Military Studies Research Guide: Primary Sources

The wide range of material included in Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America presents a unique insight into interactions between Indigenous Peoples in North America and European colonists from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid- to late-twentieth century. This resource contains material from the Newberry Library’s extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection; one of the strongest archival collections on histories of Indigenous Peoples in North America in the world.

Document types, digitized in full color, include:
-An extensive collection of manuscripts ranging from the early 16th to the mid-20th centuries
-A striking collection of artwork including rare ledger art
-Speeches and petitions
-Diaries, essays, travel journals and ledger -books from early European expeditions
-Correspondence, notes and minutes relating to important treaties
-Early linguistic studies and ethnographic accounts of life
-Thousands of photographs
-Historic maps and atlases
-Rare printed books
-newspapers from the 1960s-1990s

This rich selection of primary sources covers such important themes as:
- Indigenous Peoples and the European Powers
-Indigenous Peoples and the US Government
-Military Encounters: Conflicts, Rebellions and Alliances
-Observation, Representation and Cultural Encounters
-Indigenous Peoples of Mexico
-First Nations of Canada
-Missionaries and Education
-Trade and Indian Economies
-Civil Rights Movement

*spans more than 400 years of personal writings, bringing together the voices of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales
*lets researchers view history in the context of women’s thoughts – their struggles, achievements, passions, pursuits, and desires
*includes approximately 100,000 pages of material assembled from numerous bibliographies and from newly conducted research

The files in this collection extend from the 1830s to the 1960s

Nature of the material:-
Profiles of leading political, military, diplomatic and economic figures
-Incoming and outgoing diplomatic dispatches
-Correspondence
-Statistical charts and tables
-Descriptions of leading personalities
-Accounts of tours
-Minutes of meetings and conferences
-Texts of treaties
-Political summaries
-Economic analyses
-Annual reports and calendars of events, by country
-Maps

Topics covered include slavery and the slave trade, immigration, relations with indigenous peoples, wars and territorial disputes, the fall of the Brazilian monarchy, British business and financial interests, industrial development, the building of the Panama Canal, and the rise to power of populist rulers such as Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil.

*contains 26 million pages of text from more than 136,000 titles (155,000 volumes)

*contains Canonical titles of the period as well as contemporary works that analyze and debate those titles

*contains materials ranging from books and directories to Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements

*contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America

*Date range for publications is 1473-1700.

*includes prayer books, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, calendars, and many other primary resources

*Subjects covered include English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

*comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750

*derived from the seminal reference work European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750.

*wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery

Deep and broad in its coverage, this collection incorporates anti-Semitic propaganda, correspondence from prisoners, documents from resistance groups, bank records from Nazi financiers, eyewitness accounts from concentration camps, and much more.

APSU has access to the Holocaust studies bundle within Archives Unbound. Deep and broad in its coverage, this collection incorporates anti-Semitic propaganda, correspondence from prisoners, documents from resistance groups, bank records from Nazi financiers, eyewitness accounts from concentration camps, and much more.

Available collections include:
*Correspondence from German Concentration Camps and Prisons
*German Anti-Semitic Propaganda, 1909-1941
*Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees: The West's Response to Jewish Emigration
*Jewish Underground Resistance: The David Diamant collection
*Nazi Bank and Financial Institutions: U.S. Military Government Investigation *Reports and Interrogations of Nazi Financiers, 1945-1949
*Nazism in Poland: The Diary of Governor-General Hans Frank
*Nuremburg Laws and Nazi Annulment of Jewish German Nationality
*SAFEHAVEN Reports on Nazi Looting of Occupied Countries and Assets in Neutral Countries
*Testaments to the Holocaust. Documents and Rare Printed Materials from the Wiener Library, London
*The Holocaust and Records of Concentration Camp Trials: Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes
*The Jewish Question: Records from the Berlin Document Center
*U.S. Relations with the Vatican and the Holocaust, 1940-1950

APSU Library has acquired the twelve Archives in this collection published as of 2015. They are:

1. Asia and the West: Diplomacy & Cultural Exchange (including US State Department Consular & Diplomatic Records, British Foreign Office Political Correspondence regarding Japan, missionary journals and correspondence).

2. British Politics & Society (including coverage of major political figures, working class radicalism, the Oxford Movement, etc.)

3. British Theatre, Music & Literature: High and Popular Culture (including British Playbills, 1754-1882; Drury Lane Theatre Archive)

4. Children's Literature and Childhood (provides a wide range of primary sources related to the experience of childhood in the long nineteenth century)

5. Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, & Conquest (including Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices Papers on Africa; personal narratives of African exploration)

6. European Literature, 1790-184: The Corvey Collection (includes 18,000 volumes with a particular focus on the British Romantic Era, plus thousands of works in French and German)

7. Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature

8. Photography: The World through the Lens (including The Photographic News from 1858 to 1908 and selections from the Photographic Collection of the British Colonial Office)

9. Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform

10. Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1780-1925 (including a collection of American Medical Periodicals from 1797-1900 and a collection of 600 monographs on “Evolution and the Origin of Species”)

11. Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Part II

12. Women: Transnational Networks (includes manuscripts from the Mary Braddon Archive, manuscript Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and a collection of Quaker Women’s Diaries from the 18th and 19th Centuries)

*Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada.

*More than 100,000 pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories

*Materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1890 to 1920

*Provides in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world

*Provides keyword searching of almost 281,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life

*Contains pointers to over 4,100 audio and video files and almost 19,000 bibliographic records

Gale Primary Sources is a full-text primary source database that cross-searches Gale's Sabin Americana (1500-1926), Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Nineteenth-Century Collections Online (NCCO).

Orderly Books were the controlling document of day-to-day life in the military, most notably during the Revolutionary War. It offers access to Orderly Books found nowhere else and contains handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817. The content in Orderly Books provides detailed accounts of troops’ daily lives, documenting everything from court martial cases to the price of necessities charged by locals.

Content Includes:
*Over 30,000 pages of original primary source material from two hundred handwritten volumes
*Original images, fully transcribed and keyword-searchable

Subjects Include:
*Both sides of the American Revolutionary War
*The French and Indian War
*The War of 1812
*The early frontier
*Other various military deployments throughout the young United States

Colonialism, Communism, military conflict in Vietnam, and more pivotal topics and events are covered extensively in primary sources providing perspectives on complex issues and ideals. Newspapers, official reports, and many other documents dating from 1910 to 1975 help researchers discover multiple facets.

As the first in the Women’s Studies archive, this collection traces the path of women’s issues from past to present—pulling primary sources from manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals, and more. It captures the foundation of women’s movements, struggles and triumphs, and provides researchers with valuable insights.

As a comprehensive academic-level archival resource, Women’s Studies Archive: Women’s Issues and Identities will focus on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Along with providing a closer look at some of the pioneers of women’s movements, this collection offers scholars a deep dive into the issues that have affected women and the many contributions they have made to society.

Content will include approximately one million never-before-digitized pages of primary source material, all aligned with women’s studies.

Much of history is one-sided, mainly focused on the male perspective; women's voices are not often heard. Women's Issues and Identities provides the opportunity to witness history from the female perspective. Offering coverage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Women's Issues and Identities allows for the serendipitous discovery of commonalities among a variety of archival collections.

Global in scope, the archive presents materials covering the social, political, and professional aspects of women's lives and offers a look at the roles, experiences, and achievements of women in society. Women's Issues and Identities spans multiple geographic regions, providing a variety of perspectives on women's experiences and cultural impact. Within the archive can be found fascinating historical records from Europe, North and South America, Africa, India, East Asia, and the Pacific Rim with content in English, French, German, and Dutch.

*Formerly titled History Resource Center: World

*Contains approximately 100,000 pages of more than 1300 primary documents

*Contains nearly 100 scholarly full-text journals, as well as citations from 180 titles

*Covers world history from B.C. to the present

*Contains approximately 1400 images and maps

*EBSCO partners with American Antiquarian Society (AAS), the premier library documenting the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to provide digital access to the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection, the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877.


Series 1 (1691-1820)

AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 1 presents more than 500 titles dating from 1691 through 1820. Almost every 17th- and 18th-century American title is represented in addition to the majority of works published before 1821. Subject strengths in this series include Afro-Americana, Agriculture, Children's literature, Education, Eighteenth-century imprints, Leisure and hobbies, Masonic works, Medicine, Religion, Science, Technology, The Trades, Women's literature

Series 2 (1821-1837)

AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 2 presents over 1,000 titles dating from 1821 through 1837. Series 2 represents the Jacksonian Democracy era in history and is broad in scope including agriculture, entertainment, history, literary criticism, and politics.

Series 3 (1838-1852)

AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 3 presents over 1,800 titles dating from 1838 through 1852. Series 3 reveals a rapidly growing young nation, where industrialization, the railroads, regional political differences, and life on the western frontier were daily realities.

Series 4 (1853-1865)

AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 4 presents over 1,200 titles dating from 1853 through 1865. While the Civil War is a key focal point of Series 4, it also features a diverse record of the continuance of daily life for many Americans—both leading up to and during the war. News from the battlefront is found, in addition to the usual breadth of subject matter found in Series 1-3 (e.g., science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion).

Series 5 (1866-1877)

AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 5 contains over 2,500 titles dating from 1866 through 1877. Themes presented reflect a nation that persevered through a most difficult set of circumstances—the aftermath of a bloody civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the incorporation of the recently-freed African Americans into American life, a population that rapidly expanded into the Western territories, and much more. Series 5 coverage of broad subject areas reach into every facet of American life, including science, literature, medicine, agriculture, fashion, family life, politics, education and religion.

*knits together more than 400 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs

*includes 100,000 pages of re-keyed and indexed text

*includes 4,000 facsimile pages of previously unpublished manuscript material

*includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century

*chronicles the development of America across 150 years

*researchers can see all of the original typography, drawings, graphic elements, and article layouts exactly as they were originally published

*documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850

*collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists

*brings coherence to a wide range of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, letters and images of maps

*contains 26 million pages of text from more than 136,000 titles (155,000 volumes)

*contains Canonical titles of the period as well as contemporary works that analyze and debate those titles

*contains materials ranging from books and directories to Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements

*includes all of the images, and extensive indexing, from the 1790 - 1930 U.S. federal censuses

*offers more than 20,000 book titles, including nearly 8,000 family histories and over 12,000 local histories \

*provides access to more than 250 primary-source documents such as tax lists, city directories, probate records, and more

*Brings together 100,000 pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, displayed as high-quality images of the original manuscripts

*The collection is drawn entirely from the extensive holdings of the American Antiquarian Society

*Spanning 1750 to 1950, the database is particularly strong in nineteenth-century material

*Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada.

*More than 100,000 pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories

*Materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1890 to 1920

*Brings together more than 100,000 pages of personal stories, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find

*The collection presents the entire spectrum of native peoples’ experiences from their own point of view

*In addition to biographies, included is a detailed timeline of Indian events, more than 20,000 photographs, and more than 2,000 oral histories, presented in audio and transcript form.

*Includes approximately 150,000 pages of letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950, including 7,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts

*Material is drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings

*The writings provide a detailed record of what women wore, what they ate, what they read, the conditions under which they worked, and how they amused themselves

*Provides access to 29,000 titles (more than 6 million pages of text) and offers original accounts of exploration, pioneering, settlement, the western movement, military actions, Native Americans, slavery and abolition.

*Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides and documents from sermons and political tracts to legislation and literature.

*Takes works from Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America from Its Discovery to the Present Time and makes them available online

*Brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s activism in public life

*This resource examines perspectives on women’s social movements from colonial times to the present

*Includes primary documents, published materials, and research tools

This website from ProQuest contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:

Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
The Contemporary Era (1976-2000s)

The documents presented here represent a selection of primary sources available in several ProQuest databases. The databases represented in this website include American Periodicals, Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest History Vault, ProQuest Congressional, Supreme Court Insight and Alexander Street’s Black Thought and Culture.

The goal of this website is to provide a selection of primary source documents that may be used by a wide range of students, from middle and high school students to college students and independent scholars. Examples of assignments may include National History Day projects or research papers about Black Freedom.

The Digital Library of Tennessee provides access to rare and unique primary sources housed in libraries, archives, and museums in the state of Tennessee. Explore photographs, letters, diaries, oral histories, maps, original art, music, material culture, and archival material that documents the cultural heritage of the state of Tennessee from the Pre-Columbian era to the present.

*comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750

*derived from the seminal reference work European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750.

*wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery

The HathiTrust Digital Library started with the collection of the University of Michigan Library, which was digitized by the Google Books Project. Since then the Digital Library has grown to include collections digitized from other partner libraries and research institutions as well as collections from other digital projects like the Internet Archive.

Full-text access and downloading is available for those items in the public domain, including:

US federal government documents
The following are in the public domain, giving full access:
*Works published in the U.S. prior to 1926
*Works Published outside the U.S. before 1876 (for non-U.S. users, before 1873)
*U.S. federal government documents
*Works still protected by copyright, but made available to HathiTrust with the permission of the copyright holder

The number of works in the HathiTrust Digital Library is large and ever-increasing.

Guest users can download public domain works in their entirety that do not have download restrictions (e.g., works digitized by Internet Archive and certain other organizations, or works that have been opened with a Creative Commons license). Guest users can only download works one page a time if they do have download restrictions (e.g. a work that was digitized by Google). Download format options include PDF; EPUB; Text (.txt); Text (.zip); Image (jpg).

There is significant overlap of volumes in HathiTrust and Google Book Search, and if a work is "full view" in HathiTrust, it is possible that the work can be downloaded from Google Book Search. If you are unable to download a full-view book from HathiTrust, you can select the “Find in Google Books” link to check their website for download options. Google Books has their own copyright policies, so we cannot guarantee that the book will be available for download on their website.

The Tennessee Virtual Archive (TeVA), is a digital repository of Tennessee history and culture. The mission of the creators of this resource (Tennessee State Library & Archives) is to bring digital versions of the state's rich historical records to a wider audience. New items are added on a regular basis, including photographs, documents, maps, postcards, moving images, audio and more.