Primary Sources, United States: Free Online US Sources
This guide provides help in finding primary sources concerning American history. In addition to searching tips, it provides links to KU databases and free web sources. Many are sorted by century of coverage.
Search all of Duke's digital collections from this portal. Their collections are particularly strong in women's history, African American history, and business history.
Kansas Memory makes it possible to search the digital collections of the Kansas Historical Society. Great indexing makes it possible to search by subject, county, year, and other variables.
Access digital collections from various groups on the KU campus. Included are Kansas Sanborn Maps, images from the Dole Archive, materials from the KU archive, and the Kansas Collection
Selected Online Collections
These are just a few of the countless digital primary source collections. Be sure to use your favorite search engine to identify others relevant to your topic. If you find one you think should be added to this list, please e-mail semorris@ku.edu.
This collection from the Wisconsin Historical Society contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies.
Archives of Maryland Online, provides access to over 471,000 historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland's government. Much of these materials cover the Colonial and Early Republic eras.
CHLA)is an electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.
The Digital Public Library of America 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.
This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.
Documenting The American South includes digital access to the rich collections of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina.
The Feeding America project is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century.
HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 and include such important titles as Good Housekeeping.
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, is a web-based collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression.
The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History has many useful digital collections. Among their collections are television advertisements, billboards, magazine advertisements, and ads related to medicine.
The Jukebox includes recordings from the collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.
Lantern searches an index of over 800,000 documents from early covering film and media magazines such as Variety. The majority of coverage is prior to 1930.
American Memory is the portal to the Library of Congress' digital collections. The various searching methods provide multiple ways to research this important collection.
The Vault contains more than 3,000 documents from the FBI, including individual's and organization's FBI files, videos, and other agency documentation.
Search the digital collections of the National Agricultural Library, which include many technical reports related to rural America, agriculture, and the environment.