Primary sources for U.S. history
These databases provide indexing and full-text documents of primary sources covering United States history.
Getting started with academic research | Overview of U.S. history | Recommended databases | Primary sources | U.S. Civil War | General history databases
Early English Books Online from Chadwyck-Healey
Early English Books Online from Chadwick
Early English Books Online contains scanned page images (GIF and TIFF) of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Coverages includes all subject areas with strong coverage in the humanities, performing arts, and education. Each is full-text searchable. Limited to simultaneous users.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online - ECCO from Gale
Eighteenth Century Collections Online - ECCO from Gale
ECCO provides full-text books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements in HTML and PDF. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
America's Historical Imprints from Newsbank-Readex
America's Historical Imprints from Newsbank-Readex
America's Historical Imprints is a digital collection containing virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America over a 200-year period. It is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties, and more. Scanned pages available as JPEG, TIFF, and PDF.
America's Historical Newspapers from Newsbank Readex
America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1922 from Newsbank Readex
Cover-to-cover reproductions of 1,000+ US newspapers in PDF. Restrict searches to dates/eras, article types (news & opinion, election returns, letters, poetry/songs, legislative, prices, advertisements, matrimony & death notices), region/state, and newspaper name. Includes the digital versions of the Early American Newspapers microforms collection, African American Newspapers 1827-1998, and a collection of Virginia newspapers (labeled Selected Historical Newspapers).
ProQuest Historical Periodicals
ProQuest Historical Periodicals
ProQuest Historical Periodicals indexes citations and full text of 200 years of American magazines and journals and important newspapers of record. 1740-2007.
HarpWeek: The Civil War Era and Reconstruction I & II (1857-1877)
HarpWeek: The Civil War Era and Reconstruction I & II (1857-1877)
Browse, search, and retrieve full page images of Harper's Weekly, which chronicles the events of the American Civil War and reconstruction years. Page images are JPG; full text is HTML and PDF. Harper’s Weekly is a consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century.
American History in Video from Alexander Street Press
American History in Video from Alexander Street Press
American History in Video provides streaming Flash videos covering American history, most with transcripts. It includes programs from the History Channel, A&E, and Biography Channel, plus documentaries, newsreels, and archival footage. Users who establish profiles can create playlists of videos and video clips with persistent URLs to include in course pages. Video coverage from 1492 to late 20th century.
American Memory from the Library of Congress
American Memory from the Library of Congress
American Memory is a gateway to the Library of Congress’s digitized American historical materials, organized into more than 100 thematic collections. Original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each collection provides explanatory features to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections. 1400s-present.
American Journeys
American Journeys
American Journeys indexes the full text of 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. Includes more than 150 rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives. 1000s-1840s
Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600-2000
Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600-2000
Women and Social Movements in the US indexes citations and full text of primary documents and archives; book, film, and website reviews; teaching tools; a directory of organizations; and a chronology of women's history. 1745-present.
Oral History Online from Alexander Street Press
Oral History Online from Alexander Street Press
Oral History Online is both an index of full-text interviews and other oral history narratives and free oral history information online. The narratives cover diverse subjects, including civil rights and race relations, labor history, African American history, women's history, immigration studies, political history, American Indian history, regional history, and more.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from the Library of Congress
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from the Library of Congress
Allows searching and viewing newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and finding information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Full-text newspapers from Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington are currently available.
Making of America from Cornell University
Making of America from Cornell University
Making of America provides digital reproductions of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure. Content is provided in text, GIF, and PDF formats. Major segments of this collection include magazines, ebooks, and Civil War documents. 1840-1900.
Making of America from the University of Michigan
Making of America from the University of Michigan
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. Content is available in text, GIF, and PDF formats. 1840-1900.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
A digital publishing initiative that provides online access to primary sources such as texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, maps, literary works, oral history interviews, and songs. 1500s-present.
- Bruce Pencek
- College Librarian for Social Sciences & History
- (540) 231-5806 (Lane Hall 311 office -- during regular office hours)
- (540) 231-2140 (Newman Library 3050 office -- for most purposes)
- bpencek@vt.edu
-
3050 Newman Library
311 Lane Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24062-9001
Legend
Resource is restricted to current Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff. Use Off Campus Sign In if not on the campus network.
Resource is licensed for Virginia Tech alumni access. Use Alumni Library Portal Sign In to access. Freely accessible database, available to anyone without restriction Sponsored by VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia.
Mobile interface available, see description for link. Screencast tutorial available, icon linked to list. Contents of this database are in Summon.
Resource provides Get VText links to access full text. Resource provides open access publishing opportunities and open access publications.
Resource provides self archiving opportunities and open access documents.