History: Primary Materials

Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.

Focused on the political and religious life in North America and at times South America and the Caribbean. Varied genres.

Primary documents and scholarly commentaries on Gilded Age themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage.

The American Founding Era collection is a gateway into one of the great conversations in history. These newly prepared digital editions of the papers of Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Washington are presented in a fully searchable and interoperable environment.

Focused on economic and business activity in the West, from the last half of the 15th century to the eve of World War I.

Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts in a variety of disciplines, including art, music, science, literature, politics and religion.

The database contains 1297 primary sources with 1100 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.

This unique database examines interdisciplinary topics on the African experience throughout the Americas via in-depth essays accompanied by detailed timelines along with important research articles, images, film clips and more.

frican American Communities - offers a rich panorama of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of a handful of Black communities—Atlanta, Brooklyn, Chicago, and the North Carolina public education system. It offers a broad array of primary materials and documents, including letters and correspondence, pamphlets, association records, newspaper and periodical clippings, judicial records, oral histories, visual materials, and ephemera.

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States - this open access database, courtesy of ProQuest, encompasses approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom.

A unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. The content includes letters, speeches, editorials, articles, sermons, and essays.

Contains the collection of over 2,000 interviews conducted in seventeen states between 1936 and 1983 under the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Progress Administration.

Access to primary source documents from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world and useful secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.

records of nearly 35,000 separate slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866, gleaned from original documents and historical publications located in archives, libraries, and other institutions throughout the world.

Includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.

Covers women’s studies and feminist research in areas including sociology, history, international relations and humanities. Some full text links.

Offers scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines, newspapers, and videos.

Includes primary documents, document projects with introductory essays, a bibliography, a Dictionary of Social Movements, and images.

The Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and fifteen languages. This online resource delivers two million page images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works.

Includes a wide array of primary source documents, serials, books, manuscripts, diaries, reports, and visuals focused on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century

Includes women's diaries and letters, biographies, and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

A wide range of material focused on the interactions between Native Americans and Europeans from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid- to late-twentieth century.

The database offers a wide range of images and full-text materials relating to the early exploration and settlement of North America.

History of Anthropology, Exploration and Social Sciences Across the Globe-- the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology (the study of humankind) in its broadest and most inclusive sense.

The Society’s archive contains vast collections of documents, maps, photographs, expedition reports, manuscript materials and books, and span 500 years of geography, travel and exploration.

American Anitiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection - Rich and vast collection of more than 7,500 periodicals detailing American history and culture from the late 17th century through the late 19th century.

ProQuest Congressional Historical Indexes - includes indexes for published hearings, committee prints, and Serial Set content from 1789-1969, as well as indexes for all never-published hearings that have been released by the National Archives and indexed by CIS staff.

America and Great Britain: Diplomatic Relations 1775-1815. The database is made up of the diplomatic, official correspondence between America and Britain and gives an extraordinary insight into the shaping of a nation, from America being referred to as “our Colonies and Plantations in North America” by King George the Third in 1775, to its recognition as the “United States” by Britain in 1782 and the official cessation of hostilities in 1815.

Provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Serial Set is invaluable for research in political history, social history, cultural history, military history, ethnic history, international relations, explorations, commerce, industrial development and much more.

The SHAFR Guide Online : An Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Foreign Relations since 1600 (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations)—the database offers a near comprehensive 2.1 million-word online bibliography of historical work covering the entire span of U.S. foreign relations.

Official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. It is comprised of more than 190 titles, beginning with Abraham Lincoln's administration in 1861 and continuing to the administration of Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Founded in 1867, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for a century, with maps created every five to ten years, eventually covering 12,000 communities on over 660,000 individual sheet maps.

This database offers full-text and full-image articles for newspapers from 1851 to 2001.

This database offers full-text and full-image articles for newspapers dating back to the 19th century. For most titles, the collection includes digital reproductions of every page from every issue--cover to cover--in downloadable PDF® files. When the project is complete the coverage will span from 1849 to 2001.

Access to Barron's, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post from 2008 forward.

Access to what was once the most widely-read black newspaper in the country. Coverage 1910-1975.

Comprised of 20th c periodicals produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines.

The largest compilation of Spanish-language newspapers printed in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.

This database presents online access to one of the most highly regarded resources for the study of the 19th and 20th-century history and culture. The database includes the complete pages of every issue of the London Times from 1785 to 1985 forming a complete chronicle of the period.

A wide variety of international, national, and local news sources from the 1980s to the present.

Access to more than 40 fully searchable African newspapers published between 1800 and 1922.

Access to more than 100 nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American newspapers.

Access to a select group of South Asian newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Now published by Coherent Digital, Accessible Archives may go by a new name, but it still offers its unique, exclusive, primary-source content previously only available in a variety of physical formats. Along with a new publisher comes a next-generation platform, History Commons, which offers mobile-responsive on all browsers, enhanced viewing and examination functionalities, and manually rekeyed OCR so keyword searching, text and data mining are easier than ever.

American Anitiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection - Rich and vast collection of more than 7,500 periodicals detailing American history and culture from the late 17th century through the late 19th century.

HarpWeek is a database of images and indexing to the 19th century issues of Harper's Weekly. At present the Civil War Era: 1857-1865 is complete. HarpWeek has begun indexing Reconstruction: 1866-1877, which will be the second segment of a project that will ultimately provide users with a cumulative index from 1857 through 1900. Full Text.
Harper's Monthly began in June 1850. The database can be searched by date, indexes (Subject, Illustrations, Literature & Publishing, Advertising), Literary genre, or occupation/role.

Features an outstanding collection of 18th and 19th century journal literature. The series offers an excellent source for primary materials.

Delivers a complete searchable copy of every issue of The Economist from 1843 to 2006. New full-color images, multiple search indexes, exportable financial tables and a gallery of front covers highlighting a key topic of each week - all combine to offer a primary source of research covering the 19th and 20th centuries.

The database features a complete searchable archive and one of the countries foremost journals devoted to political and cultural commentary.

For ninety years The New Republic has provided in-depth examination of American politics, foreign policy and culture with an uncanny ability in covering issues before reaching the mainstream. The New Republic continues to be the leading journal of opinion and covers topics from a variety of viewpoints. This database offers complete indexing & abstracting and full text for all issues back to the journals inception in 1914.

The collection includes approximately 100,000 pages of published memoirs, letters and diaries from individuals plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 400 sources, the collection provides in-depth coverage of all aspects of the war.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries--records the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Hathi Trust--a repository of digitized books and serials drawn from major academic and research collections from throughout the United States. The database is immense in scope and crosses all disciplinary boundaries. It is particularly valuable in offering full text access to primary sources and materials.

Representing millions of pages this database is founded on Charles Evans renowned American Bibliography, 1639-1800. The collection encompasses virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year span. In doing so the databases offers an unparalleled view of Colonial America and the Early Republic.

This database comprehends more than four million pages derived from over 36,000 sources. It is founded on Ralph Shaw and Richard Shoemaker's comprehensive American Bibliography, 1800-1819, and is a marvelous complement to Series I.

Early English Books Online--Following its digital launch in 1998, Early English Books Online now contains page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere between 1473 and 1700.

Early Modern Books Online—an extension of Early English Books (ProQuest) that spans the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, the Interregnum and the Restoration (1641-1700).

The database reveals the development of law and legal institutions in the British Empire between 1701 and 1800. Topics include acts, criminal and international law, appellants' cases and more.

Trial transcripts, popular printed accounts, briefs, arguments, and other documents related to notable Anglo-American trials and crimes such as those involving Dred Scott, Susan B. Anthony, Oscar Wilde, the Boston Massacre, the Bounty mutineers, the Salem witchcraft trials, and many more.

An Archive of Printed Ephemera--This collection--originating from University of Oxford's Bodleian Library--provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising.

Artstor - NIU was generously granted free access to this unrivaled storehouse of 3 million images and artworks until the end of June 2021.

Grove Art Online - the foremost scholarly art encyclopedia, updated regularly and covering global art and architecture from prehistory to present day. Includes peer-reviewed articles contributed by nearly 7,000 scholars from around the world, accompanied by images, bibliographies, and links to additional resources.