Database List By Format: Primary Source Documents

Nineteenth Century British Library Newspapers offers full runs of national, regional and local 19th century British newspapers, taken directly from the holdings of the British Library. The content includes 48 titles, totaling approximately 2.2 million pages, selected to reflect the social and political developments of the times in which they were published.

19th Century UK Periodicals is a database using content from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Australia, and many other sources, to make available digitized versions of key 19th Century UK Periodicals.

African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century provides first-hand reports of the cultural life and history of African-Americans in the United States.

America's Historical Newspapers is a comprehensive database designed to enable searching and browsing American newspapers published over three centuries. The collection is continually expanding and provides access to digital fascimiles of thousands of titles from all fifty states.

The American Memory project of the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program digitizes distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the Library of Congress, including photographs, full-text manuscripts and rare books, maps, recorded sound and moving pictures. To achieve its goal, this unique public-private program, also works in cooperation with members of the Digital Library Federation and other libraries and archives throughout the United States. For example, digital collections from the LC/Ameritech Digital Library Competition are included.

A collection of rare and original documents that includes books, journals, photographs, and more, American West chronicles the expansion of American from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Overview of the political history of the Middle East in the 20th Century, based on primary source documents from The National Archives, London. Original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through to the Black September war of 1970-1. Major policy statements are set out in their fullest context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of colonial administration and, following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, British diplomacy towards Israel and the Arab states.

A unique fully-searchable collection, Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940, Part I brings together approximately 1.5 million pages of primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Rare and unique content from microfilm, newsletters, organizational papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of primary sources sheds light on the gay rights movement, activism, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and more. Part II provides coverage of the development, culture, and society of LGBTQ groups in the latter half of the twentieth century, providing new perspectives on a diverse community through materials such as oral history transcripts, diaries, and letters, as well as periodicals and manuscripts.

ARTstor consists of a repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data including the tools to actively use those images and a restricted-usage environment that seeks to balance the rights of content providers with the needs and interests of content users. The ARTstor collections are comprised of contributions from museums, individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives. All images are accompanied by comprehensive metadata and are rights-cleared for educational use.

The Digital Archives of the Beethoven-Haus provides online access to the unique collections of the Beethoven-Haus, including music first edition scores, correspondence, and pictures. The collection consists of more than 37,000 scanned 16,00 audio files, and 7,600 text files.

Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more. It combines several resources for research and teaching in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index.

Consists of two major collections from the British Library which span three hundred years of newspaper publishing in the U.K.—17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century Newspapers.

The Hoagy Carmichael Collection is a digital collection of Indiana University's extensive materials related to the composer Hoagy Carmichael. Sound recordings, scores and photos, correspondence, and other items are available online.

Contains earliest known complete text of the New Testament from 4th Century Greek text.

The purpose of the "Codices Electronici Sangallenses" (Digital Abbey Library of St. Gallen) is to create a virtual library of the manuscripts in the Abbey Library of St. Gall. The collection of 2100 manuscripts (650+ of which have been digitized) includes many examples of early music.

Collection consists of items originating from prisoners held in German concentration camps, internment and transit camps, Gestapo prisons, and POW camps, during and just prior to World War II. Most of the collection consists of letters written or received by prisoners, but also includes receipts for parcels, money orders and personal effects; paper currency; and realia, including Star of David badges that Jews were forced to wear.

The collection contains correspondence addressed to Emiliano Zapata; combat reports; relations with troop commanders and officers; promotion and appointment requests; allegations of abuses committed by military personnel; applications for food, uniforms and ammunition; letters and telegrams on the transfer of prisoners.

The Cuban Culture and Cultural Relations, 1959- resource from Brill is a primary-source collection that documents the literary, intellectual and cultural milieu of Revolutionary Cuba. Sourced from the archives of the Casa de las Américas in Havana, it provides unprecedented access to files covering more than a thousand writers, thinkers and artists from Cuba and abroad.

The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts is a uniquely exhaustive resource for historians, theologians, political scientists, and sociologists studying the religious and social upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries. The database gives researchers immediate, web-based access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. In addition, it offers in-depth browsing and searching of a treasury of theological writings, biblical commentaries, confessional documents, sermons, letters, polemical treatises, and other works by hundreds of Protestant authors.

Collection of significant primary documents central to U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945.

DRAM is a scholarly resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. The collection contains over 4,000 albums' worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 42 independent labels and archives. In addition, it contains a diverse catalogue of American music represented by the New World Records and CRI labels.

The purpose of E-Codices is to create a virtual library of all of the medieval and selected early modern manuscripts (including music manuscripts) of Switzerland. The virtual library currently contains over 800 manuscripts.

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 provides a comprehensive set of American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century. Based on the noted “American Bibliography, 1801-1819” by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker, this collection contains more than four million pages from over 36,000 items—including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions.

Through Early American Imprints, Series II, students and scholars can extensively research westward expansion, the development of American arts (literature, music, painting, etc.), the progression of American political thought and much more. In addition to books, broadsides and pamphlets, the collection includes published reports and the works of many European authors reprinted for the American public. Additionally, a large number of state papers and early government materials—including presidential letters and congressional, state and territorial resolutions—chronicle the political and geographic growth of the developing American nation.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700.

From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this incomparable collection contains more than 130,000 titles and more than 17 million scanned pages as listed in 4 collections - Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. EEBO covers more than 30 languages from Algonquin to Welsh, and variant editions and multiple copies.

The Economist Historical Archive is a searchable database of The Economist archive. The archive includes full-color images, multiple search indexes, exportable financial tables and a gallery of front covers highlighting a key topic of each week.

The Elliott Carter Collection in the Library of Congress presents a brief biography of the composer as well as links to digitized music manuscripts from the Library of Congress's collections.

This collection comprises documentation related to the activities of Emiliano Zapata and the Liberation Army of the South. It consists mainly of correspondence exchanged between the headquarters and the camps and regional commands.

Documents include requests for economic aid; guarantees to people for jobs and food; complaints of abuses; reports, promotions, and notifications to the troops and brigades, as well as information on pay. The documentation also includes acts or proceedings on revolutionary and civil trials; correspondence with municipal or State authorities in connection with problems of land, water, control of finance, trade, etc.; and, information concerning the revolutionary Convention sovereign.

This site features nineteen early manuscript compositions by composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), spanning the period from 1896 to 1916, and comprising a portion of the Ernest Bloch Collection at the Library of Congress. 

Source materials for the major social movements and key figures in early twentieth century black history.

The records in this collection represent the files of the national office of the Civil Rights Congress, based in New York City, including several hundred case files; publications produced and received by the Congress; files of the Literature Department; Executive Director William Pattersons correspondence files; correspondence and other materials from Civil Rights Congress chapters around the country, including case files of the New York chapter; and files of the New York headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America, created during the trial of twelve Communist leaders, 1948-1949, including two black members, Benjamin J. Davis and Henry Winston, consisting of correspondence, transcripts, legal briefs, and printed material.

News and analysis covering business, innovation, politics, trends and more.

The First World War portal makes available invaluable primary sources for the study of the Great War, brought together in four thematic modules. From personal collections and rare printed material to military files, artwork and audio-visual files, content highlights the experiences of soldiers, civilians and governments on both sides of a conflict that shook the world.

This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.

Gale In Context: U.S. History is an engaging online experience for those seeking contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in U.S. History. U.S. History merges Gale's authoritative reference content with full-text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, audio files and links to vetted websites organized into a user-friendly portal experience.

An integrated research environment that allows users to search across all Gale primary source collections.

The following collections are currently available within Gale Primary Sources:

19th Century UK Periodicals
Archives Unbound
Archives of Sexuality & Gender
British Library Newspapers
The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2011
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003
The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926
The Making of the Modern World
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926
The Sunday Times Digital Archive
The Telegraph Historical Archive
The Times Digital Archive
Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive

The Glenn Gould Archive by Library and Archives Canada provides online access to materials related to the concert pianist Glenn Gould. Items include searchable databases of published and archival materials, full-text writings by or about the pianist, and digitized images, archival material, and audio tapes.

This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel for the first time, including many from private or neglected collections.

Heritage Broadcasting Service (HBS, or Heritage) is a subscription video-on-demand platform developed by Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Founded in 1999, ALI produces The Archaeology Channel, our streaming-media website launched in 2000 and still streaming free video and audio programming. We created the Heritage platform to deliver premium content in keeping with our nonprofit mission to tell the human story through compelling media applications. Heritage films are on diverse cultural-heritage topics and produced by some of the most innovative and skilled storytellers in the world today.

Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 is a compilation of Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. The collection features hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including many long scattered and forgotten titles published in the 19th century.

Deep and broad in its coverage, this collection incorporates anti-Semitic propaganda, correspondence from prisoners, documents from resistance groups, bank records from Nazi financiers, eyewitness accounts from concentration camps, and much more.

Explore the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, through the wonderfully rich and diverse manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland.

This collection comprises, in its entirety, the Primary Source Media microfilm collection entitled Records of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 1938-1947.

Resource of primary source materials covering the political history of the Middle East in the 20th Century.

Based on British Government and other files in the UK national archives, the series makes a contribution to research and teaching of Middle East Studies, the workings of diplomacy, of conflict resolution and peace-keeping.

Offers a broad range of original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers covering the period from the Anglo-Indian landing in Basra in 1914 through the British Mandate in Iraq of 1920-32 to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974.

Policy statements and other working documents are set out in context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of the mandate administration, diplomacy, treaties, oil and arms dealing. Also includes photographs and colour maps, as well as contemporary film.

This collection brings to life the communal and social aspects of Jewish identity and culture, whilst tracing Jewish involvement in the political life of American society as a whole.

Global Plants is a community-contributed database where worldwide herbaria can share their plant type specimens, experts can determine and update naming structures, students can discover and learn about plants in context, and a record of plant life can be preserved for future generations.

This resource presents a multi-national journey through well-known, little-known and far-flung destinations unlocked for the average traveller between 1850 and the 1980s. Guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs and personal travel journals provide unique insight into the expansion, accessibility and affordability of tourism for the masses and the evolution of some of the most successful travel agencies in the world.

Franz Liszt: Musikalische Werke is the early 20th-century edition of Franz Liszt's complete works, originally published by Breitkopf & Hartel and digitized by the International Music Score Library Project. Some listings include other digitized public domain scores, digitized and audio files (MIDI or recorded performances).

Examine complete images of 190 manuscripts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with the Brotherton Collection Manuscript Verse Index, which includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection.

London Low Life is a full-text searchable resource containing rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London.

Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957-1963 provides complete coverage of the Cabinet conclusions (minutes) (CAB 128) and memoranda (CAB 129) of Harold Macmillan’s government, plus selected minutes and memoranda of policy committees (CAB 134). This collection also includes 165 files from the Prime Minister's Private Office (PREM 11). These provide an important supplement to the Cabinet records and cover all aspects of policymaking.

Making of America (MOA) sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection currently contains approximately 6,600 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Instant access to the theories, practices, and consequences of economic and business activity in the West, from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century.

The Making of the Modern World offers researchers new ways of understanding the emergence of modern economics and other social sciences. It's the most comprehensive collection in existence for researching the literature of economics from this period. This unrivalled online library offers instant access to the theories, practices, and consequences of economic and business activity in the West, from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century. It combines the strengths of two pre-eminent collections: the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library and the Kress Collection of Business and Economics at the Harvard Business School, along with supplementary materials from the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University and from the libraries of Yale University.

Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 provides a unique insight into the American consumer boom of the mid-20th century through access to the complete market research reports of Ernest Dichter, the era’s foremost consumer analyst, market research pioneer and widely-recognized ‘father’ of Motivational Research.

This resource contains full colour images of the original medieval manuscripts that comprise the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor and Armburgh family letter collections along with full text searchable transcripts from the printed editions, where they are available. The original images and the transcriptions can be viewed side by side.

The Edward Sylvester Morse Papers were given to the Peabody Museum in 1926 and consist of 99 boxes of personal and professional papers including diaries, correspondence, research files, drawings, lecture notes, publications, scrapbooks and manuscripts. The collection spans the full range of Morse’s interests from his career as a natural historian to his life-changing experiences in Japan.

From the century of immigration, through to the modern era, Migration to New Worlds charts the emigration experience of millions across 200 years of turbulent history. Explore the rise and fall of the New Zealand Company, discover British, European and Asian migration and investigate unique primary source personal accounts, shipping logs, printed literature and organizational papers supplemented by carefully compiled teaching and research aids.

The European Mozart Ways presents a new approach to studying Mozart by focusing on his travels. The site includes a full text biography of the composer, descriptions of his travels with maps and itineraries, and digitized, translated, and annotated versions of the letters of Mozart and his family.

The Munich Digitization Center (MDZ) digitizes the special collections of the Bavarian State Library and other German institutions, including fine arts and music, and currently comprises over 900,000 titles.

This collections consist of memorandums, letters, cables, balance sheets, reports, exhibits, newspaper clippings, and civil censorship intercepts on: the financing of the German war effort and German financial institutions; reports on Nazi gold, the use of Swiss banks, and links between German and Swiss banks, inclusive of Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Golddiskontbank, Dresdner Bank, and Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft; information regarding Aryanization, bank operations outside of Germany, industrial ties, liquidation proposals, and the restitution of Hungarian property; records concerning agricultural cooperatives; denazification of German finance personnel; an interrogation report of Hjalmar Schacht, the former Reichsminister of Economics and Plenipotentiary for the War Economy; a report on the operations of I.G. Farben AG; plans for the seizure of Reich ministerial records called "Operation Goldcup"; information relating to fiscal conditions in former German-occupied countries; report of banking in the Soviet Zone; documentation on investigations of Bernhard Berghaus, Alois Alzheimer, August von Finck, Eduard Hilgard, Kurt Schmitt, and Franz Schwede-Coburg; and, files relating to Carlowitz & Company and Japanese firms operating in Germany.

The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery provides free access to over 700,000. The Digital Gallery includes nearly 12,000 of scores and manuscripts from the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The United States kept a contingent force in Nicaragua almost continually from 1912 until 1933. Although reduced to 100 in 1913, the contingent served as a reminder of the willingness of the United States to use force and its desire to keep conservative governments in power. This collection provides documentation on the almost continual political instability in Nicaragua.

North American Indian Thought and Culture brings together more than 100,000 pages, integrating autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files. This database is a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them and is an essential resource for all those interested in serious scholarly research into the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples.

Compiled by the Perdita Project, Perdita Manuscripts is a collection of digital facsimilies of the manuscripts of early modern women authors.

The resource allows users to study this exciting period using manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia. The interactive chronology, extensive visual resources and video footage provide valuable contextual background to the materials included in this collection.

Complete runs of regional newspapers, as well as pamphlets covering a wide range of topics. Set of primary sources, with documents original articles and page images from Manifest Destiny through the end of the Civil War.

The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) offers full page and article images with searchable full text. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Amsterdam News: 1922-1993 offers full page and article images with searchable full text. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

The Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001) offers full page and article images with searchable full text. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

A full-text database of jazz journals and magazines, RIPM Jazz Periodicals contains over 100 jazz journals, covering the period from 1914 to 2006.

The records reproduced in this collection consist primarily of SAFEHAVEN reports and letters, cables, and military attaché reports referring to specific SAFEHAVEN reports or SAFEHAVEN-related topics. Such topics include information on alleged art looting; business matters (including alleged patent transfers) pertaining to leading German industrial firms such as Bosch and I.G. Farben; and various Third Reich personalities.

Franz Peter Schuberts Werke is the late 19th-century edition of Schubert's complete works, originally published by Breitkopf & Hartel and digitized by the International Music Score Library Project. Some listings include other digitized public domain scores, digitized and audio files (MIDI or recorded performances).

The digitized collection of music scores from Eastman School of Music's Sibley Music Library includes over 14,000 digitized manuscripts and scores in the public domain, many of which are unique to Sibley's collection.

This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.

This collection comprises, in its entirety, the Primary Source Media microfilm collection entitled Southern Literary Messenger.

This collection comprises documents from a wide variety of sources, including the Gestapo, local police and government offices, Reich ministries, businesses, etc., pertaining to Jewish communities. These records are organized into various sub-collections, i.e., Archiv Schumacher, Streicher, Hans Frank, Hauptarchiv der NSDAP, Geschaedigte Juden, etc., and Ordner, or folders, and include newspaper clippings, letters, manuscripts, pamphlets, reports and other documents originating with the Sturmabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Gestapo, Reich Ministry of Justice, and Reichskulturkammer (RKK, Reich Chamber of Culture) from 1920- 1945.

Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) remains the best-known of the Chamberlain family due to his controversial policy of "appeasement" towards Hitler. The Papers of Neville Chamberlain contain political papers documenting his policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, but also highlight his personal correspondence with his family. These provide insight into the intentions behind his policies, his concerns at the development of the Second World War, as well as letters covering his life together with his wife Annie and his sisters, particularly Hilda and Ida. The correspondence of his wife with his biographer and the handling of his estates following his death can be found in this collection as well

This resource brings together hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. A wide variety of forms of travel writing are included, ranging from unique manuscripts, diaries and correspondence to drawings, guidebooks and photographs.

The U.S. Serial Set is an ongoing collection of United States Government publications compiled under the directive of Congress. The contents include Congressional reports and documents and executive and departmental reports.

A collection of manuscript musical scores dating from the 17th through 19th centuries, digitized from the University of Washington Music Library's Rare Book Collection.

A finding aid for women's studies resources in the UK National Archives, this resource is presented alongside original primary source documents that cover the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, 1903-1928 and the granting of women's suffrage in colonial territories, 1930-1962.

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary source materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Mother Tongue is a rescue initiative for documentation and preservation of endangered Jewish languages. It utilizes audio and visual tools to document speakers from varied Jewish communities, paying special attention to the language and culture of women and of peripheral communities whose voices have remained largely unheard.

All the materials are edited and catalogued topically. Where relevant, sociolinguistic data is added.