History

Primary Documents Online - United States

United States - Primary Resource Links  
The Burning of McPhersonville, South Carolina 1865
 William Waud. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain
       
American History
 
File:SalemWitchcraftTrial large.jpg
Witchcraft at Salem Village
 From WA Craft's 1876 book: 'Pioneers in the Settlement of America'
Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain
 
American Polics and Law
 
File:Lincoln Memorial.jpg
Lincoln Memorial
Image courtesy Jeff Kubina
Wikimedia Commons. No changes, CC License
 
War
 
File:Avenge december 7.jpg
Avenge December 7
US Office of War Information Poster, 1942 
Reference is to the attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 
 
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain
 
Ethnic Groups
Regional
 
File:1835 Great Fire of New York.jpg
The Great Fire of New York 
Nicolino Calyo 1835
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

Historical Newspapers: American

United States - Historical News

File:1792 AmericanApollo Oct12.png

October 12 1792 issue of the Boston newspaper American Apollo
 Published by Belknap & Hall
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain
 
  • Brooklyn Daily Eagle - Free access to the Daily Eagle (1841-1955) and to the society magazine Brooklyn Life (1890-1931) from the Brooklyn Public Library
  • California Newspaper Collection - 600,000+ pages from California news sources (1846-1922)
  • Chronicling America - Free access to millions of pages of American historical news sources. The collection is keyword searchable.
  • Colorado Historical Newspapers - 600,000+ pages from Colorado news sources from 1859-1923
  • Farm, Field and Fireside - A University of Illinois collection of US farm weeklies from the late 19th & early 20th centuries
  • Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press - Spanish language news publications from the American south-west and Mexico. Search by keywords or browse titles.
  • Historical Jewish Press - More than a million pages of Jewish news from different countries, time periods (1843-1987), and in several languages.
  • ICON (International Coalition on Newspapers) - Historic and recent news from around the world. Search by country. Not all titles are fully scanned; not all titles are available for free (look for the exceptions with the $-sign)
  • Kentucky Digital Library - This collection contains 300,000+ pages of news, but also contains images, oral histories, books and maps.
  • Lancaster County Historical Newspapers - Five newspapers from this Pennsylvania county, most content is from the 19th century.
  • North Carolina Digital Collections - The page includes many other “collections” in the sidebar besides newspapers. Search by keyword or browse the papers
  • Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers - Text from a collection of state newspapers from the period 1831 – 1877 (coverage is not comprehensive). Pennsylvania State University
  • Richmond Daily Dispatch - Almost 1400 issues of the Dispatch available for the Civil War period – 1860-1865.
  • Utah Digital Newspapers - More than a million pages of news from nearly 100 Utah newspapers
 File:Fleischmanns Yeast newspaper ad.png
 
Fleischmann's Yeast ad in the Times Dispatch
Richmond, Virginia. February 7, 1913 
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

Media History: Primary Resources

  • Media History Digital Library - More than a million digitized pages of text and images from media trade papers and fan magazines. Search using the "Collections Gateway" in the right sidebar.
photoplay  
Image (left) from the Fan Media Collection
Image (right) from the Global Cinema Collection

Gale / Cengage Collection

"Points to the Past" is an enormous collection of primary resource materials (nearly 200,000,000 pages of digitized content) that is available to you in full text. The collection includes maps, photos, newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, poems, and other resources. NOTE: This material is made available through BC Government funding and is accessible only from within British Columbia.

There are more than thirty collections of documents in the set. One of them - the "Gale NewsVault" - contains ten sub-collections of newspaper resources such as:
  • 19th Century UK Periodicals: Empire
  • 19th Century U.S. Newspapers
  • Times Digital Archive 1785-1985
  • Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003
  • Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive 1902-2005
  • Financial Times Historical Archive 1888-2006
The collection is predominantly related to records in British and North American history.
See all of the collection titles here.

Print Primary Sources: Series Titles

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       Titles from the Bedford Series in History & Culture
 
The Library has several book series (both print and e-Book) that collect primary documents. Each series is made up of individual titles.
Series titles include:
Bedford Series in History and Culture
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life & Thought 
Canadian History Through the Press 
Classics of Western Spirituality 
Documentary History of American Life 
Documentary History of the Jews in Italy 
John Harvard Library 
Loeb Classical Library 
Manchester Medieval Sources 
Records of Civilization
Rupert’s Land Record Society 
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Popular Patristics 
Sources of Civilization in the West 
Sources of Early Christian Thought 
Sources of History 
Sources of Medieval History 
Translated Texts for Historians 
 
To browse the topics in each series use the "title" search option. Another way is to use the catalogue’s “Advanced search” option: enter the name of the series title (e.g. Bedford Series in History and Culture) and select the drop-down option “series (any word)”. This search will display all the titles in that series (there are 10 titles in the Bedford Series).