Research Guides: Primary Sources: Online Primary Documents

Mixed Collections

These collections offer a variety of types of primary sources (documents, photographs, videos, etc) for a wide range of time periods and areas of interest.

Library of Congress Digital Collections Access online collections: view maps & photographs; read letters, diaries & newspapers; hear personal accounts of events; listen to sound recordings & watch historic films.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) The Digital Public Library of America brings together photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available.
World Digital Library Links to over 5,000 primary documents and images from collections around the world. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Search by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource.
British Library Collection of primary and secondary sources
Internet Archive
Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York (DCMNY) provides online access to digital collections of libraries, archives, museums and historical societies located in and around New York City.

MasterFILE Premier This link opens in a new window Contains full text for more than 1,750 periodicals covering general reference, business, health, education, general science, multicultural issues and much more. This database also contains full text for nearly 500 reference books, 86,019 biographies, 105,787 primary source documents, and an Image Collection of 293,480 photos, maps & flags.

EuroDocs EuroDocs access to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.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.

These collections are a short list of examples of collections that focus on specialized areas of research. To find a digital collection relevant to your area of research, ask for help from a librarian.

SlaveVoyages The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history, including the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American trafficking.
Virginia Memory Digital collection provided by the Library of Virginia including photographs, Virginia newspapers, maps, and public records.
Documenting the American South 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.
North American Slave Narratives "North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of Black people struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
Digital Library on American Slavery The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South.
Geography of Slavery in Virginia The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers.
Sydney howard Gay's "Record of Fugitives" This digital collection is of the records kept by Sydnew Howard Gay, the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, of every fugitive slave who came to his office.
Discovering American Women's History Online This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.
Women Working, 1800-1930 Women Working, 1800 - 1930 provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard's library and museum collections.
Women's Travel Diaries Over 100 diaries written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.
Women Veterans Historical Project 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.
Avalon Project (Yale University) 150 historical documents in the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government, from the Athenian Constitution to key documents of World War II and the Cold War.
Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture The Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture collects and creates electronic resources for study and research of the decorative arts, with a particular focus on Early America. Included are electronic texts and facsimiles, image databases, and Web resources.
London Lives 1690-1800 London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners.

The archives of many famous or influential individuals have been put online. Here is a short list of some examples.

Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection This digital collection was created to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. It incorporates images of all of Poe's manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center (some with transcriptions by the Poe Society of Baltimore) with a selection of related archival materials, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections.
Albert Einstein Archives The Albert Einstein Archives contains the largest collection of original manuscripts by Einstein in the world and includes his vast correspondence with the most influential physicists and intellectuals of the 20th century.
John F. Kennedy Digital Archives
Charles Darwin's Papers Online This is the largest ever publication of Darwin papers and manuscripts, totalling about 20,000 items in over 100,000 electronic images.
Thomas Jefferson Papers An electronic archive from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Henry Executive Papers Digital Collection, 1776-1778 This Library of Virginia digital collection covers two years of Patrick Henry's term in office as the Governor of Virginia.

Historic Newspapers

American

Virginia's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Full text newspapers from the state of Virginia covering the time of colonial development to World War I.
Harper's Weekly, 1857-1877 This link opens in a new window Historic newspaper, including illustrations, advertisements, and news stories.

British Newspaper Archive Digitized historic newspapers from Britain. Hosted by the British Library. Select the check box, "Display only Free Content" for more efficient searching.
Chronicling America This site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. The data is open and can be used outside of the platform.
Friend of Man Friend of Man is one of the most significant and little studied newspapers documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements.
Historic Mexican & Mexican-American Press The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.

Other institutions have put together many helpful lists of places to find primary sources online.

Internet Modern History Sourcebook Links to full text historical documents, such as philosophical writings and court decisions.
African American History Links to primary sources in African American history. From the University of Washington.

Other institutions have put together many helpful lists of places to find primary sources online.

NINES: Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online NINES provides peer-review of digital resources and archives created by scholars in nineteenth-century studies. Search the site for digitized nineteenth-century documents from 114 sites.
Victorian Web Links to over 61,408 documents on the age of Victoria, including: literature, painting, sculpture, book illustration, history, religion, though the sections on history and technology include hundreds of documents.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook Links to full text historical documents, such as philosophical writings and court decisions.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook Contains thousands of sources from medieval writers, with the goal to replace the need for students to purchase a separate sourcebook

Books and Manuscripts

Books and pamphlets written during the era you are researching are also considered primary sources. You can find many print items that have been digitized in the following collections:

Internet Archive
Slavery & Abolition in the US Slavery and Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s is a digital collection of books and pamphlets that demonstrate the varying ideas and beliefs about slavery in the United States as expressed by Americans throughout the nineteenth century.
Cornell University Witchcraft Collection Cornell’s Witchcraft Collection contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe.
Early Modern Manuscripts and Archives Western manuscripts and archives from the years 1500 to 1800 from Oxford's Bodleian Library.
HathiTrust Digital Library HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law.
19th century European-American views on Life in and the Peoples of the American West Collection of period books on Native Americans, the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century, life in the West and George Armstrong Custer.

Data & Statistics

American

The African American Electorate by Hanes Walton; Sherman C. Puckett; Donald R. Deskins
Call Number: JK1924.W36 2012
ISBN: 9780872895089
Publication Date: 2012-07-20

Historical Statistics of the United States Millenium Edition This link opens in a new window
Includes over 37,000 data series on a variety of topics such as migration, health, crime, slavery, American Indians, and poverty.