U.S. History

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.

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. See here for a list of titles included.

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. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.