Primary Sources
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African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 by Newsbank This link opens in a new windowOne-of-a-kind record of African American history, culture, and daily life. Covers life in the Antebellum South through the Civil Rights movement and more.
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African American Newspapers: the 19th Century by History Commons This link opens in a new windowFull text primary resource news articles provided by History Commons (formerly known as Accessible Archives). Includes The North Star, The Freedmen's Record, and Frederick Douglass' Paper plus many additional titles.
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America's Historical Imprints This link opens in a new windowComprehensive online resources offer more than 100,000 early American books, pamphlets, broadsides and rare printed materials. Featuring extensive indexing and full bibliographic information, they together illuminate more than 250 years of American history, literature, culture and daily life. Unique and authoritative, these fully searchable products enable researchers to browse and explore America's past in unprecedented ways.
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America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new windowFully searchable, cover-to-cover reproductions of early American newspapers including titles from all 50 present states. Includes: Early American Newspapers, Series 1 (1690-1876), Early American Newspapers, Series 2 (1758-1900) and Early American Newspapers, Series 3 (1829-1922).
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American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series 1 This link opens in a new windowFully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides (political materials) printed between 1820 and 1900 and 15,000 pieces of ephemera printed between 1760 and 1900. Ephemera includes: government proclamations, tax bills, town meeting reports, autobiographies, dying confessions of convicted criminals, theater playbills, sheet almanacs, advertisements, patriotic and popular songs and poems. This series is included in America's Historical Imprints.
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American Pamphlets Series I 1820-1922 This link opens in a new windowDigitized pamphlets from the New York Historical Society, which includes printed materials written by authors from an unusually broad socio-economic range.
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AM Explorer (formerly Adam Matthew Digital) This link opens in a new windowCollections spanning the social sciences and humanities, developed in collaboration with leading libraries and archives. Contains millions of pages of unique primary source content and hundreds of videos.
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Archive Finder This link opens in a new windowLocate primary resources held in over 220,000 Special Collections in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland, with links for contact and access information.
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Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new windowThe largest single collection of 17th & 18th century newspapers and pamphlets available from the British Library, published primarily in London.
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Eight Centuries (formerly Nineteenth Century Masterfile) This link opens in a new windowAn "index of indexes" to periodicals, newspapers, books, United Stated and United Kingdom government documents, documents, artwork, and images published from the 12th Century through 1930.
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Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowAccess the digital images of every page of books published in the United Kingdom and elsewhere during the 18th Century. With full-text searching of millions of pages, the product allows researchers new methods of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.
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HarpWeek: the Civil War Era 1857-77 This link opens in a new windowAccess to Harper's Weekly during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Provides both text and image searching capabilities.
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History Commons : Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals This link opens in a new windowFormerly known as Accessible Archives. Primary source material from 18th and 19th century periodicals. Includes Godey's Ladies Book (1830-1880), Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800), Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective (1860-1865), African American Newspapers: The 19th Century.
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Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part I (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowA robust, diverse, informative source on the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada. Researchers will explore the impact of invasion and colonization on Indigenous Peoples in North America, and the intersection of Indigenous and European histories and systems of knowledge through the use of manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, photographs, motion pictures, images of artwork, and more. Content has been sourced from both American and Canadian institutions and has received direct-from-source permission to digitize newspapers from various tribes and organizations. This archive also features indigenous language materials, including dictionaries, religious texts, and primers.
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Nineteenth Century Collections Online : Asia and the West This link opens in a new windowFeatures primary source collections related to international relations between Asian countries and the West during the 19th century. These invaluable documents—many never before available—include government reports, diplomatic correspondences, periodicals, newspapers, treaties, trade agreements, NGO papers, and more. Documents are sourced from The National Archives, Kew; The National Archives, United States; and other collections.
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ProQuest Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new windowHistorical access to the New York Times (1851-2015), Chicago Tribune (1849-1996), Los Angeles Times (1881-1995), Philadelphia Inquirer (1860-2001), and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1786-2003). Also features recent issues of the New York Times (2008- two months ago) and Wall Street Journal (2008- two months ago).
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Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowArchival collections on the history of slavery in America and the rest of the world sourced from more than 60 libraries at institutions such as the Amistad Research Center, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Archives, Oberlin College, Oxford University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Yale University. F&M subscribes only to the following collections:
Part 3, The Institution of Slavery (1492-1888)
Part 4, The Age of Emancipation -
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new windowThis collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
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ArchiveGridArchiveGrid includes over 5 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
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Avalon ProjectThe Avalon Project is a digital library of documents relating to law, history and diplomacy. The project is part of the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library.
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Digital BodleianBringing together the digitized collections of Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries' into a single portal, Digital Bodleian contains a plethora of valuable manuscripts and printed content from across the world and centuries.
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Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
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Europeana CollectionsExplore 58,246,083 artworks, artefacts, books, films and music from more than 2000 European museums, galleries, libraries and archives.
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Hansard Parliamentary DebatesDigitized Official Report of debates from the British Parliament, from 1803 through the present.
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Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
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Internet History Sourcebooks ProjectThe Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a web site that collects modern, medieval and ancient primary source documents, maps, secondary sources, bibliographies, images and music to cover a wide variety of topics and concepts throughout history.
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Library of Congress Digital CollectionsThe Library of Congress Digital Collections are multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library of Congress' vast collections.
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Life Magazine Photo ArchiveSearch millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
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Making of America (Cornell University)A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
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Making of America (University of Michigan)A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
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Pennsylvania Newspaper ArchviveThe Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive is a freely accessible web resource developed and hosted by Penn State University Libraries. The archive provides access to the Commonwealth’s historical newspapers as a single portal for all digitized Pennsylvania newspapers.
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Pennsylvania Sanborn Fire Insurance MapsThe Sanborn Map Company, the best known of the US fire-insurance map producers, has made maps since 1867. The fire insurance maps produced by Sanborn show building footprints, building material, height or number of stories, building use, lot lines, road widths and water facilities. The maps also show street names and property boundaries of the time. This collection of maps is historically significant as it is sometimes the best detailed map of a town or city dating from the mid 1800s. Penn State University Maps Library has a near complete collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for the state of Pennsylvania.
Secondary Sources
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America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new windowDefinitive database of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With selective indexing for 1,700 journals from 1955 to present, and also provides full-text coverage of more than 200 journals and nearly 100 books.
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American National Biography This link opens in a new windowThe American National Biography includes more than 17,400 men and women whose lives have shaped the nation. Updated quarterly.
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HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new windowHathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
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Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new windowComprehensive international historical coverage (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and much more. Features article (+ some book) indexing from 1955 to the present.
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History Reference Source This link opens in a new windowAccess full text from more than 1,620 reference books, encyclopedias and non-fiction books, more than 150 leading history periodicals, nearly 57,000 historical documents, more than 78,000 biographies of historical figures, more than 113,000 historical photos and maps, and more than 80 hours of historical video.
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Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new windowIndexes articles from English-language magazines and academic journals in a wide range of interdisciplinary fields. Covers 1907 to 1984.
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Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new windowIndexes over 300 English-language periodicals covering classical studies, history, literature, performing arts, philosophy, and related fields. Covers 1984 to the present.
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JStor This link opens in a new windowA collection of full-text articles from over 3000 scholarly journals, many dating from the nineteenth-century to the last 4 or 5 years. A growing number of titles are available through the current issues, as part of their "Current Scholarship Program". Select Advanced Search to strategically search amongst 45 disciplines. Choose PDF from within JStor to properly view and print articles. For convenience, JStor is now searchable on Facebook.
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Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science) This link opens in a new windowIndex to content from core journals in all areas of the social sciences. Provides lists of sources cited, plus publications citing the original article. Also known as SSCI. Covers 1900 to the present.
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Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new windowIndexes over 300 English-language periodicals covering anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, social work, sociology, and related fields. Covers 1983 to the present.
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