Primary Sources: World History

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

Includes newsreels and archival films divided into browseable eras including:
Pre-World War I (1888-1913), World War I (1914-1918), Jazz Age & Depression (1919-1938), World War II (1939-1945), Postwar (1946-1968), Late 20th Century (1969-2000), and 21st Century. Each section is further subdivided into categories: Arts, Business & Economics, History & Politics, Science & Technology, and Social Sciences.

• Create and share playlists—use premade clips, full videos, or custom segments to engage students
• Add a personalized video introduction to any playlist you create
• Public performance rights and no copyright infringement

 

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).

Primary Sources (JSTOR) contains the following collections:

19th Century British Pamphlets
19th Century British Pamphlets is a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain. Created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK) with funding from the JISC Digitisation Programme, the collection is comprised of more than 26,000 important pamphlets held in research libraries in the United Kingdom.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
The collection consists of more than 190,000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral histories, and speeches.

World Heritage Sites: Africa
The collection links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. It includes more than 57,000 objects, including photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler’s accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research.

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

*Combines all of the content from Alexander Street’s seven award-winning collections of letters, diaries, and oral histories together with a growing archive of additional content 

*Combined, the materials in this vast collection offer something entirely new and critically important for history research—personal, contemporaneous, first-person accounts

Brought together under a unified search interface is all the premium content from the following Alexander Street individual collections:
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries
• Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries (from the American Antiquarian Society)
• British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
• Black Thought and Culture

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

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.