Historical primary sources online: Historical imprints, books & public documents
Multipart guide to VT Libraries' many digital archives, whether based on types of sources or thematic collections.
What's on this page
This page includes boxes for historical imprints and maps, historical public documents, and collections of digitized historical books.
Historical imprints (mostly US) and maps in full page image
- Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 from Gale Based on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets, serials, and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions, and much more.
- America's Historical Imprints from Readex America's Historical Imprints is a digital collection containing virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America over a 200-year period. It is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties, and more. Scanned pages available as JPEG, TIFF, and PDF.
- African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle, 1865-1883 from Readex Searchable books, pamphlets and speeches covering the struggle of African Americans for equality during Reconstruction.
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- African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest, 1883-1922 from Readex Searchable books, pamphlets and speeches covering the lives of African Americans during the early Jim Crow period.
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Maps and atlases
- Online Maps: HistoricalPortal to some major online sources of digitized maps and atlases, most freely accessible. From the University of Georgia library.
- Maps | Collections with maps (Library of Congress)Search function has many filters for searching or browsing you way through more than 55,000 digitized maps.
- Maps, globes, and plans: an ongoing census of free digital archives from AIRAnnotated directory of sources of freely accessible/downloadable cartographic document collections from around the world, in several languages. It is organized into several "episodes" each describing a handful of repositories. Organized more like a blog than a database, it can be difficult to navigate but fast to browse: find an interesting repository, then use its own search function to find maps. (AIR's search option identifies cartographic collections -- not individual maps -- and search cannot be limited to map repositories.)
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- FIMo Fire Insurance Maps OnlineUniform series of large-scale maps, starting in the mid-19th century, depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of towns and cities. Originally used by insurance companies to represent fire risks, insurance maps are now useful to social historians, architects, geographers, genealogists, local historians, planners, and environmentalists. Often called "Sanborn maps" after the best-known publisher. VT has coverage for Virginia and District of Columbia only; for other states see the Library of Congress's Sanborn Maps digital collection. Interface permits overlaying some historical maps on recent remote-sensing imagery. Data contained include the outlines of buildings; size, shape, and construction materials; functions of structures; locations of windows and doors; street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, and house and block numbers.
Collections of historical books and manuscripts
- HathiTrust The HathiTrust Digital Library contains over seven million volumes and over one billion pages of scanned books and other materials. About 20 percent of all content is in the public domain (and accessible to you). You can also browse several public collections. Content is available in several image formats, text, and PDF. 1200s-present.
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- OpenTexts.World OpenTexts.World is an experimental portal to more than 8 million free, digitized texts from major repositories around the world. Many historical eras and languages are represented. Search is basic keyword-matching, and cataloging is sparse – so it’s most appropriate for locating facsimiles of historical texts you know about. (For discovering if books exist to fill your needs, use the "libraries worldwide option in VT Discovery Search or another flavor of WorldCat.) Search results records link back to the source repositories’ own platforms, which are much more powerful.
- Loeb Classical Library Loeb Classical Library provides ebooks of Latin and Greek works that show the original language and English translation on facing pages. You can search using Latin or Greek letters.
- EEBO: Early English Books Online from ProQuest Early English Books Online contains scanned page images (GIF and TIFF) of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Coverages includes all subject areas with strong coverage in the humanities, performing arts, and education. Each is full-text searchable.
- Early European Books Counterpart to EEBO for works printed in continental Europe, Early European Books traces the history of printing and publishing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.See ProQuest's guide to EEB.
- Literary Manuscripts: Leeds from Adam Matthew Digital Examine complete images of 190 manuscripts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century verse held in the celebrated Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. These manuscripts can be read and explored in conjunction with the Brotherton Collection Manuscript Verse Index, which includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection.
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- Literary Manuscripts: Berg from Adam Matthew Digital The establishment of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, on October 11, 1940, was made possible by the avid book-collecting and generosity of the brothers Henry W. Berg (1858-1938) and Albert A. Berg (1872-1950). One of the finest literary collections in the world, it is rich in nineteenth-century and especially Victorian authors; its rare editions extend from 1480 to the present day from Edmund Spenser to Eugene O’Neill. The author collections in this manuscript collection were selected with guidance from Dr Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the collection, and with reference to the importance of each authors' contribution to Victorian literature, and the strength and significance of the Berg's holdings for that author.
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- Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive from Adam Matthew Digital Literary Print Culture provides digitized primary source materials on the histories of book making and selling, publishing, copyright, and the early London Livery Company. Topics of interest include publication of plays and ballads, the lives of early printers, wages and working confitions, governance of London, voting rights, property deeds, heretical and seditious works, charity, events and ceremonies, and court orders.
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- Perdita Manuscripts from Adam Matthew Digital Discover manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University, the project seeks to rediscover early modern women authors who were “lost” because their writing exists only in manuscript form.
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Public documents (mostly US)
- HeinOnlineHeinOnline offers deep archives of legal scholarship (law reviews, monographs), historical legislative and administrative documents, and a growing number of "special collections" documenting many topics public in the news. Emphasis is on US public laws and policy, with some coverage of other jurisdictions and international affairs.
- AM Explorer from Adam Matthew Digital Cross search all or selected Adam Matthew primary source databases and access millions of digitized pages from a single search.
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- LLMC Digital Important archive of historical legal and government documents from US and other jurisdictions: constitutions, codes, statutes, court reporters, treatises. Searchable. Displays original documents in full page image; reader interface resembles HathiTrust. Formerly Law Library Microfilm Collaborative.
- Congressional Serial Set (from ProQuest) Don’t be misled by the title: as the official historical record of the U.S. government, these resources are essential for any historical, political, or cultural research of the United States. The US Congressional Serial Set(incorporating American State Papers,1789-1838, and maps,1789-1969) includes documents on virtually every topic the US Congress has taken an interest in – which can be just about anything anywhere in the world -- since 1789 both for law-making and for oversight of executive-branch agencies: congressional reports on public and private legislation considered during each Congress (example); reports of investigations commissioned or conducted by Congress or its parts (example); reports from federal executive agencies (including land surveys, research and statistical publications, and reports of scientific investigations and explorations) submitted to Congress (example); budgets of the United States (since 1923) (example); treaties presented to the Senate (since 1979) (example); and reports and other documents of select nongovernmental organizations (example), from the Red Cross to the Smithsonian and the American Legion to the American Historical Association. Comprising only documents Congress has declared to be particularly important, the Serial Set does not (usually) include text of bills and resolutions, hearings, nor committee prints. See ProQuest's Serial Set guide. Alternative access to the Serials Set: HeinOnline. Our existing Hein databases have always contained substantial portions of the Serial Set, including the American State Papers, comprehensive coverage of Foreign Relations of the United States, and thousands of House and Senate reports and documents inside compiled federal legislative histories.
- Digital National Security Archive from ProQuest The Digital National Security Archive provides primary documents on U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945. Subsets include the CIA Family Jewels Indexed information which reveals the CIA's most closely held secrets about their domestic intelligence activities they considered outside its charter, conducted at the height of the Cold War through 1973, and the Cuban Missile Crisis: 50th Anniversary Update which includes unpublished records from U.S. and Soviet archives.
- PLUS D: Public Library of US Diplomacy from WikiLeaks Includes over 2 million records from a variety of sources, including FOIA documents, leaks, and documents declassified by the U.S. State Department; many of these materials were previously released on the National Archives' website.
- Foreign Relations of the United States, 1861- Perhaps the most important collection of official primary sources to consult before beginning research on the history of US international relations, the Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the documentary historical record of major US foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. Prepared and issued by the Department of State since 1861, "FRUS" is the official compilation of selected documents from the files of the Department of State, the White House, and other agencies. It presents a historical view of American foreign policy and now comprises hundreds of individual volumes. FRUS for 1861-1960 has also been digitized by the University of Wisconsin. The official, State Department version's full-text coverage online is fairly complete through the Carter administration but spotty from the 1980s and later. Electronic documents not yet included in FRUS might be found at their originating agency or in compilations of presidential documents. See Status of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (State Department) and Researching U.S. Foreign Policy: Publications and Web Sites (National Archives and Records Administration).