Primary Sources

This digitized collection contains virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1800. Find information about life in early America, including agriculture, foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, and witchcraft. This collection is derived from Charles Evans' comprehensive American Bibliography and includes the 36,000+ works found in the microform edition plus 1,000+ additional digitized works. This collection contains a wide variety of publication types, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, and treaties.

This database provides access to two separate collections, American Periodicals Series Online (APS Online) and American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries (APCRL). It contains over 1,100 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. Each issue is digitized and searchable from cover to cover, including all articles, advertisements, illustrations, editorial cartoons, obituaries, letters to the editor, and other types of content. Subject coverage includes history, literature, history of science & medicine, law, news & magazines, politics, religion, education, women's studies, art, and American studies.

This collection provides access to digitized and fully searchable American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912. A wide variety of publication types are included, such as general interest magazines, religious magazines, periodicals for women and children, and specialized publications in literature, science, agriculture, medicine, and related fields. Each periodical may include a variety of content types, such as articles, poetry, short stories, serialized novels, editorials, cartoons, and advertisements. Subjects covered in the collection reach into every facet of American life, including science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion.

This collection is drawn from Joseph Sabin's famed nineteenth century bibliography "Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America from Its Discovery to the Present Time". This digital collection offers a perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late fifteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Covering more than 400 years in North, Central, and South America and the West Indies, this collection highlights the social, political, and religious beliefs, culture, and contemporary opinions through sermons, political tracts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, legislation, and first-hand documentation of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, westward movement, Native Americans, and military actions.

Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars, researchers, and students at the college and university level. A multi-disciplinary resource, collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Further explore African American, American, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern Studies; British and European History; Business and Economic History; Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; Health and Environmental Sciences; International Relations; and Law, Politics, and Radical Studies. Collections are chosen based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.

Gale Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows users to search across all of their Gale primary source collections. This includes the Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Archives Unbound, Crime, Punishment & Popular Culture, Sabin America, the Making of Modern Law, the Making of the Modern World, the Times Digital Archive, and the Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive.

ProQuest History Vault consists of manuscript and archival collections digitized in partnership and from a wide variety of archival institutions. Major collection areas in History Vault focus on the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century, Southern Life and Slavery, Women's Rights, International Relations, American Politics and Society with a strong focus on the 20th Century, and labor unions, workers and radical politics in the 20th Century. On the topic of civil rights and Black Freedom, History Vault contains records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE. History Vault's collections on Slavery and Southern plantations candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society and provide some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system. Many of the collections in History Vault were originally available in microfilm from the University Publications of America (UPA) research collections and others come from the University Microfilms International (UMI) research collections with additional collections scanned from the original documents.

Reader's Guide Retrospective 1890-1982 is a comprehensive online database that indexes articles from popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada. It covers a vast time span, providing access to over 3 million articles from approximately 375 leading magazines published between 1890 and 1982. This resource offers valuable insights into 20th-century American history and culture, allowing users to explore contemporary accounts of significant events in politics, fashion, media, film, television, health, and science. The database features subject-based indexing, making it easy for researchers, students, and historians to locate relevant articles on specific topics. It serves as a digital version of the original print Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, preserving its extensive bibliographic compilation while enhancing accessibility and searchability. This tool is particularly useful for those seeking to understand historical perspectives on various subjects through the lens of popular media.

The C19 Index comprises tens of millions of records and provides integrated access to the most important finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers, archives, and reference material. Browse the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC), which indexes all printed works published in Britain, its colonies, and the United States of America and includes well-known and obscure works of literature, important translations, legal documents, political pamphlets, medical and scientific monographs, and periodicals. Search American and British Periodicals, Cotgreave's Contents-Subject Index to General and Periodical Literature, An Index to Legal Periodical Literature, Niles' Weekly Register, Poole's and Stead's Indexes to Periodical Literature, and The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Further, search House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, and the digital collections of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.

The database titled "European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750" is an authoritative bibliographic resource that provides comprehensive citations of European works related to the Americas during the early colonial period. It includes over 32,000 citations drawn from the six-volume set European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas. This extensive collection encompasses a wide range of topics, including British colonies, commerce, discoveries, religious orders, and the activities of pirates, as well as the roles of the Dutch and French in America. By documenting the perspectives and portrayals of Native American peoples alongside European exploration narratives, this database serves as a critical tool for researchers and historians interested in understanding the complex interactions between Europe and the Americas during a transformative era.