Primary Sources, United States: Colonial & Early Republic

Digital access to the periodical collections of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), considered to be the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912.

Contains manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century.

American Periodicals Series Online includes digitized and images of the pages of over 1,100 American magazines and journals published from 1741 through 1940.

Search or browse U.S. congressional materials originating from 1789 through 1838, including 1st Congress, 1st Session through 25th Congress, 2nd Session.

American West provides electronic access to the Everett D Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Material in the collection ranges from 1722 to 1939, with the majority covering 1830 to 1839.

Search over one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences.

Over 550 works written by black authors from the Americas, Europe, and African.

Arranged by era and topic, this free website contains important documents in African-American history, with the earliest from 1790.

Drawn from the records of the British Colonial Office, this collection contains resources covering 25 islands from 1624-1832. Among the topics covered are rivalries among other European colonizers, absentee landlords, the rise and decline of the slave trade, and start of the abolition movement.

The Evans collection includes digital images of virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America over a 160-year period.

Shaw-Shoemaker contains a comprehensive set of United States books, pamphlets and broadsides published between 1801-1819.

This collection includes published and unpublished accounts documenting the first impressions of North America by Europeans and of Europeans by native people.

EEBO contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

ECCO includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom in the 18th century as well as thousands of works from the Americas.

Contains citations to European documents written about the Americas.

The Gerritsen collection includes 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945.

This rather complicated to use database contains government information from all three branches of U.S. government. Ask if you need help.

A resource for census data, family records, and local histories. This collection assembles every extant U.S. federal census, banking and military records, genealogies, primary source materials, and genealogical and local history serials.

Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition contains over 37,000 different time-series statistics providing a quantitative view into American history.

The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926 provides full-text searching and digital images of 22,000 legal treatises on US and British law published from 1800 through 1926.

This collection offers online access to early state codes, city charters, documents relating to constitutional conventions, and other resources in American legal history. Dates of coverage include from 1620-1979.

Making of Modern Law: Trials 1600-1926 contains books and pamphlets covering major and minor trials of English-speaking jurisdictions and English-language trials in other jurisdictions.

Search autobiographies, Indigenous publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files created by American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples. The interface includes a timeline of events that are cross referenced by region and tribe to improve discovery.

As the most important newspaper of the period, the Pennsylvania Gazette provides accounts of colonial America, the American Revolution, and the early republic.

Based on Joseph Sabin's bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From its Discovery to the Present Time, this collection includes books, pamphlets, serials and other works. about North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean.

Contains over 15,000 thematic and interactive maps based on the entire U.S. Census from 1790 to 2000.

The organizational archives of one of the oldest scientific organizations in the United States. The topics covered here include many sciences, but also topics such as human rights.

Brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000.