Databases by Subject

History (Primary Resources)


Digital access to the periodical collections of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), considered to be the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912.

Features more than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, bulletins, newsletters, annual reports, and other genres.

Indexes the alternative press in North America, with citations from alternative, radical, and leftist publications. Coverage is from 1969 to 1990.

Presents a collection of American Civil War letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies written between 1855 and 1875, including material that was previously unpublished. Covers the military, social, economic, and political aspects of the war.

American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 - Contains thousands of reports commissioned by companies such as Philip Morris, Chrysler, Exxon and CBS on consumer goods ranging from tobacco and broadcasting to cars and hotels. Features the complete market research reports of Ernest Dichter, the era’s foremost consumer analyst and market research pioneer.

Trade Catalogues and the American Home, 1850-1950 -  Advertisements reflecting one hundred years of changing commercial tastes and consumer trends, attitudes towards race, the family and domestic sphere, and advancements in technology. Includes trade catalogues, cards and marketing ephemera.

Search sources from the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library dating from the 1500s through the 1990s.  Materials range from maps to manuscripts to newspapers and cover all of North America. 

Digitized images of the pages of over 1,100 American magazines and journals published from 1741 through 1940.

Contains the full text of over 450 US prison newspapers, including the Angolite and San Quentin News.

Search or browse U.S. congressional materials originating from 1789 and covering through 1838, including 1st Congress, 1st Session through 25th Congress, 2nd Session.

This digital collection of primary sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library contains over 300 manuscripts, broadsides, maps, and rare printed works. Material in the collection ranges from 1722 to 1939, with the majority covering 1830 to 1839.

A directory that describes collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.

Detailed archival collection descriptions concerning historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials.

News Features & Internal Communication:  The news features, dating from 1940, include news analysis, human interest stories, and entertainment and sports reporting.

Bureau Collection: This collection offers access to records from the AP's Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh bureaus, dating from 1931 to 2004.

European Bureaus Collection provides records from 1952 to 2000 (date spans vary by country)

Washington, D.C. Bureaus Collection: Washington D.C Bureau provides access to records covering the years 1915-1930, 1952-2009.

Consists of personal papers of African Americans and records of civil rights organizations. Among the collections are: Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM); Mary McLeod Bethune Papers; Records of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC); Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Bayard Rustin Papers; Claude A. Barnett Papers.

This platform provides access to the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, Black Studies Center Periodicals, The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index (1827-1940). Materials are both historic and contemporary and covers Africa, the United States, and Caribbean.

Access over 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major African American leaders, teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers and other figures covering 250 years of history.

This is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.  KU's Kenneth Spencer Research Library is a contributing partner. 

Access to primary sources, videos, and scholarly research relate to disability studies from around the globe covering the history of the social movements surrounding disability.

Includes local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations and by sympathetic publishers across the United States. It also includes the voices from several anti-Klan newspapers. The collection covers 1921-1932.

The Evans collection covers virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. Digitized from one of the most important collections ever produced on microform, Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans' renowned American Bibliography and Roger Bristol's supplement. Including more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages, Series I also offers new imprints not available in microform editions. This link also includes access to Early American Imprints, Series I: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1800. To search Early American imprints Series 1 and 2 together, see America's historical imprints.

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 provides a comprehensive set of American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century. It is based on the noted -American Bibliography, 1801-1819 by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. With more than four million pages from over 36,000 items, including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions. This link also includes access to Early American Imprints, Series II: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1801-1819. To search Early American imprints Series 1 and 2 together, see America's historical imprints.

Documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. It makes available a collection of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, and letters that document the first impressions of North America by Europeans and of Europeans by native people.  The focus of the collection is on personal accounts of the people involved including explorers, soldiers, slaves, traders, missionaries, and officials.  The collection includes primary materials, images, environmental studies and maps that researchers and students would otherwise struggle to obtain. Indexing makes it possible to compare original descriptions of an area with the observations by individuals who followed.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Parts I and II, comprises over 200,000 printed volumes. It includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, thousands of important works from the Americas produced in the same period, along with contemporary titles that debate and analyze those works.

This resource is supported through collaborative efforts between the KU Libraries and the School of Law.

This bibliographic database is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750. Based the authoritative bibliography European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750, created at John Carter Brown Library.  It covers the history of European exploration, Native American peoples, and a wide range of subject areas from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery.

Executive branch publications from 1789 to 1932 covering topics that span business and industry, foreign trade, navigation, immigration and population, health, causes of death, religious affiliations, military operations, and weather conditions.

Contains records from the FBI and the Subversive Activities Control Board, who investigated and tracked radical groups in the U.S. from the 1950's through the 1970's.

This genealogy database provides access to US military records, including stories, photos, and personal documents for veterans beginning with the Revolutionary War. It includes data from the previously KU provided resource, American Civil War Research Database.

This resource is supported through collaborative efforts between the KU Libraries and the State Library of Kansas.

Transcripts of foreign broadcasts and news that have been translated into English by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a U.S. government agency.  This fully searchable digital edition is the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence. The dates of coverage are 1941 to 1996.

A research portal that provides enhanced ways and methods to search numerous primary source collections from Gale.

The collection was begun by Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen in the late 1800s. This resource delivers images on the evolution of feminist consciousness and women's rights as they appeared in the original printed works.  It includes monographs, periodicals and pamphlets in fifteen languages.

A resource for census data, family records and local histories. This collection assembles every extant U.S. federal census, banking and military records, genealogies, primary source materials, and genealogical and local history serials.

This collection chronicles the transformative decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s through the lens of independent alternative presses. Among the broad interest groups covered are American youth. Feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals and the New Left, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, and members of the LGBT communities.

Created to celebrate Kansas' Sesquicentennial, this database contains digitized and fully searchable primary sources, including personal narratives, memoirs, political speeches, sermons, and more from the Sabin Americana Collection and other Gale sources.

This resource is supported through collaborative efforts between the KU Libraries and the State Library of Kansas.

Provides cover-to-cover access to Liberty Magazine, an illustrated weekly magazine covering middle America from 1924 to 1950.  Includes illustrations, fiction, nonfiction articles, and advertisements that captured middle America’s attitudes, lifestyles, interests, values, and fads.

Access to articles and images from one of the most influential popular magazines of all time.

This collection brings its users to the teeming streets of 19th century London through posters, penny fiction, chapbooks, maps, cartoons, song sheets, and more. Of interest to scholars and students of social history, popular culture, language and literature, and urban development.

Provides full-text searching and digital images of 22,000 legal treatises on US and British law published from 1800 through 1926. These legal history resources cover many topics of interest to general researchers.

Offers online access to early state codes, city charters, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history. Dates of coverage range from 1620-1970. Based primarily on holdings of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University.

Provides full-text searching and digital images of thousands of books and pamphlets covering major and minor trials of English-speaking jurisdictions and English-language trials in other jurisdictions. Materials include unofficially published accounts of trials, as well as briefs, arguments and other trial documents where these were printed as separate publications. These legal history resources are also useful in the social sciences and reveal elements of the lives of ordinary people. Topics covered include: adultery, commercial law, conspiracy, constitutional law, crimes against persons, domestic relations, dueling, elections, impeachment, international law, land, libel, military offenses, murder, slavery, theft, torts, treason and wills, among many other subjects.

Covering years 1909 through 1972, this collection contains internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People throughout the country.

Provides a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. Included are approximately 100,000 pages of primary source such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, political cartoons, and oral histories. Materials included cover a period from approximately 1840 to the present, with most of the focus on the period from 1890 to 1920. People from many countries are represented, including more recent waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Several thousand pages of Ellis Island oral history interviews are indexed and searchable as well.

The Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge contains 538 Old English and medieval manuscripts. This database provides full digital copies of each manuscript along with thousands of citations to the relevant secondary literature on the manuscripts.

Includes printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera, and video clips. Covers music, tv, movies, fashion, youth culture, student protests, civil rights movement, and women's liberation.

This collection of primary source materials from the Wiener Library and The National Archives of the UK and covers the politics and administration of the refugee crisis in Europe after World War Two. Among the topics included are refugee camps, Jewish orphans, and the British military in Germany.

Provides indexing to the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the important events of the 20th century.  Coverage includes 1890-1982.

An online collection of books, pamphlets, serials, and other works about the Americas, from the time of their discovery to the early 1900s. Covers a span of 400 years in North, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean.

Letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories; accounts from official, radical, and alternative organizations; posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare materials; and Universal newsreel footage of the times.

This database include essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world as well as materials on free African-Americans in the colonies and the U.S. before 1870.This 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.

A comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Provides thousands of tables and millions of data points across a wide variety of topics.

Contains hundreds of personal letters, diaries, photos, and maps from the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society and the Kansas Collection of the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. Includes a tutorial for Territorial Kansas history with lesson plans.

Primary source material, including maps, from the bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the reports, documents, and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Searchable by subject, publication category, standing committee author, and other parameters. 

Texts from the bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the reports, documents, and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Records and briefs brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978. 

Contains a wide range of material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain, and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930.

Contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day. Vogue is a unique record of American and international popular culture that extends beyond fashion.

Brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities, organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. This full-text resource also provides learning modules in the form of document projects, each of which is organized around a specific question about a single social movement.

Collating material from archives around the world, this resource features ephemera, souvenir artifacts and personal reflections collected by fair-goers as well as official records from the organising committees and examples international reception. Material includes pamphlets, guide books, official catalogues, periodicals, minutes, correspondence, and a large number of visual materials.
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