Primary Sources for Historians

Consistory is a database featuring testimony offered in the main church court of the diocese of London. The testimony entered in the court's records offers invaluable evidence for our understanding of many aspects of late medieval history;This database is projected over the next several years to present all the surviving medieval (pre-1500) records of litigation

Coverage: Some Full Text
A digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. UMBC access is available only for the free content.

Coverage: Full Text
A fully searchable edition of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court. The project is a collaboration between the Open University, and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield.

Coverage: Full Text
Provides a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners including parish archives and criminal, coroner, guild and hospital records.

Coverage: Some Full Text
The bibliographic records and searchable PDFs of the EPPI are now available for most of the collection. No login is required.

Coverage: Full Text
This site is generated from the Official Report of debates in Parliament. Information presented here is generated from the publicly available XML files. Files can be browsed by year, by House, by named person, official Acts, bills, etc.

The National Archives preserves and provides access to the records of the Federal Government. Here is a sample of these records, from our most celebrated milestones to little-known surprises .

The digital resources described in this guide provide online access, in varying degrees, to the personal papers and/or publications of the major founders of the American Republic—that is, those men who served in roles of national political leadership between 1765 and 1815—and members of their families.

Coverage: Full Text
A Century of Lawmaking brings together the records and acts of Congress from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention through the 43rd Congress, including the first three volumes of the Congressional Record, 1873-75. Included are the Journals of Congress, statutes and and documents, debates of Congress, Congressional Record, more.

This web site provides an overview of the War of 1812, outlining the major military conflicts as well as the principal causes and outcomes of the war. More importantly, the site provides access to fully digitized books, broadsides, prints, maps, correspondence, log books, legal documents, diaries, speeches, letter copybooks, orderly books, and receipts relating to the conflict.

Coverage: Full Text
Using unpublished historical manuscripts the database provides access to biographical details of enslaved Virginians. In some cases there may only be a name on a list; in others more details survive, including family relationships, occupations, and life dates.

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina.

Gale's American Eras - Primary Sources provides access to selected full text documents with supporting commentary on contemporary issues and events. Each volumes covers areas ranging from arts and business to science and sports. A chronology of world events and an era overview provide additional context.

Coverage: Full Text
Provides access to primary sources related to slavery, abolition, and resistance in relevant collections in each Yale institution.

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. The collection includes more than 15,000 individual pages of printed text and corresponding searchable transcriptions.

Coverage: Full Text
The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War.

Gale's American Eras - Primary Sources provides access to selected full text documents with supporting commentary on contemporary issues and events. Each volumes covers areas ranging from arts and business to science and sports. A chronology of world events and an era overview provide additional context.

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 of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and 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.

The University of Iowa’s Civil War Diaries and Letters web site contains digitized diaries, correspondence, photographs, and other items. Searching or browsing is available and item information includes date of origin, thumbnails or originals, and transcription into plain text. Links to other Iowa primary source collections are available.

Coverage: 1861-1865
The Civil War Home Page represents one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Civil War related material available electronically. Includes full text documents, maps, statistics, official records, oral histories, slave narratives, photos.

The Southern Historical Society was founded in 1868-1869 to document Southern military and civilian viewpoints from the American Civil War. These were compiled into the Southern Historical Society "Papers". They were published in the late 19th Century, comprising 52 volumes of articles written by Southern soldiers, officers, politicians, and civilians. Full text available for vols. 1-43. Index to the papers in the Reference collection: REF E483.7 S762. R62

Gale's American Decades - Primary Sources provides access to selected full text documents with supporting commentary on contemporary issues and events. Each volumes covers areas ranging from arts and business to science and sports.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company. The Sanborn maps are arranged by state, then city and release data. Currently there are over 25,000 sheets from over 3000 city sets.

Provides an overview and selected documents for various facets of the period.

FRASER is a mixed subject and institutional repository that preserves and provides access to economic and banking data and policy documents. To this end, various types of documents have been digitized, including Federal Reserve policy documents, publications, speeches and news releases, economic and statistical data.

Lantern offers access to nearly 2 million pages of digitized books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

Coverage: 1939-1946
SMU Central University Libraries, part of GPO's Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), have digitized hundreds of historical World War II publications and photographs and made them available to the public.

Coverage: Full Text
Provides access to digitized copies of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held in the Library's collection and available on the USCCR Web site.

Coverage: 1940-current
NSA/CSS periodically releases declassified documents or indexes to these documents to the public. Full text docs listed on this page include those related to Vietnam (Tonkin Gulf) UFO projects, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy assassination, more.

NYPL Digital Gallery access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more. Below are links to specific collections that may be useful for Dance research.

The mission of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University is to support research & education regarding all aspects of the history of the American Vietnam experience. Materials include full text documents, maps, oral histories, diaries, videos, other.

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).