Primary Sources: How to Search

Presidential documents on the internet. Hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Calisphere is a gateway to digital collections from California's great libraries, archives, and museums. Discover over 925,000 images, texts, and recordings—and counting.

University of California newspaper collections.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1943 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Promotes 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. Features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries.

A digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books with 19th century imprints.

Gateway to US history through documents, photos and records.

a list of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.

Primary source materials in a wide variety of subjects contributed by libraries, museums, and archives.

Individually each of these libraries is among the world’s greatest repositories of knowledge for the specialized fields they support. Collectively they are among America’s greatest scientific and cultural treasures. They belong to the nation, and through their expanding on-line presence and digitization initiatives more and more people from across the country and around the world are able to access their vast resources.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is comprised of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

A Library of Congress Collection of US congressional documents and debates, 1774-1875.

An index of archives. Some items are digitized and can be viewed.

From University of Houston. Includes text versions, (not digitized documents) of many primary sources.

The series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.

Browsable site hosting digitzed primary source material relating to the American midwest.

Documenting voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression.
Concentrating heavily on the 19th century, the collection includes:
over 400,000 pages from more than 2,200 books, pamphlets, and serials
over 9,600 pages from manuscript and archival collections
more than 7,800 photographs

Makes available a wide array of materials documenting the social effects of the railroad and the transformation of the United States to modern ideas, institutions, and practices in the nineteenth century.

A collaborative project between the Office of the Historian and the Clerk of the House's Office of Art and Archives.

Provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.

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. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.

Digitized document in the Library of Congress, giving Union and Confederate armies by actual surveys by the Union and Confederate engineers, and approved by the officers in command, of all the maps herein published

Presents a collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies.

More than 150 books, pamphlets and prints representing themes including the intellectual origins of the American Revolution; the Revolution itself; the early years of the republic; the resulting spread of democratic ideas in the Atlantic world; and the effort to abolish the slave trade in both Great Britain and the United States. Princeton University Digital Library.

An American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress.

Internet Archive is a library of millions of free books, text documents, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Collection of more than 140,000 clippings, arranged by subject and date, includes news stories and editorials from newspapers, mostly Canadian, documenting every aspect of the war. The English-language clippings are from the archive of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper, while the French-language materials are from a collection of the newspaper Le Devoir.
Items are digitized and are downloadable.

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.

Collection of German Axis military photos from the period 1935 to 1945.

Blog featuring images from the American Civil War.

AMDOCS is maintained by George Laughead, manager
and by Dr. Lynn H. Nelson.
Searchable by decade. Primitive site but has good content.

Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. Organized by time period.

In this anthology, Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner draw on the writings of a wide array of people engaged in the problem of making popular government safe, steady, and accountable. The documents included range from the early seventeenth century to the 1830s, from the reflections of philosophers to popular pamphlets, from public debates in ratifying conventions to the private correspondence of the leading political actors of the day.

This archive of primary documents has been assembled by volunteers of the World War I Military History List (WWI-L).

LIFE Magazine is a photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. A large collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. Free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Part of the Cornell University Library Division of Rare Books and Manuscript, this collection contains digitized, English language texts related to witches and witchcraft.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.