Primary Sources in American History (J495): Primary Source Databases

Contains poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the earliest published African American poems to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet to achieve national success and recognition.

Includes the full text of diaries, letters, and memoirs from the American Civil War, as well as biographies and a bibliography of the sources in the database.

Includes access to numerous American dramatic works including plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a multitude of other genres from the years between 1714 and 1915. Dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.

See Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926.

Includes the works of more than 200 American poets from the colonial period to the early twentieth century.

ARTstor is a digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.

Includes the full text of non-fiction works of major African Americans leaders-teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures. Works include monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews, published between the colonial period and 1975.

A collection of the full-text of more than 700 first editions of American novels and short stories written before 1875 by major and minor authors of the period.

Contains letters, diaries, memoirs, and accounts of the peoples, cultures, and environment of North America between 1400-1800.

This collection includes virtually all books printed between 1473-1700 in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere during this time period.

Includes access to four Adam Matthew Digital World War I collections, and includes a range of visual and documentary sources such as photographs, diaries, leaflets, posters, postcards, film clips, manuscripts, and rare printed material and ephemera. Collections include: The First World War: A Global Conflict: The material in this collection covers the contribution of soldiers who took part from all corners of the world, including colonial territories, and documents events and battles that occurred internationally, in the Middle East, Africa and Russia.The First World War: Personal Experiences: This collection of primary source documents offers information on subjects such as daily life in the army, trench warfare, training and discipline, food, weapons, equipment, health and medicine. The First World War: Propaganda and Recruitment: This collection focuses on all types of propaganda produced during the Great War of 1914-1918. The First World War: Visual Perspectives and Narratives: This collection presents international perspectives on major events during the war.

Includes personal narratives including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories of immigrants who came to the United States and Canada between 1800 and 1950.

Full-text access to the letters and diaries of over a thousand North American women, from the 17th century to the present. Also includes biographies and an annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Provides a wealth of material about the history of North, Central and South America, the Arctic and Antarctica, and the West Indies, with particular emphasis on the history and culture of the United States from 1500-1926. Includes original accounts of exploration, colonization, pioneering, settlement, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the western movement, Native Americans, slavery and abolition.
Note: The ability to cross-search multiple primary source collections from the provider Gale is now available on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

See Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970.

A digital collection of primary documents on slavery that includes information on the abolitionist movement and conflicts within it; anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period; debates on the subject of colonization. Materials within the collection include books, pamphlets, newspapers, journals, and manuscripts.
Note: The ability to cross-search multiple primary source collections from the provider Gale is now available on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

Contains a range of influential works reflecting the major trends of sociological thought from the eighteenth century to the present. Content includes works by such theorists as Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Jürgen Habermas, Talcott Parsons, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard.

An online archive of publications and documents focusing on women's activism in American public life between 1600 and 2000. The collection is organized around 124 document projects, each posing a new interpretive question and then providing 20 to 50 primary documents that address the question, together with an interpretive introduction and headnotes, bibliography, and related links.

A collection of American novels published between 1851 and 1875. Authors in this collection include Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others.