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.

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.

In addition to the manually created Thesaurus-based index, HarpWeek has had the Full-text of Harper's Weekly typed and entered into an additional database. Clients now have another way to explore the nineteenth century.

The content is full-text searchable. If "Haiti" doesn't show up in Searchable Full-text, try it in the Thesaurus-based index; (it was spelled "Hayti" in the nineteenth century). If First Lieutenant J. E. Tuthill doesn't appear in the Thesaurus-based index, try him in Searchable Full-text.

Harper's Weekly is a consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century. Harper's was aimed at the middle and upper socio-economic classes, and tried not to print anything that it considered unfit for the entire family to read. In addition to the importance of illustrations and cartoons by artists like Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast, the paper's editorials played a significant role in shaping and reflecting public opinion from the start of the Civil War to the end of the century. George William Curtis, who was editor from 1863 until his death in 1892, was its most important editorial writer.

From its founding in 1857 until the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the publication took a moderate editorial stance on slavery and related volatile issues of the day. It had substantial readership in the South, and wanted to preserve the Union at all costs. Some critics called it "Harper's Weakly."

Harper's Weekly would have preferred William Seward or possibly even Stephen Douglas for president in 1860, and was lukewarm towards Lincoln early in his administration. When war came, however, its editorials embraced Lincoln, preservation of the Union, and the Republican Party. Military coverage became paramount in every issue, as its news and illustrations kept soldiers at the various fronts and their loved ones at home up to date on the details of the fighting.

The following quotation from the April 1865 issue of the North American Review shows how a leading peer publication viewed the wartime contributions of Harper's Weekly.

"Its vast circulation, deservedly secured and maintained by the excellence and variety of its illustrations of the scenes and events of the war, as well as by the spirit and tone of its editorials, has carried it far and wide. It has been read in city parlors, in the log hut of the pioneer, by every camp-fire of our armies, in the wards of our hospitals, in the trenches before Petersburg, and in the ruins of Charleston; and wherever it has gone, it has kindled a warmer glow of patriotism, it has nerved the hearts and strengthened the arms of the people, and it has done its full part in the furtherance of the great cause of the Union, Freedom, and the Law."

After the war, Harper's Weekly continued to be a major factor in Ulysses Grant's presidential victories in 1868 and 1872, the overthrow of New York City political boss William Tweed in 1871 and the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Its circulation exceeded 100,000, peaking at 300,00 on occasion, while readership probably exceeded half a million people.
Search synopses of literary works within Harper's Weekly

Throughout the course of its run, Harper's Weekly featured nearly 2,700 fictional works. HarpWeek indexers have summarized many of these works in the form of Literary Synopses. Using HarpWeek's Synopsis feature, you can access these indexer-authored summaries. Serialized works, that is, works that spanned multiple issues of Harper's Weekly, can be accessed by installment from a convenient summary document. Using HarpWeek's search features, you can find text or phrases within these summaries and then be directed to the original work as it first appeared within Harper's Weekly.

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.

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.