LibGuides: Making America: Home

Library Primary Sources and Newspapers

Databases with primary sources

U.S. History in Context
Historical Newspapers
Historical Newspapers in Proquest gives you access to the archives of many newspapers going back over 200 years. Access by selecting Historical Newspapers under Source Type.
Black Freedom Struggle
Find historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more from specific periods in U.S. history marked by the opposition African Americans have faced on the road to freedom.
JStor
Includes archives of over one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Newspapers

California Digital Newspaper Collection
The California Digital Newspaper Collection contains significant historical California newspapers from 1846-present, including the first California newspaper, The Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, The Daily Alta California.
Chronicling America
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Historical Newspapers Edited by Frederick Douglass
This online collection presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century.
New York Times
We have schoolwide access to NYTimes.com. To activate, please follow the link.

Other Primary Source Resources

Digital Public library of America: Primary Source Sets
Primary source collections exploring topics in history, literature, and culture developed by educators — use the time period drop down menu to explore specific topics or search the collection with keywords.
Hathi Trust
similar to DPLA, searches several member institutions' digital collections
American Memory from the Library of Congress
American Memory provides text and images of the original pages for many documents, photographs and prints, films, sound recordings, and other resources.
Calisphere
The University of California's gateway to more than 200,000 digitized items reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.
Umbra
Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available search tool; digitization of African American materials across University of Minnesota collections including primary sources!
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Click on the "Primary Sources" tab at the top to browse their selection. (The collection is searchable by clicking the "Search the Collection" option at the left.)

Finding More!

Search the internet for your topic and the word archives.

Many museums, colleges, universities, and other cultural institutions collect items in archives for use by scholars. Unfortunately not all of the objects are digitized, but you may get lucky here and there!

Ask the librarian for help if you are having trouble finding useful sources.