History (U.S.) Research Guide: Primary Sources

*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

*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 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.