Covers: 1524-1885. Draws together primary source materials on the cultural encounters in the European exploration of and United States expansion into of the North American continent. Contains letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Users can search or browse by year, place, ethnic group, environment, cultural event, flora, fauna, or image.
Covers: 1470 - 1700. Offers page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from the beginning of printing through the 17th century. Fully searchable texts are available for more than 60,000 titles.
A growing collection of records for both recent and long out-of-print titles. Because a search may retrieve results from the full-text of many books, Google Books is most useful in helping you to identify titles of interest in your research. A number of popular magazines and government documents have also been added to the Google Books service.
Primary Sources Online for America
These are a few primary sources available to you online.
Pamphlets "published by various groups leading up to prohibition, during the prohibition era, and ending with the 21st amendment in 1933, which repealed the 18th amendment from 1919 prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors."
Almost 3,000 interviews, sometimes known as "old settler interviews." "The histories describe the informant's family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations. " Browse by state or search by keyword.
The State Archives in Little Rick offers a collection of "about 3000 titles published at some 250 different places in Arkansas, 1819 to present." In addition, a number of their newspaper titles have been digitized on the Library of Congress Chronicling America site.
offers "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."
Commonwealth College was established in 1923 at the Newllano Cooperative Colony (near Leesville, Louisiana) to promote labor education and especially to educate leaders for the labor movement.
"Audio files and song transcriptions of more than 1,000 songs recorded in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas between 1956 and 1976 by Max Hunter, a traveling salesman."
Sanborn fire insurance maps provide block-by-block coverage for historical buildings, generally from 1870-1920. We subscribe to the maps for Arkansas; maps for Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and selected other places are freely available online.
More than 700 ethnographic sound recordings and photographs collected by Lomax while traveling from Port Arthur, TX to the Library of Congress in 1939. Search by song text or subject.
