Primary Sources - United States - HIST 264/ ANTH 264: Materiality and Spectacle in 19th C. U.S. (HC)

If the document you want isn't available online

If it's a published source (Book or Article)

First, try Google to see if there's a digitized copy available elsewhere.

Tip: try putting the exact title in double quotes "like this"

Second, search for the title in Tripod to see if the Tri-Co Libraries have a copy.

Third, try to request a copy via EZBorrow. If there are no copies there, fill out the Interlibrary Loan form to try to request a copy from another library.

Any questions? Ask Laurie or Margaret (the librarians for this course) for help.

If it's an unpublished manuscript

Local collections in the Philadelphia area include awesome collections. When you've found something you'd like to see, contact the archive to make an appointment & take a look at the Guide to Using Archives from the Society of American Archivists for help.

Quick Tips for Searching Complex Websites

If you find a particular website (e.g. Internet Archive or the Library of Congress) difficult to search, try creating your own search engine for that site using Google.

Go to the Google search bar in your browser and enter your search terms (e.g. smallpox vaccination India).

Add the following to the end of your site: site:archive.org (where you replace "archive.org" with the website you want to search)

So your search terms would look like this:

smallpox vaccination India site:archive.org

Major 19th C. U.S. Online Primary Source Collections

Eight Centuries
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Includes over seventy seminal as well as lesser known contemporary indexes to English-language publishing prior to 1930. Access is by genre: 1. Multi-title Periodical Indexes (e.g., Poole's, Legal, Religion, Scientific Papers, etc.); 2. Book Indexes; 3. Newspaper Indexes; 4. Complete Individual Periodical Indexes (e.g., Harper's, Atlantic Monthly,etc.); 5. US Patents; Hansard's; US and UK Historical Government Documents
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a peer-reviewed collection of digital projects on the the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American. Useful for identifying primary sources.
American Periodicals Series Online
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Search through 1,800 magazines and journals published in the United States between 1740-1940. Includes early scientific publications, trade journals, popular magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, and journals such as Puck, The Dial, and McClure's.
Accessible Archives
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Contains full-text primary resource materials in American history including newspapers, magazines, and genealogical records originally only offered on microfilm. Covers 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
American Broadsides & Ephemera: Series I
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Offers fully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides (1820-1900) and 15,000 pieces of ephemera (1760 -1900) from the American Antiquarian Society collection. Subjects range from contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Material types include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and private celebrations.
Early American Imprints: Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)
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Covers American history and literature from the colonial period to the eighteenth century. Provides full-text digitization of the Early American Imprints microform set, Series II (1801-1819). Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States.
America's Historical Newspapers
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Search through 2,000+ historical newspapers published in the United States between 1690-1922. Includes publications from all 50 states, large cities and small towns, and a mix of major newspapers and titles with smaller circulations.
Chronicling America This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to newspaper pages from 1900 to 1910 and abstracts about American newspapers published between 1690 to the present.

Guide to Historical Newspapers Online
This guide, created by Nick Okrent at the University of Pennsylvania Library links to online newspaper archives by state in the United States.

Large Collections and Directories of Online Primary Sources

These links point to websites that allow for searching across the collections of many different libraries at once. Some (e.g. Internet Archive) also include content that has been submitted by users.

American Memory This link opens in a new window
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of primary-source collections on American history and culture, including photographs, documents, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The DPLA allows you to search 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 library or other content provider's website.
Europeana This link opens in a new window
Use Europeana to search through millions of digitized books, art, newspapers, and other sources from European museums, galleries and national libraries.
Internet Archive This link opens in a new window
The Internet Archive includes more than 300,000 texts, as well as audio, moving images, software and archived web pages. A good source for books printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including many travel accounts.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online
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Full text versions of books, magazines, newspapers and other materials published, for the most part in the United Kingdom, during the 19th century. This is a collection in development. Materials now in the database cover eight topic areas including British politics and society and high and popular culture in Britain.

OAIster This link opens in a new window
Lets you search for materials (including primary sources) that libraries have digitized and made available online.

Search tip: Enter a topic into the search box, and then narrow down your results using the limits on the left side (of the search results page).
WorldCat
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Catalog of books held by many libraries across the world. Use Worldcat to find primary sources by searching for your topic and then narrowing down by material type (e.g. archival material or online resource).

Also useful for finding scholarly books not owned by the Tri-Co Libraries.

HIST 264/ ANTH 264: Materiality and Spectacle in 19th C. U.S. (HC): Primary Sources - United States

If the document you want isn't available online

Quick Tips for Searching Complex Websites

Major 19th C. U.S. Online Primary Source Collections

Large Collections and Directories of Online Primary Sources