Databases are also fantastic places to search for primary sources. If you only have time to look at a few, take a look below at some of our recommended databases that focus on U.S. History primary source materials from the 19th century. See the "Full List of Databases" tabs to find other useful databases covering 19th century U.S. History. Many of these databases include eras beyond the 19th century.
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From 1717 through 1836 the governments of Spain and Mexico collected in San Antonio de Bexar (when that city was the capital of Texas under Spanish and Mexican rule) an amazing series of official documents detailing the military, civilian, and political life of the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas. These records, which have become known as the Bexar Archives, constitute the most complete and detailed primary source in existence for the study of colonial Texas. The Archives, housed at the University of Texas at Austin, consist of 250,000 pages of manuscript documentation and more than 4,000 pages of printed material on colonial and regional history.
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The collections in the Confederate Military Manuscripts cover the perspective of an army commander or an administrative department down to the level of the private soldier, covering all aspects of their military service and experience, while also offering glimpses of life on the home front. Several previously unpublished collections of records of the Union Army are also integral to this module. Highlights include papers of spies, scouts, guides and detectives, including a series on Allan Pinkerton; records on military discipline from courts-martial, courts of inquiry and investigations by military commissions; and records of the U.S. Colored Troops.
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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.
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Updated regularly. Includes more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and the 1990s, including titles from all 50 states. Search by dates/eras, article types (news & opinion, election returns, letters, poetry/songs, legislative, prices, advertisements, matrimony & death notices), region/state, and newspaper name.
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From the library of the American Antiquarian Society, this collection contains more than 500 periodicals related to America from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic.
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From the library of the American Antiquarian Society, this collection of more than 2,000 periodicals includes contemporary coverage from the era of the Second Great Awakening, the early temperance movement, and the abolitionist movement.
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From the library of the American Antiquarian Society, this collection of more than 1,700 periodicals focuses on the Civil War and a diverse record of the continuance of daily life for many Americans—both leading up to and during the war.
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From the library of the American Antiquarian Society, this collection of more than 2,800 periodicals covers all aspects of American life from the Reconstruction through the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Presents thematic content focusing on the evolution of Hispanic civil rights, religious thought, and the growing presence of women writers from the late 19th and 20th centuries. Rare and relevant books and newspapers – including rare anarchist newspapers – are presented in their original form. Extensive manuscript collections of both organizations and individuals are included for viewing, and are indexed for ease of search and maximum discovery. This collection offers a unique approach by focusing exclusively on the Latino-Hispanic history of the United States.
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Updated regularly. Contains approximately 1200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. The content represents North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print.
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The collections in the Confederate Military Manuscripts cover the perspective of an army commander or an administrative department down to the level of the private soldier, covering all aspects of their military service and experience, while also offering glimpses of life on the home front. Several previously unpublished collections of records of the Union Army are also integral to this module. Highlights include papers of spies, scouts, guides and detectives, including a series on Allan Pinkerton; records on military discipline from courts-martial, courts of inquiry and investigations by military commissions; and records of the U.S. Colored Troops.
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A collection of large-scale, detailed maps from 1867-1970 depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of more than 12,000 U.S. towns and cities.
The available states on our site are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Access to this resource is funded by the Littlefield Fund for Southern History.
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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.
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Presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Provides full text and page impages of Harper's Weekly, one of the most important serials of nineteenth-century America. Includes browse issues by date, search the index, search for the full text of articles, browse literature by genre, or find people by their cccupation or role in society.
The University of Texas Libraries subscribes to the entire database, including The Civil War Era (1857-1865), Reconstruction I (1866-1871), Reconstruction II (1872-1877), Gilded Age I (1878-1883), Gilded Age II (1884-1889), Gilded Age III (1890-1895), Gilded Age IV (1896-1901), Gilded Age V (1902-1907), and Gilded Age VI (1908-1912).
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Provides access to a large compilation of Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes many newspapers published bilingually in Spanish and English. Features hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including many long scattered and forgotten titles published in the 19th century.
Based on the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project", a national research effort directed by Professor Nicolás Kanellos.
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Provides access to historical Jewish newspapers published around the world from the nineteenth century onwards. Includes digital versions of each newspaper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication.
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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.
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This resource’s unique content is primarily composed of video oral histories recording the African American experience in the first-person. Testimonies captured in The HistoryMakers Collection interviews are conducted in homes and offices across the United States and abroad. The interviews reveal the broad scope of narratives of African American men and women who have made significant contributions to American life, history, and culture during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
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LGBT Thought and Culture is an online primary source database hosting the key works and archival documentation of LGBT political and social movements throughout the 20th century and into the present day. The collection contains seminal texts, letters, periodicals, speeches, interviews, and ephemera.
The resource provides a look into LGBT life from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, covering topics such as bars and saloons, gay communities, clubs and social organizations, gay activism and activists, gay rights, AIDS, films, politics, books, medical treatments and procedures, gender identity, discrimination, and more.
Includes material from the Kinsey Institute Archive and Library, the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the Jeanne Cordova Papers, the Magnus Hirschfeld Collection, and more.
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A digital online archive of 22,000 legal treatises published in the United States and Great Britain between 1800 and 1926. Provides access to over 10 million individual page images. Includes works on British Commonwealth and American law, with 14,900 titles from the nineteenth century and 7,100 titles from the years 1900 to 1926. Covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature, some very rare. The monographs and materials include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches.
Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.
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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.
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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.
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Newspaper Source Plus provides a full-text digital collection of the world's major news content. It includes millions of articles from newspapers, newswires and news magazines. In addition, it offers television and radio transcripts and ongoing daily updates from popular news sources.
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Updated annually. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1851. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.
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A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century. The content is sourced from the world's preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.
Access to this resource is partially funded by the Emily Knauss Library Endowment for the Liberal Arts.
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Updated quarterly (until completed). Provides a view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. When completed, will include more than 100,000 pages of personal narratives including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories. Currently contains 342 authors and approximately 37,500 pages of information.
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A collection of biographical material of American Indians and Canadian First Peoples in their own words and through the words of others. Includes biographies, autobiographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, oral histories, reference works, manuscripts, photographs and audio files.Sources include rare books and biographies from more than 100 Indian publications, such as The Arrow, the Cherokee Phoenix, and the Chickasaw Intelligencer. The collection includes 2,000 oral histories presented in audio and transcript form and at least 20,000 photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Edward Curtis, and many rare collections.
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Updated daily. Provides indexing of many Congressional publications, including Bills, Resolutions, 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.
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Contains comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America. Covers more than 375 titles.
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Updated semi-annually. The Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (RIPM: Repertoire International de la Presse Musicale) indexes articles from over 60 international 19th and 20th-century music periodicals in all major languages. Citations include author and title of article, periodical data, and a brief note of contents (e.g., "review"). Annotations or abstracts are not included. Includes writings about composers, performers, and compositions, and provides a documentary history of 19th-century music and musical life.
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Provides over 14,000 primary source titles based on Joseph Sabin's bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana. Materials describe every aspect of life in the Western Hemisphere from 1500 to the 1890s. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. Searchable in a variety of ways, including: author, title, year of publication, and subject.
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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.
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Slavery and the Law is a collection of archival primary sources.Slavery and the Law also includes State Slavery Statutes, a master record of the laws governing American slavery, covering 1789–1865.
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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:
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.
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Updated regularly. Provides a digital reproduction of the United States Congressional Serial Set, consisting of the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Content covers years 1817 to 1980.
The maps published as part of the U. S. Congressional Serial Set publications are also searchable. Includes all maps from 1817 - 1980.
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Provides nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs from over 150,000 cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978. Also contains full-text search capabilities to more than 350,000 documents, including appellant's and appellee's briefs, oral transcripts, and petitions for writ of certiorari.
Access to this resource is funded by the Tarlton Law Library at the Jamail Center for Legal Research.
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The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names. The Vogue Archive preserves the work of the world's greatest fashion designers, stylists and photographers and is a unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.
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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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.