Primary source databases

Also known as Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819. Contains virtually every known book, pamphlet and broadside published in America between 1640 and the first two decades of the 19th century—more than 75,000 printed items in all. Based on renowned bibliographies by Charles Evans and Roger Bristol and by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.

The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.

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.

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.

Making of America (MOA) represents a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and make accessible through digital technology a significant body of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure. Funded originally by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MOA sought to involve research institutions and national consortia to develop common protocols and consensus for the selection, conversion, storage, retrieval, and use of digitized materials on a large, distributed scale.

The complete MOA collection includes over 1.5 million images, representing approximately 5,000 volumes of primary source materials. The selection process at Cornell focused on the major journal literature of the period, ranging from general interest publications to those with more targeted audiences (such as agriculture).

The initial phase of the project, begun in the fall of 1995, focused on developing a collaborative effort between Cornell University and the University of Michigan. Drawing on the depth of primary materials within their respective libraries, these two institutions developed a thematically-related digital library documenting American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. At Cornell University, 109 monographs (267 volumes) and 22 journals (955 volumes) with imprints primarily between 1840 - 1900 were selected, scanned, and made available. Librarians, researchers, and instructors have worked together to determine the content of this digital library and to evaluate the impact of this resource on research and teaching at both institutions.

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.