LibGuides: Environmental Movements in the U.S.: Primary Sources

Select Primary Source Collections

Gerald W. Williams Collection
“This collection consists of the collected historic photographs, personal papers, and research library of Gerald "Jerry" Williams, former national historian for the U.S. Forest Service. It's 3,000 volume research library includes a significant number of titles pertaining to environmental history and natural resources issues, as well as Pacific Northwest and general U.S. history, Native Americans, photography, and geology and geography.”
Library of Congress Climate Change Web Archive
“The Climate Change Web Archive preserves representative, web-based content documenting the causes of, impacts of, and responses to climate change around the world. As a multidisciplinary collection, subjects and creators include federal, state, local, and tribal governments; science and technology; economics and labor; arts and culture; public and social policy; education; and environmental justice.”

Environmental Issues: Essential Primary Sources by Lerner, K. Lee; Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth (editors)
Publication Date: 2006

A focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Each title contains approximately 175 full or excerpted documents---speeches, legislation, magazine and newspaper articles, essays, memoirs, letters, interviews, novels, songs, and works of art---as well as overview information that places each document in context.

Confluence: The History of North American Rivers
Featuring maps, interviews and archival sources to map the history of North American rivers.
Documerica
"For the Documerica Project (1971-1977), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s. The National Archives digitized part of the series "Documerica". More than 15,000 of these images are available in the National Archives Catalog."
Donaldson Collection of Northern Pacific Ocean Radiological Surveys, 1946-1964
"This collection is a sampling of personal logs, photo albums, ephemera, and papers from the radiological surveys undertaken after atmospheric nuclear weapons testing conducted by the United States in the Northern Pacific Ocean between 1946 and 1964."
Everglades Digital Library: Reclaiming the Everglades
"A collaborative digital library project of the University of Miami, Florida International University, and the History Miami libraries and special collections. Included are nearly 10,000 page images of primary source materials relating to south Florida environmental history are accessible here. This digitized documentary evidence spans the years 1884 to present and covers topics such as the establishment of the Everglades National Park, Native American land rights, agriculture, urban development, endangered species, invasive plants, and the role of women in the modern conservation movement."
Forest History Society Collection
“The Forest History Society collections contain an extraordinary range of information about forest and conservation history, from prehistoric times to current events. This Research Portal provides access to over 45,000 citations to published items on environmental history topics, over 30,000 historic photographs, U.S. Forest Service history materials, descriptions of nearly 8,000 archival collections from over 450 North American repositories, and much more.”
Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
"Launched in 2005, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts."
John Muir Papers
"As a renowned naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist, John Muir is considered a forefather of the modern environmental movement. Since 1970, Holt-Atherton Special Collections has been the repository for the John Muir Papers and over a dozen Muir related collections. Today, approximately 75% of the extant papers of Muir are made available for study."
This collection includes correspondences, journals, notebooks, drawings, photographs, and more.
Love Canal Collections
Includes reports, testimonies, newspapers, and legislative records on the environmental disaster in Love Canal, a neighborhood in New York, after toxic waste dumping led to deadly contamination.
National Park Service History Electronic Library & Archive
"A portal to electronic publications covering the history of the National Park Service (NPS) and the cultural and natural history of the national parks, monuments, and historic sites of the (U.S.) National Park System. Also included are documents for national monuments managed by other federal agencies, along with a collection of U.S. Forest Service publications."
UNT Environmental Policy Collection
"The Environmental Policy Collection contains a variety of open access resources that provide a balanced view on environmental issues and their potential consequences. The current focus of the collection is climate change, and the documents come from such agencies and individuals as: United States Climate Change Science Program, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Climate Change and Agriculture and Food Security, Earth System Science Partnership, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, United Nations Environment Programme, World Meteorological Organization, University of North Texas (UNT) graduate students"
Uranium Oral Histories
The uranium mining oral history project (1970-1971) was conducted under the auspices of the American West Center. The focus of these interviews is the documentation of the uranium industry in Utah and Colorado. Includes interviews of miners, residents of towns affected by the uranium boom, employees of Union Carbide and the Vanadium Corporation of America, Native Americans, and lawyers specializing in mining.
Western Waters Digital Library
"The Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL) provides free public access to a wide range of significant resources on water in the Western United States. Available resources include classic water literature, legal transcripts, maps, reports, personal papers, water project records, photographs, audio recordings, videos, and other material. The WWDL also includes selected collection guides. These guides, also known as finding aids, describe a collection’s content, significance, and relevance to a particular research topic."

General Primary Source Databases

These are some primary source databases that are not specifically about environmentalism, but include many relevant sources.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

Unlimited users.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
Early Encounters in North America

Unlimited users.
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.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices

Unlimited users.
Ethnographic film, documentaries, and shorts made by and for Indigenous peoples and communities. Emphasis is on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling. Local material covered includes Australia, New Zealand, Papua Niu Gini (also known as Papua New Guinea), Solomon Islands and other regions. Content has been sourced from several collections including National Film & Sound Archive of Australia, SBS, Mexican Film Board, and National Film Board of Canada.
NEPIS: National Environmental Publications Information System

Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Provides full text access from a collection of over 7,000 archival and current documents published by the Environmental Protection Agency. Allows searching, viewing, and printing, including full images of all original pages and full-text. Includes documents that are no longer available in print form.
Student Activism

Unlimited users.
Reveal Digital’s Student Activism collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions.

What is a Primary Source?

Primary sources are produced by participants or direct observers of an issue, event or time period. These sources may be recorded during the event or later on, by a participant reflecting upon the event. In some cases, it will be difficult to obtain the original source, so you may have to rely on copies (photocopies, microfilm, digital copies). Copies or transcriptions of a primary source still count as a primary source.

Some examples of primary sources include:

Newspapers
Speeches
Government documents
Legal documents
Public opinion polls
Personal materials, including letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories
Images
Works of art (novels, plays, paintings, etc.)

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