Primary Sources: Links to Online Primary Resources

In 1984, a professor at Rutgers University stumbled upon a trove of historic data in a courthouse in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Over the next 15 years, Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a noted New Orleans writer and historian, painstakingly uncovered the background of 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries making fortunes for their owners. Poring through documents from all over Louisiana, as well as archives in France, Spain and Texas, Dr. Hall designed and created a database into which she recorded and calculated the information she obtained from these documents about African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations. Together, Dr. Hall, the Center for the Public Domain, and ibiblio.org bring you the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699 - 1820 Database, a user-friendly, searchable, online database that is freely accessible to the public.

The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s. In addition to a wide spectrum of musical performances from around the world, it includes stories, jokes, sermons, personal narratives, interviews conducted by Lomax and his associates, and unique ambient artifacts captured in transit from radio broadcasts, sometimes inadvertently, when Alan left the tape machine running. Not a single piece of recorded sound in Lomax’s audio archive has been omitted: meaning that microphone checks, partial performances, and false starts are also included.

The first "issue" of All Hands was printed as the Bureau of Navigation News Bulletin No. 1 (dated Aug. 30, 1922). Twenty years later, the title was changed to Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin. As America claimed "Victory in Europe" on the cover of June 1945, the magazine's new banner read, All Hands, and the name stuck.

American Journeys 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.

The American Legion National Library and Museum administers the Digital Archive, which represents the library's digital holdings. The Digital Archive provides full-text access to The American Legion magazine, national meeting digests, post and officer manuals, newsletters, press releases, and other publications published by the national organization. Additionally, the archive contains the ruling documents of The American Legion including current resolutions.

An initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Asia for Educators (AFE) is designed to serve faculty and students in world history, culture, geography, art, and literature at the undergraduate and pre-college levels. Links directly to the Primary Sources page.

From the website: "The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. We do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.

The Avalon Project will no doubt contain controversial documents. Their inclusion does not indicate endorsement of their contents nor sympathy with the ideology, doctrines, or means employed by their authors. They are included for the sake of completeness and balance and because in many cases they are by our definition a supporting document."

10 digitized volumes. The scrapbooks were originally compiled by Ruth’s agent, Christy Walsh. Each book is packed with newspaper articles, game scores and all sorts of other memorabilia from Ruth’s career in the 1920s and '30s.

The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.

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 (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

Founded in 1807, the Boston Athenæum is one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries and cultural institutions in the United States. Today its collections comprise over half a million volumes, with particular strengths in Boston history, New England state and local history, biography, English and American literature, and the fine and decorative arts.

British History Online is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. We aim to support the learning, teaching and research of our users from around the world.
BHO was founded by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust in 2003. Our collection currently contains over 1,250 volumes and is always growing.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School is a major site of memory for many Native peoples, as well as a source of study for students and scholars around the globe. This website represents an effort to aid the research process by bringing together, in digital format, a variety of resources that are physically preserved in various locations around the country. Through these resources, we seek to increase knowledge and understanding of the school and its complex legacy, while also facilitating efforts to tell the stories of the many thousands of students who were sent there.

Census records can provide the building blocks of your research. The first Federal Population Census was taken in 1790, and has been taken every ten years since. Because of a 72-year restriction on access to the Census, the most recent year available is 1940. The 1950 Census will be released on April 1, 2022.

The National Archives has the census schedules on microfilm available from 1790 to 1940, and most have now been digitized by our digitization partners. Family researchers generally find it most helpful to begin with the most current census and work backwards as a strategy for locating people in earlier generations.

This special collection presents children’s books selected from the General and Rare Book Collections at the Library of Congress. The collection includes classic works that are still read by children today, and lesser-known treasures drawn from the Library’s extensive collection of historically significant children’s books. The books in this collection were published in the United States and England before 1924, are no longer under copyright, and free to read, share, and reuse however you’d like.

In recognition of the sesquicentennial of the start of the American Civil War, Civil War in the American South provides a central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). This site currently links to more than 10,000 items from 32 libraries. The shared collection continues to grow, providing ready access to a world-class collection of primary source materials from the American Civil War era.

Colonial North America at Harvard Library provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of an ongoing, multi-year project. When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 650,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America.

Columbia's digital library collection websites are a gateway to digital reproductions and descriptions of photographs, posters, drawings, objects, ephemera, and manuscripts as well as other archival material from Columbia's rare and special collections.

The Congressional Record is the official daily record of the debates and proceedings of the U.S. Congress. The Daily Digest summarizes floor and committee actions in the Senate and the House of Representatives, is an index to the day's proceedings.

Collections digitized and curated by Cornell University Library.

Coroners’ inquests are some of the richest records we have of life and death in the nineteenth century South. As mortals, we all die, but we do not die equally. Race, place, gender, profession, behavior, and good and bad luck play large roles in determining how we go out of the world. Collecting extant coroners' inquests for the state of South Carolina between 1800 and 1900, "CSI: Dixie" provides rare glimpses into Victorian-era suicide, homicide, infanticide, abortion, child abuse, spousal abuse, master-slave murder, and slave on slave violence.

The Digital Library of Appalachia seeks to provide online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The thirty-three member libraries, archives, and museums associated with the Appa

The Digital Library of Georgia is a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.

A portal that delivers students, teachers, scholars, and the public to incredible resources, wherever they may be in America. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through the united collection of millions of items, including by timeline, map, format, subject, and partner.

Run by the National Archives, DocsTeach provides audio, video, charts, graphs, maps and more. No account is required to view the digitized records.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings. The UNC University Library is committed to the long-term availability of these collections and their online records. An editorial board guides development of this digital library.

Digitized historic photographs, advertisements, texts & more from Duke's unique library collections. 860 collections represented.

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA was published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invited scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site.

This page is a subset of texts derived from the three major online Sourcebooks listed below, along with added texts and web site indicators. For more contextual information, for instance about Western imperialism, or the history of a given period, check out these web sites.

This biographical resource site attempts to answer such questions through an exploration of important themes in early American history, with an online collection of documents and images, as well as curriculum materials for history courses at the elementary through university levels. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has provided generous support for this project.

With the help of scholars, educators, and family historians, Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) is rapidly expanding in 2021. We are building a robust, open-source architecture to discover, connect, and visualize 600,000 (and growing) people records and 5 million data points. From archival fragments and spreadsheet entries, we see the lives of the enslaved in richer detail. Explore the data and life stories on Enslaved.org and read articles on data-driven research about the lives of the enslaved in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.

These open access sources are readily available to all -- without fees or subscriptions. Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.
In addition you will find video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation. The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural). The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.

Europeana.eu is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage. More than 3,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana. These range from major international names like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library and the Louvre to regional archives and local museums from every member of the European Union. Together, their assembled collections let users explore Europe's cultural and scientific heritage from prehistory to the modern day.

An index of scholarly websites that offer online access to digitised primary sources on the history of Europe, created by the European University Insitute. Search collections by keyword or browse by country, language, period or subject.

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. The series, which is produced by the Department of State's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 450 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands...
...often referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine. The Bureau also assumed custody of confiscated lands or property in the former Confederate States, border states, District of Columbia, and Indian Territory. The bureau records were created or maintained by bureau headquarters, the assistant commissioners and the state superintendents of education and included personnel records and a variety of standard reports concerning bureau programs and conditions in the states.

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.

The digital archive of Colombian-born writer Gabriel García Márquez includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The searchable, online archive is comprised of approximately 27,500 items from García Márquez's papers, and was made possible by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

The faculty and students of the Hanover College History Department initiated the Hanover Historical Texts Project in 1995, at a time when few primary sources were available outside of published anthologies. To make primary texts readily available for classroom use, they selected important documents, scanned print versions that were out of copyright, converted the scans into HTML format, proofread the resulting documents to correct OCR errors, edited them to provide page breaks, page numbers, and bibliographical information, and posted them online. Most of the texts in the Hanover Historical Texts Collection are in public domain.

The main business in both Houses of Parliament often takes the form of a debate including discussion on a Bill, general topics of interest, or issues selected by the major parties. All these debates are published in a daily record called Hansard. Published Parliamentary material has been digitized and made available on the Internet by various organisations. Please note that Parliament is not responsible for the content of external websites.

Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.

HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. The initial focus of the partnership has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This includes both in copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives.

This project locates, digitalizes, archives, and disseminates online photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands outside that country. These are often of even greater historic interest than might ordinarily be the case, as the destruction of materials in China through war and revolution in the twentieth century, and especially during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, means that there is a relative dearth today of accessible photographic records in China itself.

Historic Newspapers of South Carolina provides free online access to historic local and regional newspapers originating throughout South Carolina since the 1700s.

Hong Kong Government Reports Online (HKGRO) is a full-text image database providing online access to pre-World War II issues of four major government publications, namely, Administrative Report, Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Hansard and Hong Kong Government Gazette. It contains a wide range of information, such as official notifications, proceedings of the Legislative Council, statistics, and reports of government departments and special committees, which are essential to students and scholars in conducting research on Hong Kong.

The collections contained within the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library are largely composed of digital versions of paper documents from the Ike Skelton CARL collections and student papers produced at the US Army Command and General Staff College. We have recently partnered with several Army educational and historical organizations whose collections appear here also.

Imperial War Museums is the world’s leading museum of war and conflict. Founded while the First World War was still raging, it gives voice to the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people forced to live their lives in a world torn apart by conflict.

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. There are three sourcebooks presented: Ancient History, Medieval, and Modern History. A link to instructions on how to cite the website is included on the home page. The website's most recent update appears to be in 2006.

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.

The Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) produces digital collections and projects that support research about the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and historically interconnected sites in the Atlantic World.

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. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts.

Mapping Inequality brings one of the country's most important archives to the public. HOLC's documents contain a wealth of information about how government officials, lenders, and real estate interests surveyed and ensured the economic health of American cities. And with the help of ongoing research, we continue to learn at what cost such measures were realized.

Visualizing Cultures weds images and scholarly commentary in innovative ways to illuminate social and cultural history. NOTE: This link opens the "About" page; navigation to various units using the link at the top of the page.

This vast online collection of World War I era newspaper clippings is from a single unique source: the 400-volume, 80,000-page set, World War History: Daily Records and Comments as Appeared in American and Foreign Newspapers, 1914-1926. Beginning with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 and extending to the November 11, 1918 armistice and years after, the clippings yield significant information about the political, social, cultural, and economic impact of the war as it is taking place and its aftermath.

Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets. This link goes directly to the Documents page of the website.

The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), headed by the Director of Naval History, is an Echelon II command headquartered on the Washington Navy Yard, D.C.

For 70 years the New Jersey Jewish News was the newspaper of record for New Jersey’s Jewish Community. The paper chronicled the social, religious, personal and business developments of the community. In addition to these local issues, its pages included national and world events affecting the community; Jewish culture and the arts; and Jewish holidays, celebrations, and other topics of interest.

The NPGallery Digital Asset Management System is an enterprise system for storing, organizing, and sharing photos and other digital files. NPGallery's central online repository offers a place for the NPS to store digital assets, including photos, illustrations, audio files, videos, and documents. T

The P. T. Barnum Digital Collection draws from the holdings of the Barnum Museum and the Bridgeport History Center, Bridgeport Public Library, both located in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The 1000+ archival items and artifacts selected for this collection pertain to the world-famous showman, Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891), and many of his associates, such as Charles S. Stratton (“Gen. Tom Thumb”), Jenny Lind, and Jumbo the Elephant, as well as his American Museum in New York City, circuses, four homes in Bridgeport, and other career, civic-life, and family-life topics. Both the planning and implementation phases of this project received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

McMaster University Library, Ontario, Canada. Our site includes almost 3000 records, organized around some 50 case studies. As well as a timeline to provide chronological context, some of the case studies include audio or video, and we have transcribed many of the original materials for easier reading.

Perseus is a growing collection of online resources for studying the ancient world. Materials include ancient texts and translations, maps, articles, essays, and images form over 70 museums around the world.

ROHA's digital archive features 1,175 life course oral history interviews and over 32,000 pages of fully text-searchable transcripts. All content is available to students, teachers, and scholars free of charge for educational purposes.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions. The online checklist also contains links to existing digital images from our collection and will be updated as new images are added.

South Carolina and the Civil War brings together eyewitness views and accounts of this period of American history, selected from the rich holdings of University of South Carolina Libraries. Books, diaries, sheet music, maps, letters, photographs and illustrations all provide glimpses of everyday life during exceptional times. This collection provides students and other researchers with primary sources on the Confederate and Union soldiers, women, African Americans, and others who lived in camps and on battlefields, in urban and rural areas, at the homefront and on both sides of the blockade during our bloodiest conflict.

The South Carolina Digital Library provides free access to historic materials, such as photographs, manuscripts, journals, books, oral histories, objects, etc. illustrating the history and culture of South Carolina from over 40 cultural heritage institutions across the state. Over 200,000 items have been added so far.

The Spartanburg County Public Libraries Digitization Program creates digital collections of local history materials from the Kennedy Room of Local and South Carolina History and Cleveland Genealogical Department and makes them available:
to enhance local history and genealogical research;
to increase access to its holdings;
to promote lifelong learning by the citizens of Spartanburg, South Carolina and the public at large.

Use the search engine or browse list of hyperlinked keywords to find recent images of Alaska, the northeast U.S. and in other regional categories, and historic images as well. Most, if not all, the images are 5″ x 7″, suitable for printing, and free for public use.

The UCLA Digital Library Program (DLP) serves as the catalyst for the creation, management, and delivery of digital content in support of the UCLA Library mission and goals. The Program provides for the storage and dissemination of digital objects, including text, images, audio, and video in their various digital manifestations and combinations.

The Digital Collections include historical and cultural material that has been scanned and made available online. These collections feature scanned material from several collections and departments at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Library.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has digitized the 17-volume set, United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the end of the conflict, and it is now available on govinfo. Published in 1948, this publication compiles key documents, maps, and records for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) from the start of the American involvement in World War I through the occupation of Germany.

Use the menu link in the upper left-hand corner of the website to navigate to the "Collections Search" link located under "Research and Collections".

A direct link to the Digital Collections Library of the University of South Carolina, Columbia Campus.

The Special Collections Digital Lab creates research quality digital collections of texts, images, and audio materials and makes these collections available to scholars throughout the world. These digital collections will eventually represent the entire range of Special Collections materials: historical manuscripts and photographs, children's literature, Mississippiana, rare books, oral histories, and editorial cartoons.

This site carries several projects that range from historical photograph collections to current collections gathered by this university’s Herbarium. Other projects include early images of Egypt and electronic theses and dissertations.

Resources within the collections are free and publicly accessible online. They are loosely organized into collections that span a range of subjects including art, ecology, literature, history, music, natural resources, science, social sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. Digital resources include text-based materials such as books, journal series, and manuscript collections, photographic images, slides, maps, prints, posters, audio, and video.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages
that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

This interactive map was designed and built by Andrew Kahn using data from over 20,000 voyages listed in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Andrew Kahn is the assistant interactives editor for Slate, a daily magazine on the web.

The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project (WVHP), established at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 1998, documents the contributions of women in the military and related service organizations since World War I. The WVHP includes a wide range of source material including photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, oral histories, military patches and insignia, uniforms, and posters, as well as published works.

The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world.

This vast online collection of World War I era newspaper clippings is from a single unique source: the 400-volume, 80,000-page set, World War History: Daily Records and Comments as Appeared in American and Foreign Newspapers, 1914-1926.

Welcome to the Yellowstone sound library, where you can immerse yourself in the aural landscape of America's first national park. The files available here were recorded in the park and are in the public domain. They may be downloaded and used without limitation; however, please credit the "National Park Service " where appropriate.

Welcome to the Yellowstone video library. The files available here were recorded in the park and are in the public domain. They may be downloaded and used without limitation; however, please credit the "National Park Service" where appropriate. These files have been encoded at their native resolution using the H.264 codec.