Full Text Primary Source Collections Online

The resources listed below have been selected from the Databases & Article Searching section of the Yale library web site. You may also want to check publicly available web resources such as the American Memory project of the Library of Congress and the Documenting the American South project of UNC.

See the ALA Using Primary Sources on the Web guide for additional useful information.

Magazines and Newspapers
Diaries and Letters
Documents

Magazines and Newspapers:

Accessible Archives: provides a searchable collection of American newspapers from the 18th & 19th Centuries. Eras covered include the Colonial Period, the French & Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, African-American History, Industrial Revolution, and Genealogy.

American Periodical Series: contains 1000 magazines published between 1741 and 1900. Titles include Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, the first American professional journals, and several consumer magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Ladies' Home Journal. The search interface allows you to search the complete text, including tables of contents, by boolean and keyword operators. Articles are linked to the corresponding page images, downloadable in PDF format.

Augusta Chronicle Newspapers: a searchable internet database of The Augusta Chronicle newspapers dating from 1792 to 2000, including editions of Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, The Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State, and The Daily Chronicle & Constitution. The archive shows the page as it was originally published - with stories, photos and advertising.

Early American Newspapers: features cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. This collection is based largely on Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820.

HarpWeek: The Civil War Era and Reconstruction (1857-1877): Searchable full-text database of all the pages of Harper's Weekly during the Civil War Era, Reconstruction I and Reconstruction II with scanned images, together with a series of indexes.

Los Angeles Times: Historical Los Angeles Times (1881-1987) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue.

Nation Digital Archive: includes every issue of The Nation magazine, America's oldest continuously published weekly journal, founded in 1865.

New York Times: Online access to articles from the New York Times, currently covering from 1851 to the present.

Times of London: complete digital edition of The Times (London) from 1785 to 1985. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. Palmer's Index to the (London) Times available through Historical Newspapers Online.

Wall Street Journal: Historical Wall Street Journal covers the years 1889-1987.

Washington Post: Historical Washington Post (1877-1987) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue.

Diaries, Letters, Oral History:

The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries: includes more than 400 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs providing access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, seaman, wives, and even spies are included.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries: includes the immediate experiences of 91 women, as revealed in approximately 24,000pages of diaries and letters.

Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment: this database, assembled from hundreds of primary sources, documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850.

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories: provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1840 and 1950.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial-1950: includes the personal experiences of 1,325 women, as revealed in their diaries and letters. When complete the collection will include approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials.

Oral History Online: provides in-depth indexing to more than 1,800 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. The collection also provides keyword searching of more than 75,000 pages of full-text by some 2,500 individuals from all walks of life.

Documents:

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy: digital documents dating from 122 B.C. to 2003.

National Security Archive: contains more than 35,000 of the most important declassified documents that led to policy decisions. There are twelve complete collections: Afghanistan, Berlin Crisis 1958-1962, Cuban Missile Crisis, El Salvador, Iran-Contra Affair, Intelligence Community, Iran Revolution, Military Uses of Space, Nicaragua, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Philippines, and South Africa.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans: Upon completion, Evans Digital will consist of over 36,000 works issued in America from 1639 to 1800.

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker: (1801-1819) provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century.

Early Canadiana Online (ECO): full text online collection of more than 3,000 books and pamphlets documenting Canadian history from the first European contact to the late 19th century.

Lexis-Nexis Primary Sources in U.S. History: comprises three full text modules---Access to African American Studies, Access to Presidential Studies, and Access to Women's Studies. The modules provide a range of sources, including autobiographies, manuscripts, government documents, photographs and images, reference and scholarly articles, and speeches, dating from 1788 to the present.

Macmillan Cabinet Papers: contains ca. 30,000 original documents from the years 1957-1963, linked to fully searchable indexes.

Making of Modern Law: Contains legal treatises published from 1800-1926. Includes more than 21,000 works on U.S. and British Commonwealth law.

Making of Modern Economics: Contains works of literature on economic and business published in Europe and North America from 1450 through 1850.

Original Sources: contains the full text of over 250 volumes, including the Public Papers of the Presidents, as well as 1,000 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1793 to 1998; 1,100 links to key documents of American History (1000 AD to the present); all the National Party Platforms for each major party, 1840-1996; 17 classic political and economic writings.

Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600 - 2000: documents the multiplicity of women's reform activities by bringing together thousands of pages of books, images, and documents.

 

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This file last modified 12/12/06
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