Research by Subject: American History: Primary Sources

Selected Primary Sources: American History

American Periodicals Series This link opens in a new window
This database contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Ancestry Library Edition This link opens in a new window
Ancestry Library Edition is genealogical database designed for academic and institutional research needs. It covers the U.S., Canada and the U.K. and includes census records, vital records, immigration records, military records, court and legal documents, directories, photos and maps, and more.
Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
Access to the Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800); Civil War newspapers; African American newspapers (19th century); Godey’s Ladys Book (1830-1880); Delaware County, PA newspapers (1819-1870); and Chester County, PA Genealogical Catalogue (1809-1870).
American West This link opens in a new window
The American West - Graff Collection includes mixture of original manuscripts, maps, ephemeral material and rare printed sources.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Full-text of 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800. Includes most titles published in the United Kingdom during this period as well as a number of items published in the Americas.
Evans Digital Edition 1639-1800 (Early American Imprints Series I) This link opens in a new window
Evans, 1639-1800 (Early American Imprints, Series I) has been described as the definitive resource for researching 17th- and 18th-century America. This digital collection contains virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans’ “American Bibliography” and Roger Bristol’s supplement.
See America’s Historical Imprints
Everyday Life of Women in America (1800- 1920) This link opens in a new window
This digital collection is an unparalleled resource for the study of American social, cultural, and popular history, providing access to rare primary source material from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History, Duke University and The New York Public Library.
Shaw Shoemaker Digital Edition (Early American Imprints Series II) This link opens in a new window
Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 (Early American Imprints, Series II) provides a set of American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century. It is based on the noted “American Bibliography, 1801-1819” by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.
See America’s Historical Imprints
Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice 1490-2007 This link opens in a new window
Includes books, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, health and family life.
Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
Includes collections from the U.S. and Europe on the worldwide movement for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
First World War This link opens in a new window
Includes a wealth of primary source material about the First World War, from personal narratives and printed books to military files, propaganda pamphlets and visual documents. The material is complemented by a range of contextual secondary material, including scholarly essays, case studies and interactive maps.
American Slavery Collection, 1820-1922 This link opens in a new window
Features the digital edition of the American Antiquarian Society’s holdings of slavery and abolition materials, with more than 3,500 works published over more than 100 years. Materials include books, pamphlets, and ephemera.
Adam Matthew Explorer This link opens in a new window
Access millions of pages of primary source collections across the entire portfolio of Adam Matthew Digital, spanning content from the 15th-21st centuries. You'll find award-winning digital resources spanning the social sciences and humanities, developed in collaboration with leading libraries and archives
HarpWeek This link opens in a new window
Electronic access to Harper's Weekly, 1857-1912.
Readers' Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Provides access to citations of articles from popular magazines that were published between 1890 and 1982.
Indigenous Peoples: North America This link opens in a new window
Provides a wide variety of source materials to support research into the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada.
Virginia Company Archives This link opens in a new window
A source for the study of the Atlantic World and Early Colonial period that documents trade between Britain and America as well as the economic development of Virginia as seen through the papers of the Virginia Company of London, 1606-1624.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Digitized Early Presidential Papers (LOC)
Scroll down to link to individual presidential collections.
Foreign Relations of the United States digital collection
This digital facsimile of Foreign Relations of the United States is a project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries. This is an incomplete run from 1861-1960 with missing volumes being added as they can be acquired and processed.
U.S. Reports - Supreme Court
United States Reports is a series of bound case reporters that are the official reports of decisions for the United States Supreme Court dating to the court’s first decision in 1791 and to earlier courts that preceded the Supreme Court in the colonial era. This collection of Supreme Court cases is fully searchable. PDF versions of individual cases can be viewed and downloaded. More recent editions of the U.S. Reports from 1987 to the present are available online from the U.S. Supreme Court.
National Screening Room (LOC)
The National Screening Room is a project of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The goal of this digital collection is to present to the widest audience possible movies from the Library's extensive holdings, offering a broad range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)
"The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major US foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies." [from the State Dept. website]

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality This link opens in a new window
In this website, we present primary source documents from several of the time periods in American History when the river of the Black Freedom Struggle ran more powerfully, while not losing sight of the fierce, often violent opposition that Black people have faced on the road to freedom.

This website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:

Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

Tips for finding digitized primary sources

There are many interesting digitization projects that make primary source materials accessible online. Here are some tips for searching for such collections.

If your topic is geographically specific, do some browsing on the state library websites for in that area to see if they have any digitization projects from their collection.
When searching, try including words like "digital collection", "digitized", or "primary sources" along with other keywords.

Bucknell resources

Selected BU publications
Link to selected digitized Bucknell publications through the Internet Archive.
L'agenda (Bucknell yearbook WorldCat record)
Print copies located in Reference Stacks. Access online, 1889-1960.
Bucknell Special Collections/ University Archives
Offers an abundant array of original and primary sources. Special Collections includes materials on a variety of topics, and University Archives is the repository for campus publications and institutional records.
Stories of the Susquehanna
A collaborative project in environmental humanities, community studies, and natural history.