Research Guides: HIST 3613: Early National and Antebellum America, 1789-1850: Digital Collections

Evaluating Online Sources

When Google turns up a potential source, be sure to examine the content with a critical eye. Think about:

authority: who has compiled this material and why?
accuracy: are there typos or broken links?
audience: are scholarly apparatus (transcriptions, footnotes, references) provided or is the site intended more as a showcase?
extent: does the site host only a few documents, or dozens?

Primary Sources on the Web
This guide from the American Library Association offers pointers for the researcher.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
A digital collection maintained by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. The database is browsable by title, author, fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essay.
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition
The digitized items in the Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition Collection are from the Alcoholism and Addiction Studies Collection, as well as from various collections in the Brown University Library — broadsides, sheet music, pamphlets and government publications.

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1684-1912. Offers page images and searchable full text of historical periodical titles drawn from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.
American State Papers Online This link opens in a new window
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The American State Papers include largely Congressional as well as Executive materials dating from 1789 to 1838.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1850s-. Offers non-fiction published works of leading African Americans, including interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and periodicals such as The Black Panther.
Early Encounters in North America (EENA) This link opens in a new window
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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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project
The home of the ongoing editing project. This site hosts selected documents from the first 6 volumes
First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920
"This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans."
Journal of Social Hygiene-Home Economics Archive-Cornell University
HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance.The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1500-1900. An archive of books, pamphlets, court records, and manuscript materials consisting of debates on slavery and abolition. Includes records from the American Colonization Society, from Oberlin's Anti-Slavery collection, from the American Missionary Society (Tulane), and records from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Yale, Oxford, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and other archives.

The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780 – 1925
Original documents from the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina

U.S. Congressional Serial Set This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1817-1980. The 'Serial Set' refers to the bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Votes for Women: Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
This Library of Congress exhibit offers 38 portraits, cartoons, and photographs.
Votes for Women: Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
This Library of Congress exhibit offers 38 portraits, cartoons, and photographs.
Harvard Open Collections Program: Women Working, 1800-1930