Primary Sources, United States: Twentieth Century

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.

Features thousands of U.S. and global news sources, including wire services, popular magazines, and newspapers from the 1980s.

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 provides access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers. Over 50 are from Kansas.

Indexes the alternative press in North America, with citations drawn from alternative, radical, and leftist publications from 1969-1990, covering cultural, economic, political & social change.

This collection includes surveillance from the FBI on several antiwar groups, including student and communist organizations. The bulk of these papers are related to the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

“This collection consists of minutes of annual meetings, executive committee, committee of management, and purchasing committee; register of works of art in the American Art-Union; letters addressed to the American Art-Union, including many from agents around the country, and pertaining to the sale of subscriptions; letters from artists to the American Art-Union with index; and letterpress books containing copies of letters sent by the American Art-Union.”

Contains thousands of reports commissioned by companies such as Philip Morris, Chrysler, Exxon and CBS on consumer goods ranging from tobacco and broadcasting to cars and hotels. The material included is from 1935 to 1965.

With material from 1850 to 1950, this resources includes advertisements related to the home and domestic sphere. The resource includes trade catalogs, cards and marketing ephemera.

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.

Publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.

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

Covers foreign reactions to America’s racial struggles in the mid-20th century, including segregation, race riots, arts and literature, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and more.

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.

This database provides access to Kansas newspapers published in Kansas from 1827 to 1998. Among those included are Emporia Gazette, Leavenworth Bulletin, Topeka Weekly Capital, and Sedan Lance.

Contains primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world with content from newsletters, organisational papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of records that sheds light on the gay rights movement, activism, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences.

Contains the photograph archives of the Associated Press. New content is added constantly and spans over 180 years.

Search the internal documents of the Associated Press. Four collections included are: News Features & Internal Communications, U.S. City Bureaus Collection, Washington, D.C. Bureaus Collection; European Bureaus Collection.

Access the South's largest African American newspaper, including significant coverage of the civil rights movement.

The Baltimore Afro-American was one of the most circulated African-American newspapers on the Atlantic Coast. This database includes the from 1893 to 1988.

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

This database contains the papers of individuals and organizations involved in the civil rights movement. Some examples are: Revolutionary Action Movement; Mary McLeod Bethune; National Association of Colored Women's Clubs; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Bayard Rustin; Claude A. Barnett.

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

Black Thought and Culture includes non-fiction writings by important African Americans.

This important Midwest African American newspaper is particularly important for its coverage of the Scottsboro Trial.

The video archive includes all programming from C-Span's three networks. Programming includes Congressional sessions since 1987.

This combined index includes the American Periodicals Series, British Periodicals, and Poole's Index.

The Chicago Defender remains the largest and most influential African American newspaper since World War I. More than two thirds of its readership resided outside of Chicago.

Search the Midwest's most important paper from 1849 to 1992.

This database contains U.S. Congressional publications related to civil rights since the Civil War.

The collection features national Klan publications, regional and local Klan papers, some sympathetic to the organization, and anti-Klan publications. The majority of material is from the inner-war years.

This database includes hundreds of reports by HUAC and its successor, Internal Security Committee, from 1938 to 1975.

This collection covers this anti-interventionist group’s activity from 1937 to 1941 and contains newspaper accounts, America First literature, speeches, letters, reports, and press releases.

This database includes FBI records on the surveillance of James Foreman, a leader in the civil rights movement, the National Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) and the FBI’s “COINTELPRO” investigations into various “Black Nationalist Hate Groups/Internal Security” which included SNCC and the Black Panther Party.

This collection includes primary sources from the FBI that relate to a variety of individuals and organizations from the 1960s. Among those included are Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Muslim Mosque, Inc., Abbie Hoffman, Students for a Democratic Society and Weatherman Underground, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

FBIS includes translated news sources from around the globe dating from 1941-1996.

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 archive contains primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000. Among the periodicals included are Billboard, Variety, and Broadcasting.

Newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in America from 1959 to the present.

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.

Indexes the most important journals in the humanities and social sciences published in North America and Europe from 1907 to 1984.

This collection chronicles the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s through the lens of independent alternative presses. Among the broad interest groups covered are American youth. Feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals and the New Left, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, and members of the LGBT communities.

From 1924-1950, Liberty Magazine charted the moods, attitudes, lifestyles, fads, and fortunes of middle class America. Excellent images and photographs.

Access to articles and images from one of the most influential popular magazines of all time.

The West's most important African American newspaper.

The Los Angeles Times provides historical analysis of the development of California and the Pacific Rim.

The archives of 26 leading LGBT magazines dating back to the 1950s. Included are the entire backfile of The Advocate and the UK’s Gay News and Gay Times.

Taken from the ACLU collections at Princeton, this database includes materials covering the organization’s work related to civil rights, race, gender, and as well as files from the ACLU’s Southern Regional Office. The Regional Office’s papers document the ACLU’s work to dismantle Jim Crow.

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.

This digitized collection of the NAACPS papers which are held at the Library of Congress are available here. this collection includes memos, briefings and other materials from the local to national civil rights movement.

New York Amsterdam News documents the past of the city's African American community, including the Harlem Renaissance.

Provides access to full page and article images with searchable full-text from 1851 to 4 years ago.

One of the most influential newspapers of its time, the New York Tribune reported on events, arts, sports, business and finance covering from 1841-1922.

The Norfolk Journal and Guide became one of the best researched and written newspapers , with a circulation of more than 80,000 by the 1940s.

The oldest continuously published daily black newspaper in the U.S.

The Pittsburgh Courier was the most widely circulated black newspaper in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

This archive of primary sources contains over 600,000 scanned pages and 42 oral histories. The types of sources range from propaganda to government records. The extremist groups included are involved in movements such as those related to religion, race, gender, the environment, equal rights, and peace.

A compilation of questions and responses from national, state, local and special surveys, conducted by polling organizations in the United States and other countries.

Includes printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera, and video clips. Covers music, tv, movies, fashion, youth culture, student protests, civil rights movement, and women's liberation.

Indexes the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States during the Twentieth Century.

Access the entire run of one of the most important magazines to cover music and popular culture. The archive provides issue browsing and keyword searching of all text including articles, photo captions, and advertisements.

IPoll contains half a million survey questions and answers asked in the United States since the 1930s by more than 150 survey organizations.

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.

A digital version of the more than 50,000 maps published within the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980.

The Sixties contains letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories; accounts from official, radical, and alternative organizations; posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare materials; and Universal newsreel footage covering from 1960 to 1974.

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

A comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Provides thousands of tables and millions of data points across a wide variety of topics.

Access all the reports, documents, and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Texts from the bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the reports, documents, and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Explore popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930.

The entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present. Vogue is a unique record of popular culture that extends beyond fashion.

View full page and article images as well as keyword search the Wall Street Journal from 1889 to 17 years ago.

Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1877 up to 7 years ago.

Resources document women’s experiences in the conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality since 1820. Material covers the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.

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.

Search the full text popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal, Town and Country, Parents, Seventeen and more.

This collection of primary sources contains the official records of organizing committees as well as ephemera, souvenir artifacts and personal reflections collected by fair-goers.