Research Guides: HIST 341: Comparative North American Borderlands (HC): Online Primary Sources

Online Primary Sources

Below is just a sampling of helpful databases of digitized primary source materials. Please contact Sarah or Mike if you need help finding more primary sources.

Accessible Archives
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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 Philosophical Society Digital Library
The American Philosophical Society has a large collection of digitized manuscripts, documents, images, and audio interviews, with extensive holdings on Native American history.
American State Papers, 1739-1838
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides access to U.S. congressional materials from 1789 through 1838, including 1st Congress, 1st Session through 25th Congress, 2nd Session.
Beyond Penn's Treaty
Beyond Penn's Treaty: Quakers and American Indian Relations provides access to linked and annotated versions of Quaker diaries, letters, and meeting records which record contact with American Indians, particularly the Seneca, beginning in the 1740s. These documents, held in Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College and Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, are all from the Quaker perspective, and document their view of this unfolding relationship.
The Bracero History Archive
The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.
Chronicling America
A database of digitized U.S. newspapers dating from 1789-1949.
DPLA Primary Source Sets
The Digital Public Library of America has organized some of its materials into Primary Source Sets organized by theme. You can also search across the entire DPLA collection for digitized primary source materials.
Early American imprints. Series I (1639-1800)
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Covers American history and literature from the colonial period to the eighteenth century
Early American imprints. Series II (1801-1819)
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Covers American history and literature from the early nineteenth century.
The Library Company of Philadelphia Digital Collections
Texas Digital Newspaper Program
A database of more than 1,000 digitized historical Texas newspapers.

Expanding Your Search

Try searching for a specific person or organization

You can often find primary source documents if you know the person or organization you're interested in. Start your search in Tripod and the sites listed here, but if that doesn't work, expand it to Google. Try using some of the document types (e.g. personal narratives, correspondence) as additional keywords in your Google search. Hopefully, you will find primary source documents that have been scanned by other libraries and made available online.

Need to identify specific people and/or organizations? Look at the Overviews page for suggestions. (Reference books tend to be useful for this purpose.)