LibGuides: History Research Guide: Online Primary Sources

Selected Resources

Below are selected lists of resources in which you can begin searching to locate online primary sources

Minnesota

Minnesota Digital Library
Images, maps and documents from more than 150 of the state's cultural heritage organizations. A project of the Minnesota Digital Library.
Minnesota Historical Society
Provides information on a variety of Minnesota topics. For example: Becoming Minnesotan, Stories of Minnesota's Greatest Generation, The U.S. Dakota War of 1862, Minnesota and the Civil War, A Look into Fort Snelling's Past, Voices of Minnesota (oral history collection), etc.
Minnesota Immigrant Oral Histories
Presents a collection of over 360 oral history interviews conducted between 1967 and 2012 with recent immigrants to Minnesota and their American-born children, including both streaming audio and written transcripts accessible online in digital formats. These interviews are a unique source of contemporary history through the experiences of the newest Americans, in their own words. New oral history projects will continue to be added to this site as they are completed.
Becoming Minnesotan: Stories of Recent Immigrants and Refugees (Minnesota Historical Society)
Presents excerpts from the "Minnesota Immigrant Oral Histories" interviews, along with supporting information about each narrator, the communities, and immigration in general.
MNopedia
Online encyclopedia developed by the Minnesota Historical Society. Resource for reliable information about significant people, places, events, and things in Minnesota history.

United States

Abraham Lincoln: A Resource Guide
The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Abraham Lincoln, including the complete Abraham Lincoln Papers from the Manuscript Division. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Lincoln such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Lincoln and a bibliography containing selected works for both general and younger readers.

African American Registry This link opens in a new window
The African American Registry® is a calendar-based series of Black American accomplishments from before the Mayflower to the present. The Registry communicates the message that African American Contributions are American Contributions!

America in Class from the National Humanities Center
Primary resources thematically organized with notes and discussion questions. Historical documents, literary texts, and works of art.

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collections This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1876, including 6,500 titles from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century. Also contains titles in more than two dozen languages including French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and more.

American Battlefield Trust
A nonprofit to preserve American battlefields and educate the public about history. The site holds primary sources from the American Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War.
American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement
American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later. Produced by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
American Presidency Project
The American Presidency Project was established in 1999 as a collaboration between John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The archives contain 73,398 documents related to the study of the Presidency.
American Rhetoric: The Power of Oratory in the United States
Index to and growing database of 5000+ full text, audio and video (streaming) versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two. Developed and maintained by University of Texas at Tyler.

ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
ArchiveGrid includes over 5 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.

Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History & Diplomacy
Provides digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Organized by time period. From the Yale Law Library.
Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters.
Community History Archives
Community History Archives serve as a “portal to the past,” offering an intuitive and user-friendly platform where communities can explore their collective history at no cost. These archives provide free access to digital reproductions of historical newspapers, photographs, and documents, allowing people to uncover the rich stories of the people, places, and events that define their community’s heritage. More than just collections of documents, the Community History Archives are powerful tools for engagement, education, and cultural enrichment, encouraging communities to connect with and actively explore their shared history in meaningful ways.
CRS Annotated Constitution
Easily searchable text of the United States Constitution with links to court opinions, the United States Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations.
Densho Digital Archive
Holds a wealth of visual history interviews and other materials that broadly document the Japanese American experience. These unique primary sources cover a span of history from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s with a particular focus on the World War II mass incarceration.
Digital Library on American Slavery
Offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. Contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners.

Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window
The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic.

Digital Public Library of America -- Primary Source Sets
These sets are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide.
Documenting the American South
A digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. It currently includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History Online
Provides access to typescripts of interviews (1967 -1972) conducted with hundreds of Indians in Oklahoma regarding the histories and cultures of their respective nations and tribes.
Eyewitness to History
First hand accounts of events throughout the history of the world. Image rich.
GovInfo
Free online access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
HathiTrust Digital Library
A digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
Historic Government Publications from World War II
Contains 343 informational pamphlets, government reports, instructions, regulations, declarations, speeches, and propaganda materials distributed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) during the Second World War.
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience
Presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Contains images, texts, and maps. From the New York Public Library.
Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains
Includes photographs, paintings, ledger drawings, documents, serigraphs, and stereographs from 1874 through the 1940's. Maintained by Montana State University.
Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis
Hosted by the University of Virginia
Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web
A Project of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Features links to online exhibitions that have been created by libraries, archives, and historical societies, as well as to museum online exhibitions with a significant focus on library and archival materials.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Digitized collections of primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more millions of digital items from several hundred of the Library of Congress' historical collections.

Making of America Journals (Michigan) This link opens in a new window
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. Contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Museum of Broadcast Communication
The MBC collects, preserves, and presents historic and contemporary radio and television content. View and/or listen to television, radio and advertising archives, including a history of televised presidential debates, featuring footage from these events.
Papers of Abraham Lincoln
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his entire lifetime (1809-1865)
Papers of George Washington
Read papers, letters and diaries of our first president at this very attractive site. From the University of Virginia Library.
Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800
Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, will make some 55,000 documents of the early War Department many long thought irretrievable but now reconstructed through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public.
Salem Witchcraft Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project
Provides access to documents and transcriptions, historical maps, archival collections, contemporary books, and more
Statistical Abstracts of the United States (1879-2012)
A comprehensive collection of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Has information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the principal sponsor of the project, and it is an Emory University Digital Library Research Initiative.
U.S. Census Bureau History
Includes historical census data and decennial census records.
U.S. Census Bureau
The Census Bureau's mission is to serve as the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy.
Umbra Search: African American History
Free digital platform that brings together content documenting African American history and culture in order to enable the creation of new works—research projects, scholarship, curricula, art of all kinds—that illuminate parts of our history that have not been broadly accessible.
Veterans History Project
Firsthand recollections of military veterans from World War I to more recent conflicts and peacekeeping missions.
Virtual Vietnam Archive
Contains over 4 million pages of scanned materials. Types of material include: documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids.
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
Online version of the 70 volume print edition of primary source material from the U.S. Civil War. The print edition was originally published in 1880-1901. It contains reports and correspondence produced by the Union and Confederate armies and various governmental bodies of the period. This website is part of Cornell University's "Making of America" series.
Women Working, 1800-1930
Digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University.
Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers
Woodward and Bernstein's notes from source interviews, drafts of newspaper stories and books, memos, letters, tape recordings, research materials, and other Watergate papers.The Harry Ransom Center's online exhibit of the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers provides a small sample of the materials found in the collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

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American Eras: Primary Sources: Early American Civilization Exploration to 1600
Includes essays on events, publications, lifestyles and individuals important to the era of early American civilizations and exploration before 1600.

American Eras: Primary Sources - Revolutionary Era (1754-1783)
Includes essays on events, publications, lifestyles and individuals important to the Revolutionary Era in U.S. history.
American Eras: Primary Sources - Development of a Nation (1783-1815)
Includes primary sources documenting events, publications, lifestyles, and individuals important to the early Republic period in U.S. History.

American Eras: Primary Sources: Westward Expansion (1800-1860)
Includes essays on events, publications, lifestyles and individuals important to the Westward Expansion Era in U.S. history.

American Eras: Primary Sources - Reform Era (1815-1850)
Includes essays on events, publications, lifestyles and individuals important to the Reform Era and eastern United States development in U.S. history.

American Eras: Primary Sources: Development of the Industrial United States (1878-1899)
Includes essays on events, publications, lifestyles and individuals important to the era of industrial development in U.S. history.

Exploration and Colonial America (1492-1755) (Defining Documents in American History)
A collection of exploration and colonial documents, including important journals of exploration, reports of New World settlements, early political tracts on self-governing. Also included are narratives on colonial life and slavery and indentured servitude. Contains context, biographical info, and critical analysis for each document.
Immigration & Immigrant Communities (1650-2016) (Defining Documents in American History)
The American Revolution (1754-1805) (Defining Documents in American History)
Manifest Destiny & the New Nation (1803-1860) (Defining Documents in American History)
World War I (1914-1919) (Defining Documents in American History)
Offers a broad range of historical documents on important authors and subjects in World War I research. Written by historians and experts in the field, this resource examines a wide array of primary source documents with an in-depth critical analysis.
World War II (1936-1947) (Defining Documents in American History)
The Cold War (1945-1991) (Defining Documents in American History)

World

BBC-- World War One
Read and listen to stories of the War from the people who lived it. Explore diaries, letters, scrapbooks, newspaper cuttings, photos and keepsakes.
BBC--WW2 People's War
The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006. This archive of 47,000 stories and 15,000 images is the result.
EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History
A collection of European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social and cultural history.
Europeana
Portal for European digital collections
Eyewitness to History
First hand accounts of events throughout the history of the world. Image rich.
Internet Archive
A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more
Letters of Note
An attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes are sneered at. Updated as often as possible; usually each weekday.
Project Gutenberg
Over 57,000 free eBooks. Contains the world's great literature, with a focus on older works for which copyright has expired.
Repositories of Primary Sources
A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar