History Primary Resources

Library of Congress collection consists primarily of material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.

Through this website, you will be able to read and search through thousands of records from Alexander Hamilton as well as records from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and see firsthand the growth of democracy and the birth of the Republic.

This website contains the journal of Alice Williamson, a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Gallatin, Tennessee. Entries from February to September 1864 chronicle the occupation of this region by Union forces. Civil War-specific vocabulary or names may be clicked on, allowing the reader to go to a webpage giving a more detailed explanation of the word/name.

GIGI, the Graphic Interface of Gathered Images, is the American Antiquarian Society’s Digital Assets Management system. Collected in this image archive are representatives from all of the Society’s curatorial collections including manuscripts, rare books, children’s books, graphic arts (including prints and fine arts), newspapers and periodicals.

An Annotated Guide to Their Papers and Publications.

"Contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later. Read the words of explorers, Indians, missionaries, traders and settlers as they lived through the founding moments of American history. View, search, print, or download more than 150 rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives from the library and archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society."

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

The Radicalism Collection includes books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera covering a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, economic, and cultural issues and movements in the United States and throughout the world. Topics include: American Indian Movement, Asian America, Birth Control, Black Panthers, Hollywood Ten, I. W. W., Ku Klux Klan, The Rosenberg Case, Sacco-Vanzetti, Scottsboro Boys, Students for a Democratic Society, The Masses, Wounded Knee.

Primary source materials in the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government

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.

This website offers a wide variety of political cartoons by Thomas Nast. The site contains primary source cartoons from Thomas Nast which deal with historical events and topics such as the Civil War, politics, race, suffrage and much more. The site also gives a brief description of each cartoon and the historical contexts in which they were created.

Presents records and acts of Congress from the Journals of the Continental Congress through The Congressional Globe, which ceased publication with the Forty-second Congress in 1873. Provides a documentary history of the construction of the nation, development of the federal government, and its role in the national life. Offered as part of the American Memory online resource compiled by the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress.

Illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, The materials in this online compilation are drawn from collections at The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley; The Ethnic Studies Library, University of California Berkeley; and The California Historical Society, San Francisco.

The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale

Contains digitized versions of the Rose O'Neal Greenhow Papers; the Alison Williamson Diary and the Sarah E. Thompson Papers.

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) is Cornell's principal repository of rare books, manuscripts and archival materials in history, literature, music, the arts, science, natural history, and technology.

The Densho Digital Repository contains historic photographs, documents, newspaper articles, letters, and other primary sources documenting Japanese-American life before, during, and after World War II. Pre-war photographs focus on immigration to the United States and aspects of Japanese-American life, while WWII-era materials center on what life was like in various internment camps throughout the (mostly) Western United States and post-WWII collections focus on the late 20th century (1990s onward) pictures of Japanese Americans attending reunions, visiting internment camp historic sites, or giving interviews of their experiences in the camps during the war.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.

The Foreign Relations of the United States series is the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication. The series is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian and printed volumes are available from the Government Printing Office.

FRUS begins with the administration of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. There are two cumulative indexes covering 1861-1899 and 1900-1918. The organization of FRUS is generally chronological, but the dates of the volumes do not necessarily reflect the dates of documentary history. For example, the volumes for 1900-1918 do not include the records dealing with World War I or the Russian Revolution. Each volume has a subject and author index. There is also typically a table of sources and abbreviations at the beginning of each volume.

A growing body of presidential and personal papers related to the FDR presidency. Included are the President's Secretary File(PSF); British & German Diplomatic files; US-Vatican Diplomatic files, Fireside chats; and the Hackett Papers.

The University of Maryland provides samples of some of the documents found in the sourcebook, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. These documents pertain to the history of race and labor during the Civil War and after emancipation.

Google Books is a free tool that searches the full text of materials obtained by Google through publisher/author agreements, along with digitized copies of print materials owned by Google partner libraries throughout the world.

Contains digitized primary documents and images of the American Civil War and other historical subjects.

The Hanover Historical Texts Collection makes available digital versions of historical texts for use in history and humanities courses: 17th Century America;18th Century America; 19th Century America; 20th Century America.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

History Unbound will facilitate teachers’ ability to locate and review documents that conform to the Social Studies New York State Common Core standards and improve student preparation for the NYS Regents Examinations by pointing to the Library of Congress Primary Sets, New York Heritage collections and secondary literature including lesson plans and web-based and regional face-to-face workshops on inquiry based learning.

Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.

The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Comprehensive bibliography of information, documents and links of U.S. labor history sites on the internet.

The Library of Congress has made digitized versions of collection materials available online since 1994, concentrating on its most rare collections and those unavailable anywhere else.

The Teaching with Primary Sources Program works with colleges and other educational organizations to deliver professional development programs that help teachers use the Library of Congress's rich reservoir of digitized primary source materials to design challenging, high-quality instruction.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Making of America (MoA) is 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.

from New York Historical Society.

The Massachusetts Historical Society is one of the nation’s most respected research libraries. Our extraordinary collections provide an unparalleled record of American history and are enjoyed by scholars and the public alike. The MHS possesses a remarkable assembly of personal papers of three presidents, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The collections also contain accounts of the lives of thousands of ordinary Americans.

100 milestone documents, is compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.

The National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA) is a partnership between the University at Albany Libraries and the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) at the University's School of Criminal Justice. In 1999, researchers at the School of Criminal Justice formally established the CPRI. Its overarching goals were research and education -- initiate capital punishment research activities, facilitate collaboration among researchers, and make findings and information available to legal and criminal justice policymakers, practitioners, and the public.

The National Security Archive's continually growing collection of Electronic Briefing Books (EBBs) provide timely online access to critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and much more. Updated frequently, the EBBs represent just a small sample of the documents in our published and unpublished collections.

Indexes close to 500,000 records of archival and manuscript collections in research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical societies throughout North America

NYPL Digital is your gateway to The New York Public Library's rare and unique international holdings in digitized form, including: Historic maps, rare prints and photographs, iIlluminated manuscripts, unusual printed ephemera, sound files and moving images, original art and more.

The Papers of Jefferson Davis, a documentary editing project based at Rice University in Houston, Texas, is publishing a multi-volume edition of his letters and speeches, several of which can be found on this web site. The site also provides extensive information on Davis and his family and numerous images.

Sources on the history of the 19th-century United States.

An index on the presidents of the United States and contains information and documents of their speeches, writings, biographies and anything else related to their person or the office they are holding.

The Library of Congress is home to many of the most important documents in American history. This Web site provides links to materials digitized from the collections of the Library of Congress that supplement and enhance the study of these crucial documents.

A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar.

Documents, methods, routes, techniques.

Collection of letters, speeches, documents, web sites, books, and articles on significant people and events in American political thought and history. Rather than being a comprehensive list of available resources, it is meant to be a list of the best resources available on the given subject.

This guide combines links to the major online collections of Jefferson's writings that have been made accessible by University of Virginia, as well as by other institutions.

Includes digital collections for both US and global history.

Includes Civil War manuscripts, diaries, oral history interviews with Oklahoma Native Americans, and photographs. From the University of Oklahoma.

The National Archives, through its National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), and The University of Virginia Press created this site and make freely available online the historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America: thousands of records from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and the growth of democracy and the birth of the Republic.

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.

Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

The National Archives at New York City maintains the historically significant records of Federal agencies and courts in New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands dating from 1685 to the present.

An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

100 milestone documents, is compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.

National Archives and various university and trade presses have been editing and publishing the papers of different American Presidents and their Associates for years. University of Virginia provides access.