U.S. History

Updated regularly. A comprehensive collection of scholarship focused on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture, coupled with sophisticated technology permitting precise search and browse capabilities. Features over 7,500 articles from Oxford's authoritative reference works, approximately 100 primary sources with specially written commentaries, over 1,000 images, over 100 maps, over 200 charts and tables, timelines to guide researchers through the history of African Americans and over 6,000 biographies.

Some of the titles included in this access are:

• African American Artists before the Twentieth Century
• African American National Biography
• Africana
• Black Women in America, Second Edition
• Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present

A gateway into one of the great conversations in history. These newly prepared digital editions of the papers of many of the major figures of the early republic are presented in a fully searchable and interoperable online environment.

Collections include:

• The Adams Papers
• The Papers of Alexander Hamilton
• The Papers of Andrew Jackson
• The Selected Papers of John Jay
• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
• The Dolley Madison Digital Edition
• The Papers of James Madison
• The Papers of John Marshall
• The Papers of George Washington
• The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
• Founders Early Access

Updated regularly. This collection allows students and researchers to analyze historical events, and their presentation over time, through documentaries, commercial and governmental newsreels and archival and public affairs footage. The full runs of newsreels from United Newsreel and Universal Newsreel from 1929 through 1967 are included. On 14th September 2012, American History in Video was updated. As of this update there are 6,002 videos (including 3,211 documentaries) equaling 1,616 hours in American History in Video.

Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.

Updated daily. Contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals. 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 Magazine, 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.

Updated regularly. Includes every legislative and executive document of the first fourteen U.S. Congresses. Complements the digital U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980. A source of primary material on wide-ranging aspects of early American history.

Provide access to source materials on the development of the American West. Contains a wide range of documents, including original manuscripts, ephemeral material (trade cards, wanted posters, photos, claim certificates, news-sheets etc), maps, and rare printed works. Topics covered include Native Americans, pioneers and homesteaders, mining, the Mormon Exodus, transportation, outlaws, the environment, and border issues.

Digitized content selected from The Graff Collection of Western Americana at The Newberry Library in Chicago.

Access to this resource is funded by the Emily Knauss Library Endowment for the Liberal Arts.

Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer

Provides access to a digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture. Includes historical articles, newspapers, religious pamphlets, broadsides, historical books, letters, short stories, poems, advertisements, and more. The content is in Spanish (80%) and English (20%), and is searchable in both languages. Materials are drawn from the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

Updated regularly. Contains the full text of all known existing books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in the United States (or British American colonies prior to Independence) from 1639 through 1800. Based on the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans, every nonserial item listed in Evans is reproduced and an additional 1100 titles from Bristol's supplement to Evans is also included.

Updated quarterly (until completed). Contains early accounts of exploration, discovery, travel, environment, peoples, and cultures in North America. Currently contains 1,076 authors and approximately 83,000 pages of material. When complete the product will include more than 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico.

Users may need to refresh cache and cookies or use a private browsing window for this resource. Updated regularly. An online collection of English and foreign language books, pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800. Content is presented as full text page images which can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF documents. When complete, more than 33 million pages of material will support full text searching. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Updated twice annually. Provides the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Includes letters in English, French, German and Italian from families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers, etc. Also includes primary source letters from more than 6,000 writers and numerous presses, as well as document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources. Explore the writer's views on history, literature, language, arts, philosophy, science, medicine, and personal, social and political relations.

An ongoing scholarly research project of the University of Oxford and other universities and organizations.

Provides full text access to primary source documents from the British Empire (the Empire encompassed Africa, the Americas, Australia, Oceania, and South Asia). Documents include travel accounts, the literature of Empire, photography and illustration, religious material, and records on issues of race and class in the colonial context.

The material is divided into 5 sections

1. Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969
2. Empire Writing and Literature of Empire
3. The Visible Empire
4. Religion and Empire
5. Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism c1607-2007

Browse by names, places and topics Search by period, date, places, person and subject.

Also includes scholarly interpretive essays on the British Empire.

Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer

This online collection brings together documents from 16 archives and libraries from around the world and the geographical spread of material allows scholars to take either a comparative approach or focus on a particular region. The collection deals with some of the major themes of frontier existence including: Settlement development, law and order, violence, expeditions and exploration, relations with indigenous peoples, trade and commerce, death and disease, missionaries and religion, women’s history, military matters, mining, gold rushes, settler governance, contested boundaries, agriculture and livestock.

Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer

A full text collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. Includes publications from Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. The ASCII text is searchable by keyword and Boolean operators, and records are linked to the corresponding page images, viewable with the Acrobat Reader plugin from Adobe.

If users encounter an error when connecting please clear your browser cache and cookies and try again OR use a private (incognito) browsing window. The newspapers and pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available anywhere. The 1,270-title collection includes a wide range of pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period, covering more than 200 years of accounts from newspapers from England, Ireland, Scotland and a handful of papers from British colonies in the Americas and Asia.

Updated regularly. Provides a standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. Expands and revises information provided in Historical Statistics of the United States, previously produced by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and includes thirty years of new data and scholarship. Footnotes and explanatory information provide instructional information about the data and sources of the data.

Permits users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting particular areas of interest. Data is downloadable in Excel or CSV; also download entire groups of tables as a zip file.

Designed to complement The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, this archive offers online access to state and municipal codes, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history. The term “primary sources” is used not in the historian’s sense of a manuscript, letter or diary, but rather in the legal sense of a case, statute or regulation.

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Comprises over 10,000 titles and more than 2 million pages of fully searchable content, covering trial books from all countries and languages (although the great majority are in English and published in the U.S. or Great Britain); includes books covering multiple trials as well as books about a single trial. Based on the law libraries of Harvard and Yale, and of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as some from the British Library. The category of "trials" includes unofficially published accounts of trials; official trial documents, briefs, and arguments where these were printed as separate publications; official, separately published records of legislative proceedings; administrative proceedings; and arbitrations (domestic and international).

Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Updated quarterly (until completed). Includes diaries, journals, and letters written by women visiting or living in North America between the years 1700 and 1950. When complete, the database will be the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled and include the personal experiences of 1,500 women from all classes and walks of life.

Updated daily. Provides indexing of many Congressional publications from 1789 to the present, including Hearings, Committee Prints, Reports, Documents and Congressional Research Service Reports.

House and Senate Reports and Documents indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1817-1969) are available in full text in the Serial Set database. Our subscription to ProQuest Congressional does not include full text of the Serial Set.

Congressional Hearings after 2013 and House and Senate Documents and Reports indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1995 to present) are available in full text on Govinfo.gov site from the Government Printing Office.

ProQuest Digital U.S. Bills and Resolutions provides searchable full text of all versions of all U.S. Congressional bills and resolutions from 1789 to the present.

Provides a portal for slavery studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period spanning six centuries, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Offers images of many thousands of original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images not available elsewhere, links to other online sources approved by scholars and a series of contextual essays by leading authorities from around the world.

Includes extensive coverage of topics such as the African Coast; the Middle Passage; the varieties of slave experience (urban, domestic, industrial, farm, ranch and plantation); Spiritualism and Religion; Resistance and Revolts; the Underground Railroad; the Abolition Movement; Legislation; Education; the Legacy of Slavery and Slavery Today.

Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer

Slavery and the Law is a collection of archival primary sources.

Series I: Petitions to State Legislatures offers access to important but virtually unused primary source materials that were scattered in state archives of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The collection includes virtually all extant legislative petitions on the subject of race and slavery.

Series II: Petitions to Southern County Courts were collected from local courthouses, and candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in southern society. It was at county courthouses where the vast majority of disputes over the institution of slavery were referred.

Slavery and the Law also includes State Slavery Statutes, a master record of the laws governing American slavery, covering 1789–1865.

Updated regularly. Provides easy access to historical census data for the United States. Allows users to visually analyze and understand the demography of any part of the United States with access to the following:

• Interactive thematic maps of historical census data
• Customized reports for any chosen area or areas (including aggregates)
• Complete coverage of the United States, down to neighborhoods and streets
• Simple navigation buttons and a find tool make it easy and efficient to study neighborhoods

Users can examine geographic areas while selecting the type of data to be shown, such as population density or income level. The corresponding data tables are also available.

Updated quarterly. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. A resource for the teaching the history of women in the United States. Consists of 74 editorial projects with more than 2200 primary documents intended for use in high school and college history classrooms. Also includes a major collection of links to related websites and a search engine that permits users to do full text searching of all the primary documents mounted on the site.