Research Guides: Primary Source Collections: Primary sources by time period

Sources by time period

AAS Historical Periodicals Thematic Subset Collection (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
The AAS Historical Publications Thematic subset includes 50 series of primary source titles across nine major areas from Agriculture to Women's Studies. Basic searching is across all titles in the collection and Individual collection links are available.
Adam Matthew Explorer This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive resource for primary sources in history, global studies, American studies, Asian studies, gender studies, theatre, music, and much more.
American Periodicals (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from 1740-1941. Titles include 89 journals published between 1740 and 1800; 118 periodicals published during the Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1865-1877) eras; general interest magazines, children's publications, and more than 20 journals for women.
The Making of the Modern World, Part I: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection, 1450-1850 This link opens in a new window
A primary source collection which offers ways of understanding the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of modern capitalism, supporting research in a variety of disciplines.
Black Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years.
Cecil Papers‎ (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The Cecil Papers is a major collection of early-modern historical documents from the reigns of Elizabethan I and James I/VI. More than 150,000 pages have been digitised in full colour to create a definitive online archive of almost 30,000 manuscript documents written by some of the most significant figures of Elizabethan and Jacobean history.
Colonial State Papers‎ 1574 - 1757 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The Colonial State Papers offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world
Early Enccounters in North America - Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women
Early English Books Online (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) features page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.
Early Modern Books (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Early Modern Books covers material from the British Isles and Europe for the period 1450-1700. An integrated search across both Early English Books Online and Early European Books allows scholars to view materials from over 225 source libraries worldwide.
JSTOR: World Heritage Sites: Africa This link opens in a new window
Provides visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning.

Mayis Indigenous Records: Maryland State Archives
"Mayis is a web resource created as a path to guide researchers to records in the Maryland State Archives (MSA) about the Indigenous peoples of the Chesapeake Bay region. Our team designed this site to help to shine a light on this significant and complicated history of colonization and conflict. It is our hope that American Indians of the twenty-first century and their allies will use this tool to better educate all of us about the first people living in the region (before the Europeans arrived)."

North American Indian Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
North American Indian Thought and Culture integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files for a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them. The database is an essential resource for all those interested in serious scholarly research into the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1600-2000
Database of books, documents, images, scholarly essays, commentaries and bibliographies of all aspects of American Women's public lives and political activities.
18th Century Collections part I and II This link opens in a new window
A fully text-searchable collection of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800.

AAS Historical Periodicals Thematic Subset Collection (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
The AAS Historical Publications Thematic subset includes 50 series of primary source titles across nine major areas from Agriculture to Women's Studies. Basic searching is across all titles in the collection and Individual collection links are available.
Adam Matthew Explorer This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive resource for primary sources in history, global studies, American studies, Asian studies, gender studies, theatre, music, and much more.
American Civil War- Letters and Diaries (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection contains 2,009 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and memoirs.The product includes 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts such as the letters of Amos Wood and his wife and the diary of Maryland Planter William Claytor.
American Periodicals (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from 1740-1941. Titles include 89 journals published between 1740 and 1800; 118 periodicals published during the Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1865-1877) eras; general interest magazines, children's publications, and more than 20 journals for women.
Black Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history.
Brazilian Government Documents 1821 -1993 (CRL) This link opens in a new window
The Latin American Materials Project (LAMP) at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has digitized executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil’s national government between 1821 and 1993, and by its provincial governments from the earliest available for each province to the end of the first Republic in 1930.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years.
Early Enccounters in North America - Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women
Gilded Age (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The Gilded Age brings primary documents and scholarly commentary together into a searchable collection. In addition to an extensive selection of key treatises that reflect the social and cultural ferment of the late nineteenth century, The Gilded Age offers songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. This primary content is enhanced by video interviews with scholars and numerous topical critical documentary essays.
JSTOR: 19th Century British Pamphlets This link opens in a new window
Throughout the 19th century, pamphlets were an important means of public debate, covering the key political, social, technological, and environmental issues of their day. 19th Century British Pamphlets, created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), contains the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in research libraries in the United Kingdom.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection includes 2,162 authors providing a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines.
North American Indian Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
North American Indian Thought and Culture integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files for a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them. The database is an essential resource for all those interested in serious scholarly research into the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples
ProQuest Civil War Era This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Civil War Era combines continuous runs of regional newspapers, as well as pamphlets covering a wide range of topics with documents that encompass the buildup to and evolution of the war and focuses on the entire era, from Manifest Destiny through the end of the Civil War.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. With a focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1600-2000
Database of books, documents, images, scholarly essays, commentaries and bibliographies of all aspects of American Women's public lives and political activities.

60 Minutes, 1997-2014 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The 60 MINUTES 1997-2014 collection from Alexander Street grants unprecedented access to the CBS News archives from this period, including many episodes not widely seen since their original broadcast.
Adam Matthew Explorer This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive resource for primary sources in history, global studies, American studies, Asian studies, gender studies, theatre, music, and much more.
Alternative Press Index [API] This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Coverage: Some Full Text
API is a bibliographic database of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from over 300 international alternative, radical, and left periodicals. API coverage is both international and interdisciplinary. Coverage begins in 1991.
UMBC holds the Alternative Press backfile, with the print index for 1971-1990, in Special Collections. .
Anthropology Online (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Anthropology Online brings together a wide range of written ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies, covering human behavior the world over.
Black Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history.

Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy.

Disability in the Modern World (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Disability in the Modern World includes primary sources, supporting materials, and archives, along with 125 hours of video. The content is essential in the growing disciplines of disability history and disability studies, but also in history, media, the arts, political science, education, and other areas where the contributions of the disability community are typically overlooked.
Food Studies Online (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Food Studies Online brings together rare and hard-to-find archival content with visual ephemera, text, and video. Food studies is a relatively new field of study, and its importance is felt in many major disciplines. It has social, historical, economic, cultural, religious, and political implications that reach far beyond what is consumed at the dinner table.
Gilded Age (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The Gilded Age brings primary documents and scholarly commentary together into a searchable collection. In addition to an extensive selection of key treatises that reflect the social and cultural ferment of the late nineteenth century, The Gilded Age offers songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. This primary content is enhanced by video interviews with scholars and numerous topical critical documentary essays.
Human Rights Studies Online (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Human Rights Studies Online provides comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010. The collection includes primary and secondary materials across multiple media formats and content types for each selected event.
JSTOR: Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa This link opens in a new window
The liberation of Southern Africa and the dismantling of the Apartheid regime was one of the major political developments of the 20th century, with far-reaching consequences for people throughout Africa and around the globe. This collection focuses on the complex and varied liberation struggles in the region, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
LGBT Thought and Culture (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
LGBT Thought and Culture is a resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The collection illuminates the lives of lesbians, gays, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community
National Newspapers (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Coverage: Full Text
Indexes, abstracts and provides full text for the following: Baltimore Sun: 1990 - present, Christian Science Monitor: 1980 - present, New York Times + Book Review & Magazine: 1980 - present, NYT in Espanol, 2020-, Wall Street Journal: 1984 - present, Washington Post: 1987 - present
Does not include pictures or graphics
Newsbank This link opens in a new window
Newsbank is a full-text news resource consisting over 11,000+ local, regional, national and international sources (6,800+ US and almost 4,200 international sources). Updated daily, it offers researchers and students valuable primary source information on today’s issues and events from newspapers, newswires, transcripts, video clips, web only, and blogs.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection includes 2,162 authors providing a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines.
Radical Literature Collection at UMBC This link opens in a new window
Coverage: Late 19th - mid 20th cen
The Radical Literature Collection includes books, pamphlets, and other publications on and by Communist, Socialist, Labor and other left- and right-of-center political organizations and individuals.
The Sixties: Primary Sources and Personal Narratives 1960-1974 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
The Sixties brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.
Social Work Online (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Social Work Online pairs recently published social work textbooks, along with compelling documentaries, clinical demonstration videos, and engaging lectures that illustrate the complex and challenging realities social work students will face as practitioners.
Student Activism This link opens in a new window
The Student Activism collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today's vibrant, continually unfolding actions. The collection captures the voices of students across the great range of protest, political actions, and equal-rights advocacy from the 20th and early 21st century United States. The primary sources are broad-based across time, geography, and political viewpoint — from conservative to anarchist.
Twentieth Century Drama 1891-2008 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Twentieth-Century Drama features plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists. The collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.
Twentieth Century North American Drama (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
Twentieth Century North American Drama offers a unique window into the economic, historical, social, and political psyche of two countries. Scholars and students who use the database will have a new way to study the signal events of the twentieth century—including the Depression, the role of women, the Cold War, and more
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820 (Proquest) This link opens in a new window
This collection explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. With a focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1600-2000
Database of books, documents, images, scholarly essays, commentaries and bibliographies of all aspects of American Women's public lives and political activities.

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