://edwards.yale.edu/
The Crisis: see Google Books website
The original publication of the NAACP. Originally edited by W.E.B. DuBois, it has great information about black life beginning in
the early 20th century on such issues as lynching. (1911-2008)
WPA Slave Narratives: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
Interviews done with thousands of former slaves between 1936 and 1938.
Black Loyalists: http://www.blackloyalist.info
This website includes information on the blacks who escaped America with the British following the American Revolution.
19th Century American Children’s Literature: http://merrycoz.org/kids.htm
Excerpts from 19th century childrens’ books and magazines. There are also plenty of secondary sources included.
New Nation Votes: http://elections.lib.tufts.edu/aas_portal/index.xq
A searchable database of election returns between 1787 and 1825.
The Archive of Early American Images:
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/pages/ea_hmpg.html
A searchable database of images printed or created between 1492 and 1825.
The Jesuit Relations: http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/
The full English translation of the annual reports of colonial era French Jesuit missionaries in Canada.
The Geography of Slavery in Virginia: www.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos
An Archive of over 4,000 fugitive slave advertisements from Virginia & Maryland from 1736 to 1803.
An American Time Capsule: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/
Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Political Ephemera.
Atlantic Slave Trade: www.slavevoyages.org
Contains details on almost 35,000 separate slave ship voyages.
Virtual Jamestown: http://www.virtualjamestown.org/
This site has some primary sources on labor and life in Jamestown & some secondary source essays.
Gunston Hall Plantation Probate Inventory Dtbs: http://www.gunstonhall.org/library/probate/index.htm
325 Virginia and Maryland probate records
Freedom’s Journal: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/
The nation’s first black owned and edited newspaper (1827-1829)
Signal of Liberty: http://signalofliberty.aadl.org/node/19778
The editors of this Michigan newspaper interviewed self-emancipated men and women, hoping to arouse sympathy for abolitionism. The events and
movements described in the Signal of Liberty help us understand the issues that led people to resist slavery, change their churches and political parties,
and fight for freedom. (1841-1848)
Afro Black History Archives: http://www.afro.com/afroblackhistoryarchives/
Contains digitized copies of the following papers as far back as 1902: Baltimore Afro-American, Washington Afro-American, AfroAmerican Ledger, The Afro-American National.
The Citizen’s Council: http://www.citizenscouncils.com/
The newspaper of Mississippi’s white supremacist Citizen’s Council between 1955 and 1961.
Southern Worker: http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/index.htm
A publication of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Published 1931-34
Indian Pioneer Papers: http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/indianpp
Contains typescripts of interviews done in the 1930s with thousands of Oklahomans regarding the settlement of Oklahoma and the Indian Territories.
Native American Manuscripts: http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/homeNAM.php
Digitized manuscript collections relating to the history of the five “civilized tribes” and the Cheyenne and Arapaho and others.
New Netherland Institute: http://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/research/online-publications/
Contains translated documents related to the Dutch settlement of New Netherlands (New York)
Hughes Main Public Library Downtown – Local History Room
There is a significant collection of South Carolina newspapers from several cities on microfilm.
Some examples are:
Charleston Times (1800-21)
Charleston Daily Courier (1803-73)
Greenville News (1900 - present)
There are also several other Greenville newspapers going back to 1826
There are also hard copies of regional peer-reviewed journals not owned by NGU:
Georgia Historical Quarterly (1955 – present)
Journal of Southern History (1952 – present)
North Carolina Historical Review (1988 – present)
South Carolina Historical Magazine (1900- present)