America - History and Life
-Contains citations covering the history of the United States and Canada, published from 1964 to the present. The database indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide, including all key English-language historical journals, selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals, and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities, including some articles in-progress. Also includes book and media reviews from a selection of over one hundred key journals and abstracts of dissertations. Citations to articles that have full text availability in either Project Muse or JSTOR now include a link to the full article. (ECU Users Only)
Historical Abstracts
-Covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada). It contains annotated citations to articles published from 1960-present. The database covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide, including the key historical journals from virtually every major country and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities. Historical Abstracts also includes book reviews from journals in the field and abstracts of dissertations completed worldwide. Citations to articles that have full text availability in either Project Muse or JSTOR now include a link to the full article. (ECU Users Only)
History Cooperative
-Current full text coverage of the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, and several other journals. Browse by issues or search.
JSTOR
-JSTOR (Journal Storage Project) provides the complete back files of over 200 important research journals in the humanities,social sciences and sciences. Journals are scanned, so that they include full page images that look just like the original. Coverage runs from first issue published until most recent 3-5 years. (ECU Users Only)
Periodicals Archive Online
-Periodicals Archive Online is both an electronic index to the contents of thousands of scholarly journals and popular periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995, and a major online archive that makes the backfiles of more than 200 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available in digital form. The scope is worldwide and includes journals in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and other Western languages. (ECU Users Only)
Project Muse
-Full-text access to approximately 115 journals published by 10 academic presses in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. (ECU Users Only)
Academic Info: World History Gateway
-Web sites suitable for undergraduates, organized by topic or region.
American and British History Resources on the Internet
-This site is a comprehensive collection of full-text primary sources and reputable links on the entire scope of American and British histories. The site is maintained by Rutgers University Library.
Internet Public Library History Collection
-Annotated subject directory of selected history Web sites. Browsable and searchable.
Intute: Arts & Humanities: History
-Extensive directory of history Web sites hosted by Oxford University. Browse by primary or secondary sources, time period, or intended audience.
World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalogue
-Exhaustive list of WWW history links, organized by subject area.
Primary source materials are original historical documents, such as letters, treaties, newspapers and legal documents. These types of resources are invaluable to the practice of historical research. The following web sites are excellent sources of primary material.
American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900
-This collection includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection will be comprised of more than 1,000 titles, including Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, the first American professional journals, and several popular magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Ladies' Home Journal. Content is still being added to this new database.(ECU Users Only)
American Radicalism Collection
-This remarkable website includes electronic texts and digital images associated with American extremism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The site is maintained by Michigan State University Library.
Documenting the American South
-"Documenting the American South (DAS) is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century." Created by the University of North Carolina, DAS includes over 900 books and manuscripts organized into 5 separate collections, including first person accounts, slave narratives, and material on the Southern homefront during the Civil War.
Duke University Digitized Collections
-This superior digitized collection contains several collections related to southern history, especially slave narratives and documents on women's history and the civil war. Other non-south collections are also superb. The site is maintained by the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Eastern North Carolina Digital History Exhibits
-Six exhibits covering aspects of ECU and regional history, featuring "digitized pamphlets, news articles, book excerpts, photographs, broadsides, letters, plant specimens, and other resources. The major sources for the digitized materials you see in these exhibits are Joyner Library's North Carolina Collection and Special Collections Departments."
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
-"The Internet History Sourcebooks are collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use." The three main sourcebooks are in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern history, as well as a number of more specialized collections. They are both browsable and searchable.
Library of Congress American Memory Collections
-"The American Memory Historical Collections, a major component of the Library's National Digital Library Program, are multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections." The site contains over 7,000,000 digitized items, organized into more than 100 collections. This is the largest assemblage of primary source material in American history available on the Web.
Making of America - Cornell University
-Digital library of primary sources in American social history dating from the mid 19th century, offering "access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles". Can be browsed and searched.
Making of America - University of Michigan
-Digital library of primary sources in American social history dating from the mid 19th century, containing "approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles". Can be browsed and searched.
Modern English Collection (1500-Present)
-his multifarious collection contains fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present, arranged for browsing by author's last name or by category of interest. Subjects include African American, including Letters from Liberia; Native American; American Civil War; Salem Witch Trials; Thomas Jefferson; Edgar Allan Poe; Mark Twain; William Shakespeare; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Women Writers; Young Readers; Literature in Translation; Best Sellers, 1900-1930. The site is maintained by the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library.
Secession Era Editorials Project
-Digitized transcriptions of mid 19th century American newspaper editorials. The site is maintained by Furman University.
Valley of the Shadow
-This very sophisticated Civil War website traces the prewar and wartime events that occurred in two Virigina communities. The site contains digitized newspapers, letters, diaries, military records, public records, church records, maps, and more. The authors have constructed an impressive and interesting array of teaching tools, as well. It is a site, maintained by professors at the University of Virginia, that can't be missed.
Emma Goldman Papers Project
-The online Emma Goldman Papers Project contains a wealth of information and full-text primary sources of this famous American radical and feminist. The site contains primary text, biograpical essays, and teaching tools. In additon, the visitor will find online samples of materials from the published version of the project. The site is maintained by The University of California, Berkeley, Sunsite project.
Gerritsen Collection - Women's History Online, 1543-1945
-Digitized collection of journals and monographs totalling some 2,000,000 pages, "reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and women's rights".(ECU Users Only)
Internet Women's History Sourcebook
-This formidable site includes documents pertaining to women's history in a global context. Scroll down to "North America" to find the U.S. Women's History sources.
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
-This site contains full-text selections in nineteenth-century American women's literature, antislavery and suffrage documents.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950
-"North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NWLD) includes the immediate experiences of 1,017 women, as revealed in approximately 120,000 pages of diaries and letters." (ECU/NC Live Users Only)
Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
-The documents here focus on the first decade of Cady's and Stanton's collaboration, from 1852 until 1861, when they honed their skills as reformers in New York State. These primary historical sources are pertinent to the study of women, American politics, New York State, and antebellum reform movements. Site maintained by Rutgers University.
Suffragists Oral History Project
-Sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley Library, this site contains digitized transcriptions of oral histories preserving the memories of leading suffragists. These transcripts document women's activities to win the right to vote for women and their careers as leaders of the movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Women Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921: .
-This site includes documents from the Library of Congress' Rare Book and Manuscript Collection. The site contains an extensive collection of digitized suffrage documents that nicely complements a U.S. Women's History course.
African American Odyssey
-This site showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. The collection contains more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings.
African American Perspectives - Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection 1818-1907
-This site presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century
-The New York Public Library has created this Web site as part of its digitized library collection. The site is a rich source for nineteenth-century African-American women's literature, poetry, and autobiography.
Africans in America
-Companion Web site to PBS documentary surveys the origins of racial slavery in American and the global economy that prospered from it. The site contains narrative interpretation, "resource banks" (my favorite feature) that include annotated images and documents, and a teacher's guide.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography:
-Includes the life histories of former American slaves and the transcripts of actual slave interviews. This is an authoritative collection of Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives and the Comprehensive Name Index for The American Slave on the Web. (ECU/NC Live Users Only)
Born in Slavery - Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
-Library of Congress online exhibit contains 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).
Freedmen's Bureau Online
-This genealogical site offers numerous records, such as indentures, labor contracts, marriage records, and reports of outrages and arrests, (organized by state) from the Freedmen's Bureau papers. The site also links to additional Freedmen's Bureau-related sites, including the esteemed Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which has just begun to incorporate some of its many records on the internet.
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation - U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875
-Library of Congress site offering the full text of historical Congressional publications. Browse by publication or search.
Core Documents of U.S. Democracy
-Government Printing Office (GPO) site containing links to both historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Gettysburg Address, as well as current congressional and presidential documents and Supreme Court decisions for most of the 20th century.
Digital National Security Archive
-Contains over 55,000 declassified documents going back to 1945. Organized into 24 collections, with topics including the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and terrorism. (ECU Users Only)
Foreign Relations of the United States
-Official State Department documentary historical record of US foreign policy. Over 30 volumes covering the 1950's and 60's are now online.
GPO Access
-Government Web site provides access to over 280,000 online documents, from all three main branches of government. Strongest areas of coverage are laws and regulations, recent congressional publications, and recent presidential documents.
Lexis Nexis Academic: Legal Research
-Find full text state and federal legal codes and case law. Search by type of court, legal topic, or for a specific legal citation.(ECU Users Only)
Lexis Nexis Congressional
-Indexing of congressional bills, laws, and publications from 1789 to present. Full text of bills and laws to 1988, congressional documents to 1995. Most indexed publications available in microfiche in Joyner Library Documents Collection (Basement).(ECU Users Only)
National Security Archive.
-Declassified Cold War era documents from George Washington University. Topics include Latin America, nuclear weapons, and US-Chinese relations. Click on "Documents" to access online collections.
Project Avalon
-Impressive database of treaties, legal codes, and other historical documents created by Yale University Law School. Can be browsed by author, chronological period, or subject area. Searchable as well.
For more sources, see our guide to Finding Historical Government Publications.
