Primary Sources: US History

The African American Historical Serials Collection was developed in conjunction with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) as an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture.

This collection features:
*Over 170 unique titles related to African American life and culture
*Approximately 60,000 pages of searchable primary source content
*Reports and annuals from various African American organizations and social service agencies, as well as African American periodicals
*Extensive coverage of African American religious organizations, churches and institutions

*Created from the Library Company’s acclaimed Afro-Americana Collection—an accumulation that began with Benjamin Franklin and steadily increased throughout its entire history—this unique online resource will provide researchers with more than 12,000 printed works. These essential books, pamphlets and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints, hold an unparalleled record of African American history, literature and culture.

*The Afro-Americana Imprints collection spans nearly 400 years, from the early 16th to the early 20th century. Critically important subjects covered include the West’s discovery and exploitation of Africa; the rise of slavery in the New World along with the growth and success of abolitionist movements; the development of racial thought and racism; descriptions of African American life—slave and free—throughout the Americas; and slavery and race in fiction and drama. Also featured are printed works of African American individuals and organizations.

*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

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

*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

Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection draws its content from the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, the largest national project ever to locate, preserve, and disseminate Latino-Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form, from colonial times to 1960. Content indexed and searchable in Spanish and English.

Content Includes:
*Approximately 60,000 historical articles
*Hundreds of political and religious pamphlets and broadsides
*Complete texts of over 1,100 historical books of Hispanic literature and culture
*Content written in Spanish (80%) and English (20%)
*Hundreds of rare books by Latino-Hispanic Americans
*Over 3,000 issues of rare historical newspapers and periodicals
*Over 250,000 pages of personal and organizational manuscript content

--Series 1 presents a digital collection of historical content pertaining to Hispanic history, literature, political commentary, and culture in the United States. This collection conveys the creative life of U.S. Latinos and Hispanics.

--Series 2 presents thematic content focusing on the evolution of Hispanic civil rights, religious thought, and the growing presence of women writers from the late 19th and 20th centuries. Rare and relevant books and newspapers – including rare anarchist newspapers – are presented in their original form.

The Civil War Primary Source Documents collection, drawn from the holdings of the New-York Historical Society, is comprised of over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections, and focuses on the War as it was fought from both Northern and Southern perspectives.

Invaluable primary resources include letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs and illustrations. Personal accounts appear in various scrapbook journals and family portraits, and strategic initiatives are evident in maps featuring details of troop movements and local landmarks.

Highlights include the papers of David Cronin, a famous soldier and artist, soldiers' diaries chronicling daily life and experiences as prisoners of war, Union Defense Committee records and Confederate Army records.

Content Includes:
*Over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections
*Extensive correspondence from both the Confederate and Union troops, societies and individuals and their families
*Diaries from soldiers on the field and civilians on the home-front
*Hand-drawn illustrations, maps, and engineering notebooks
*Military content from both the army and navy, from the front lines to hospitals and prisons
*Letters and first person accounts from such well-known leaders as Ulysses S. Grant, as well as accounts from individual soldiers and sailors

*Contains over 2,500 primary documents
*covers history, government, and political science
*includes 1972 through the present

*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

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).

*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

Gay and lesbian publications and the personal papers of Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, and Donald Stewart Lucas provide the basis of an in depth study of LGBT issues and reflect activism across the US in the 20th century that led to emerging changes taking place today.

*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

The most recent articles from the New York Times (up to present) are available in HTML format through Gale Academic OneFile. This database offers full-page images and article images from the New York Times dating back to 1851 (called New York daily times, 1851-1857). Digital reproductions of every page from every issue, cover to cover, in downloadable PDF files. It provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.

It also allows searching using the Times Index 1851-1993. Please click on "Topics" tab within the interface.

KNOWN AS “AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER” for more than a century, The New York Times has also commanded international readership. The
world news and personal stories captured by this Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper for nearly 170 years are available online from ProQuest so
researchers anywhere can browse and search the digitized pages of this definitive record of the day.

From the digitized pages of The New York Times explore the:
• Arrival of immigrants to America’s shores
• Rise and fall of global financial markets
• Introduction of the mass-produced automobile, television, space travel, and
medical innovations
• Causes and effects of the Civil War in the 1800s to the war on terrorism in
this century
• From Beijing to Bangalore, nearly 30,000 graduate works spanning 40
countries have referenced The New York Times since 2000 in the ProQuest
Dissertations & Theses Global database, citing critical findings from its pages
on topics as diverse as music, management, anthropology, computer science,
military history, and more

Curriculum Focus:
• Culture
• Economics
• History
• Human Development
• International Studies
• Journalism
• Media Studies
• Political Science
• Science and Technology
• Sports

Newspapers.com Southeast Edition provides online access to historical newspapers from the southeast United States including over 2000 historic and recent newspapers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Newspapers.com Southeast Edition provides online access to historical news papers. It offers full-page images with searchable full text of newspapers dating from the early 1700s into the early 2000s. Invaluable for researchers, historians, genealogists, educators and students, Newspapers.com Southeast Edition provides enhanced opportunities for longitudinal and comparative analysis of historical events.

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)

For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.

The collection features publications of all kinds, from the political party newspapers at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the mammoth dailies that shaped the nation at the century's end. Every aspect of society and every region of the nation is found in the archive -- rural and urban, large cities and small towns, coast to coast, etc. Includes major newspapers as well as those published by African Americans, Native Americans, women's rights groups, labor groups, the Confederacy, and other groups and interests.

Also included are illustrated papers that bring the nineteenth century to life through the drawings of many artists.

Tennessee papers include:
Chattanooga Daily Gazette (Chattanooga, TN)
Daily Rebel (Chattanooga, TN)
Chattanooga Advertiser (Chattanooga, TN)
Jonesborough Whig, and Independent Journal (Jonesborough, TN)
Memphis Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Nashville Union (Nashville, TN)
Maryville Republican (Maryville, TN)

A selection of other ewspapers included are:
New York Herald (NY)
Lynchburg Virginian (VA)
Pacific Commercial Advertiser (HI)
Rocky Mountain News (CO)
Southern Illustrated News (VA)
Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago)
Milwaukee Sentinel (WI)
The Bee (OH)
The Mountaineer (SC)

*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 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

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

*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

This online version of The Tennessean offers full-text coverage from 1812 to 2002 and 2010 to present (with a delay of several days). It includes the following options:

*The Tennessean is available online from 2010 to present through ProQuest Recent Newspapers. There is a delay of a few days, so they most recent issues will not be available. These issues include full scans of the physical newspaper in PDF format.

*The Nashville Tennessean is available online from 1812 to 2002 through ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Every issue includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF format. The Tennessean began in publication 1907 but this service includes earlier titles such as the Nashville Whig and the Daily American. These papers reported not only Nashville-area news, but carried stories from around the state and the nation.

The default setting for this link searches both of these platforms together. To search only one option, click on the "Change Databases" link within the database interface.

Documents contained in U.S. Declassified Documents Online come from collection editors who actively monitor the release of formerly classified documents from presidential libraries as well as numerous major releases of declassified documents from the Atomic Energy Commission, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Council, White House, and other executive agencies.

Because the majority of the documents are presidential records and all of them were formerly classified, these records provide a unique, behind-the-scenes view of the highest level of American policy-making on the most sensitive issues of national security and foreign policy.

Materials available for review include:

Cabinet meeting minutes
CIA intelligence studies and reports
Correspondence
Diary entries
FBI surveillance and intelligence correspondence and memoranda
Full texts of letters sent and received by U.S. diplomatic personnel
Joint Chiefs papers
National Security Council policy statements
Presidential conferences
State Department political analyses
Technical studies
Trade treaties, studies and analyses
U.S. briefing materials for meetings with foreign heads of state and officials
White House Confidential File materials
And much more

*Formerly titled History Resource Center: U.S

*Approximately 100,000 pages of more than 1000 primary documents

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

*Contains more than 2,000 images and maps

*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

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.

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.