Subject and Course Guides: U.S. History Up To 1865: Primary Sources

Primary Sources - Databases

Age of Exploration This link opens in a new window
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Explore five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America This link opens in a new window
Contains primary and secondary sources on North and Central American Indian history and culture from the Newberry Library's Edward E. Ayer Collection. Includes manuscripts, maps, artwork, photographs, newspapers, and rare books.
American Indian Histories and Cultures presents a unique insight into interactions between American Indians and Europeans, from the early colonial period to the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. This database contains materials from the Newberry Library’s extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection, one of the strongest archival collections on American Indian history in the world. Materials in this database span from the early 16th century to the mid-20th century and include: manuscripts, artwork, speeches, petitions, diaries and travel journals, correspondences, linguistic and ethnographic studies, photographs, maps and atlases, rare printed books, and American Indian newspapers.

NOTE: Users can register for a personal account to store searches, create image slideshows, and create a document library.
Arte Publico Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a vast collection on U.S. Hispanic history, literature, and culture, from colonial times to 1960. Content is in Spanish or English with indexing and searching available in both languages.
The Arte Publico Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 provides access to a digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature, and culture. The collection draws its content from the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, the largest international project to locate, preserve, and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form, from colonial times to 1960. It includes thousands of historical articles, newspapers, religious and political pamphlets, broadsides, historical books, letters, short stories, poems, advertisements, and more. The content is mostly in Spanish (80%) with some materials in English (20%). It is indexed and searchable in both languages.
Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This link opens in a new window
This full-text work in progress documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850
This full-text work in progress documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. It focuses on personal accounts of traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials. Source materials include narratives, diaries, journals, and letters.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
An online collection of English-language titles and editions published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800
An online collection of English and foreign language books, pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera published in the U.K. and the Americas. Content is presented as full text page images which can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF documents. When completed there will be more than 33 million pages of material. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, in addition to those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide. The seven subject-specific areas of study are History and Geography; Social Sciences and Fine Arts; Medicine, Science, and Technology; Literature and Language; Religion and Philosophy; Law; and Reference.
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive collection of over 620 full-text scholarly journals primarily from university presses and professional society publishers. Additional titles are added to the collection as back files are digitized. Subject areas include: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, History, History of Science Technology, Language Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Public Policy Administration, Science, Slavic Studies, Sociology, Statistics.

Primary Sources - Online

Cornell University Witchcraft Collection
Part of Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell’s Witchcraft Collection contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe.
Early Americas Digital Archive
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the University of Maryland Libraries’ e-Publishing Initiative, and was originally developed with the support of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
Library of Congress - Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1600-1925
The Capital and the Bay comprises first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs in an attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century. Works published after that time generally pose copyright challenges that prevented their inclusion.
LIbrary Of Congress - Colonial Settlements, 1600-1763
U.S. History Primary Source Timeline
Library of Congress - Digital Collections
Digital collections from the Library of Congress related to American History
National Archives - Research by Topic
Various topics related to American History
National Geographic - Society and Culture of Colonial America
Explore more about daily life in colonial America with these classroom resources.
Plymouth Colony Archive Project
This Plymouth Colony Archive presents a collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project
Documents related to the Salem Witch Trials
Slave Voyages
The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas.
Virtual Jamestown
The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment."
Written in Bone
Explore forensic anthropology through a series of case studies, including colonial burials in Virginia and Maryland.