Historical primary sources online

Top-level Anglo-American discussions and briefing papers dominate this collection. It also contains a wealth of material on social conditions, domestic reforms, trade, culture and the environment.

The four primary components of Virginia Memory at launch in 2009 are as follows:
Digital Collections provides access to our traditional digital image collections available through our online catalog; our digital asset management tool, DigiTool; and partnership programs with the Library of Congress (Chronicling America) and the Internet Archive (Archive-It). We will highlight an older collection as a "Featured Collection," as well as newly created digital collections in "What's New?" on a regular basis.
Reading Room is where we post our newest type of digital content. Currently, we have three offerings, all of which are researched and written by Library staff.
This Day in Virginia History offers a document, image, or sound file with contextual information for each day of the year.
Virginia Chronology offers over 650 different events—42 of which have related digital images—that have occurred over the more than 400 years that have shaped the history of the commonwealth.
Virginiana presents articles written by Library archivists as they discover collections of interest during processing.
Exhibitions have been offered online for several years as virtual versions of physical installations at the Library of Virginia. All users, including educators and students, will find much of interest in this area. Exhibitions are also organized by topic.
Online Classroom is directed at students and educators with tips on incorporating primary source materials from our collections into the classroom. Lesson plans are correlated to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL).

For most people, Appalachia conjures up images of majestic mountains, old-time music, and a simpler way of life. Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of its inhabitants. Early 20th-century writers focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region’s culture, such as moonshining and clan feuding, and often portrayed the region’s inhabitants as uneducated and prone to impulsive acts of violence.

Interweaving social, political, environmental, economic, and popular history, this new Archives Unbound collection chronicles three and a half centuries of the Appalachian past. Along the way, it explores Appalachia’s contradictory images that have shaped perceptions of the region as both the essence of America and a place apart.

This collection begins its story in the colonial era and describes the bloody warfare as migrants from Europe and their American-born offspring fought and eventually displaced Appalachia’s Native American inhabitants. It depicts the evolution of a backwoods farm-and-forest society, its divided and unhappy fate during the Civil War, and the emergence of a new industrial order as railroads, towns, and mining industries penetrated deeper and deeper into the mountains.

Throughout the collection, a wide range of Appalachian voices enlivens the analysis and reminds us of the importance of storytelling in the ways the people of Appalachia define themselves and their region.

This new Archives Unbound consists of the diaries, journals, and narratives of explorers, emigrants, military men, Native Americans, and travelers. In addition, there are accounts of the development of farming and mining communities, family histories, and folklore. These accounts provide a view of the region, which spans three and a half centuries and provides information on the social, political, economic, scientific, religious and agricultural characteristics of the region.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes fourteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture.

The texts, images, and other materials come primarily from the premier Southern collections in the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These original Southern materials can be found in several library locations, including the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country; the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere; the Rare Book Collection, which holds an extensive Southern pamphlet collection; and Davis Library, which offers rich holdings of printed materials on the Southeast.

The Cabinet conclusions are taken by the secretary of the Cabinet or one of their assistants and consist of summaries of all discussions in Cabinet, together with a note of decisions reached. Cabinet memoranda consist of all papers circulated to members of the Cabinet and to other ministers for information or as a basis for discussion. These classes provide a distillation of the work of all the other departments of government, ranging in subject matter from agricultural policy and trade to nuclear policy and issues of international diplomacy.

This collection also includes 165 files from the Prime Minister's Private Office (PREM 11). These provide an important supplement to the Cabinet records and cover all aspects of policymaking.

Documents include diaries, sketches, correspondence, scrapbooks and records of publications and lectures. As one of the first Americans to live in Japan, Morse was one of the earliest and most important mediators between American and Asian societies.

The Making of the Modern World (MOMW) had its origins in the systematic building of collections of works of "economic literature." The English economist, Herbert Somerton Foxwell (1849-1936), built the two collections that afterwards become the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature and the Kress Library, and heavily influenced Edwin R. A. Seligman (1831-1939), the American economist and professor, as he assembled what would eventually become the Seligman Collection at Columbia University. Foxwell appreciated that in order to understand the way that the economy worked, one needed to know as much as possible about the world of which the economy was a part. He set a high standard. His collections and those of his successors incorporated material about every aspect of the world. So does MOMW.

The first iteration of The Making of the Modern World began with the mid-fifteenth century and ends in the mid-nineteenth century in accordance with Foxwell's protocols. The second iteration continues the collection to 1914, the start of the First World War. In effect MOMW now embraces the history of the world from the beginnings of the expansion of Europe to the end of European domination of that world.

MOMW abounds in astounding richness and diversity. Many works that are available in MOMW are digital facsimile copies of works that are unique. Multiple editions of a work permit the researcher and the teacher to trace the development of an author's thoughts and compare successive expressions of an author's ideas. The availability in one online database of translations of key works into other languages allows the researcher to understand the spread of key ideas across space and time. The multi-lingual nature of MOMW helps us comprehend the interactions among contemporaries of concepts and ideas as they developed in real time. The inclusion of important serial publications enriches our ability readily to explore a literature that expressed itself in a range of media. Clever and powerful search techniques, including the ability to full-text search across every word in the entire collection, make searches simple despite different languages, spellings, and fonts.

This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel, including many from private or neglected collections, including letters; diaries and journals; account books; printed guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings and sketches; architectural drawings and maps.

Black Studies Center brings together essential historical and current material for researching the past, present and future of African-Americans, the wider African diaspora, and Africa itself. It is comprised of several cross-searchable component databases.

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces and NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses

This treasure trove of material provides digital images of collections from the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. All of the typescript and printed material is full-text searchable and contains a wealth of materials designed as supplementary resources; these include a chronology, interactive maps, essays by leading scholars, a selection of American Jewish Year Book articles, a visual resources gallery, biographies and links to other useful websites.

In addition to the primary source documents there is a wealth of useful secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.

The American Slavery database contains two basic sections: the overview of the collection with related links, available without charge from the home page, and the collection itself. The overview includes a description of the original Library of Congress project, a history of the project, the introduction and appendices to the initial Rawick compilation, and selections from his analysis of the collection, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. Follow the 'About the Collection' link to access this material.

Independent Voices is composed of seven series that align with the major social movements of the time.

The GI Underground Press Series was developed in collaboration with the GI Press Project. It is the most comprehensive collection of digitized GI underground newspapers and newsletters ever compiled. Adding to the value of the series is its placement in the context of the hundreds of other underground press publications published during the same period. GI underground publications could be found on military bases, in coffeehouses, and in other places where GI’s gathered in the U.S. and around the world in every branch of the military. The GI underground press covered many topics, including military indoctrination, seemingly arbitrary rules and regulations, racism, sexism, the bounds of power and authority, legitimacy of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, the military as an institution, and the definition of “enemy.” The content was creative and diverse. In addition to news articles and editorials, publications included fiction, poetry, cartoons, letters to the editor, and more.

Throughout the twentieth century, literary magazines were a primary means for sharing new writing and forming literary communities. “Little magazines,” as they are often called, were usually noncommercial in nature and often committed to certain literary ideals. Nearly every literary movement of the 1950s to 1980s began or evolved in the pages of these magazines. Focusing primarily on poetry but also including fiction and criticism, this collection reflects many often-overlapping groups and communities, including writers and editors affiliated with the Beat Generation, the Black Arts Movement, Black Mountain, the Deep Image movement, the New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, Surrealism, visual and concrete poetries, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and the Kootenay School of Writing.

Underground, alternative, and literary newspapers and magazines from the fifties through the eighties were everywhere. They were in urban, suburban, rural, ghetto, barrio, tribal, and other communities in every U.S. state and in countries around the world. Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices is the most extensive digital collection of these historic publications that has ever been conceptualized and created. The Campus Underground series includes publications that originated from college and university campuses and surrounding communities. Whether laid out in traditional black and white straight columns or full-color psychedelic, the publications in this collection provide a vivid mosaic of the times.

Two of Independent Voices most important series are the Feminist Periodicals and LGBT Periodicals. Sourced largely from Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center and Northwestern University’s Deering Library, these closely related series include cover-to-cover complete runs of over 120 women’s papers. These publications sparked the women’s movement in the fifties and early sixties and propelled the second wave of feminism in the late sixties and early seventies. Groups represented by these publications include the Redstockings, New York Radical Women, Daughters of Bilitis, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, The Furies, Third World Women’s Alliance and many others.

Answers await everyone—whether professional or hobbyist, expert or novice, genealogist or historian—inside the more than 7,000 available databases. Here, you can unlock the story of you with sources like censuses, vital records, immigration records, family histories, military records, court and legal documents, directories, photos, maps, and more.

All of the documents are digitized in color and include: verse manuscripts, printed manuscripts, prose manuscripts, printed verse, correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps.

Brands include Kellogg's, Kodak, Kraft, Oscar Mayer, Pan Am, French's, Scott Paper, US Marines, and White Castle.

SIL also manages the web presence for selected Smithsonian publications:

Atoll Research Bulletin
Smithsonian Annals of Flight
Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology
Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics
Smithsonian Contributions to Botany
Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology (1969 - present ; formerly Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology)
Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology
Smithsonian Contributions to the Earth Sciences
Smithsonian Contributions to the Marine Sciences
Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology
Smithsonian Folklife Studies
Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space
Smithsonian Proceedings and related publications from the SI Scholarly Press

Women and Social Movements in the United States is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. history generally at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools. The collection currently includes 100 document projects and archives with almost 3,950 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by some 2,150 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Women and Social Movements: Basic Edition contains the following resources:

100 document projects that interpret and present documents, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each document project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question. Altogether these document projects provide more than 3,950 documents, almost 1,200 images, and 900 links to other websites. They demonstrate that historical analysis is an interpretive process based on documents. Viewers of the site are encouraged to participate in that interpretive process. We usually add six new document projects or archives annually.
About 800 publications with 48,000 pages of full-text sources pertaining to Women and Social Movements in the United States. These materials have been selected by the Editors for their relevance to the focus of the website. We add 5,000 additional pages of sources annually. For a listing of full-text sources, go to Browse Bibliography and click on Full Text Primary Sources.
A dictionary of social movements and organizations.
A chronology of U.S. Women's History.
Teaching Tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects.
Book and web site reviews published twice annually.
Regularly-published news from the archives about primary sources in U.S. Women's History.

This collection is the digitized version of the physical materials in the Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs. The collection was begun in the late 1800s by Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen.

The finding aid is the result of a five-year project by staff at The National Archives in the mid-1990s and enables researchers to quickly locate details of documents at TNA relating to women. This finding aid is far more detailed and extensive than anything available elsewhere online and has the benefit of ranging across all of the document classes TNA hold.

The original documents cover the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, 1903-1928 and the granting of women's suffrage in colonial territories, 1930-1962.

ArchiveGrid is a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It's supported by OCLC Research as the basis for our experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces. Archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives are represented in ArchiveGrid.
ArchiveGrid provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, making information available about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials. It also provides contact information for the institutions where the collections are kept.
ArchiveGrid data is primarily focused on archival material descriptions for institutions in the United States. This reflects the contribution patterns for descriptions of materials under archival control in WorldCat, which make up the majority of descriptions in ArchiveGrid.