General Primary Sources

 

Digital Libraries

College Women Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education is a searchable portal of diaries, letters, scrapbooks and photographs from the archives of a select group of the earliest women’s colleges in the United States, the Seven Sisters. This site aggregates content from partner sites and illuminates connections between the experiences of women students, with the goal of supporting new studies in topics such as political reform and women’s rights, sexuality and body image, religion, race and class, as well as major domestic and international events. Schlesinger Library contributed material about the history of Radcliffe College to this project.

HathiTrust Digital Library. Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms.  Thus a full text search of the whole database can be limited by title or Subject term.  The catalog can be searched separately.  Many post-1923 out-of-copyright books, especially government documents, are full text viewable. You can search within copyright books to see what page your search term is on.

Internet Archive

  • Full text for a variety of digitized print materials and archived web pages (Wayback Machine), as well as manuscripts (a few), digitized microfilm, films, audio files, TV News, and more.
  • Unlike Google and Hathitrust, IA usually offers multiple download options including e-readers.

To search full text within a particular subject, go to Advanced Search and put your subject terms in the Description field. Search.  In the Search box in the results page, you will see: description:(your term).  Add your full text terms: description:(archaeology Boston) AND "Long Wharf" and shift from Search metadata to Search text contents.

The Digital Public Library of America offers textual, visual, and sound resources contributed by numerous libraries, archives, and museums.  Searches catalog records, not full text, and links to the items on the contributors' websites.  Contains many individual items, such as letters and photographs, from digital collections.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) searches metadata and some full text, from over 2000 sources of academic open access documents.  About 60% of the documents indexed are available full text.  The metadata searched is provided by the source and tagging is often inexact.  This is a vast collection of documents and has much not available elsewhere.
Use Browsing to narrow your search to subject area (e.g., Literature) or Document type (e.g., Manuscript, broadly construed).  Open Browsing and choose-Dewey Decimal (for Subject), choose major subject to see next finer level, twice.  After choosing View Records add a search term to the Subject Term or Document Type.

Digital Libraries by State
These websites list hundreds of local, state, and regional resources. Each is different and some are better designed than others.  Very useful when your topic has a regional focus.

 

Images

HOLLIS: Search for images in HOLLIS by limiting to Resource Type: Images or adding the subject term "Pictorial works" for a book comprised mainly of illustrations or photographs. Use HOLLIS Images search to limit just to images in Harvard collections.

Images of America: a history of American life in images and texts is the online version of thousands of books in the Arcadia US local history series. The histories Includes photographs from archives, historical societies and private collections. Images and text are fully searchable. Searchable by location, person, event, date, ethic group and organization. Search HOLLIS+ HOLLIS tab Advanced search as Series (exact phrase) Images of America for the print books.

AP Multimedia Archive (AccuNet) is a searchable database of over 700,000 Associated Press photographs, charts and other graphics from the 1840s to the present.

Magazines

Periodicals Index Online indexes contents of thousands of journals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995. Covers journals from North America, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the English-speaking world and journals in other European languages including French, German, Italian and Spanish. Includes the complete table of contents for each issue of each journal.

Academic Search Premier (largely 1980s- ) is the usual index of first resort for general periodical searches. It indexes over 3000 journals in most fields plus many general interest periodicals. Full text is available for many of the periodicals. Includes Time full text back to 1923. Book reviews are included. A few periodicals have indexing back to the 1970s.

American Periodicals Series Online (1740-1900) offers full text of about 1100 American periodicals. Includes several scientific and medical journals including the American Journal of Science and the Medical Repository. In cases where a periodical started before 1900, coverage is included until 1940.

Newspapers

General Newspapers

NexisUni (1980s- ) is the usual first choice for finding recent newspaper articles, with full text (pictures omitted) coverage of numerous U.S. and overseas newspapers.  Note that the default search on the initial screen is OR between words.  Tips for Advanced Search.

Factiva (1980s- ) offers full text (pictures omitted) of over 6,000 newspapers, magazines, wire services and trade journals. Use Internet Explorer. For details on the publications included, open Support? (upper right), select Content Watch, select Source Search. To limit to a particular newspaper enter, e.g., sn=wall street journal and "search term". Articles for which the copyright resides with the author rather than the newspaper which are not available in LexisNexis sometimes have a citation without full text in Factiva. Includes the Wall Street Journal full text, 1984- (abstracts, 6/13/1979-1983). Search Guide: Factiva User Guide: Browsing & Searching (Boston College guide)

Articles for which the copyright resides with the author rather than the newspaper will not generally be available in NexisUni or Factiva, although Factiva sometimes provides citations. Use newspaper indexes to find articles omitted from the full text sources.

Ethnic NewsWatch (1959- ) offers full-text of 90 newspapers and other periodicals (1990- ) and of 30 African American, Hispanic American, and Native American newspapers and other periodicals (1959-1989). Includes book/film/television reviews. Lists of periodicals by ethnicity. Includes African American, Arab American, Asian American, European American, Hispanic/Latino/Chicano, Jewish, Native American newspapers. For more newspapers by ethnicity, see: Additional U.S. Ethnic Newspaper Sources

Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection
--Cambridge Chronicle (1846-2015), Cambridge Press (1887-1889), Cambridge Sentinel (1903-1947), Cambridge Tribune (1887-1941).

NewspaperARCHIVE offers numerous newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries.  Contains many small-city newspapers.

Newspapers.com. World collection (early 1700s-early 2000s). Includes papers from US, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Panama and Wales.  If you choose Browse at the top, you get a convenient breakdown of the available papers. If you hit Add more info in the search box, you can add place and date.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (mostly 19th-20th century) include illustrations, editorials, and advertising. Available papers are listed below.

Search all ProQuest news sources using: Proquest News & Newspapers.  Search across all newspapers, or select a custom group of titles to search across, rather than searching just one title.

America’s Historical Newspapers (1690-1993)  (Readex) offers full text of over a thousand U.S. newspapers. Includes all papers listed in the standard History and bibliography of American newspapers, 1690-1820, by Clarence S. Brigham. Although a very rich resource, many important newspapers, especially for the later years, are not included.  Now includes several post-1922 papers; title list (In Quick Facts & Overview box on the right).

19th Century U.S. Newspapers offers full text of about 500 newspapers.

Chronicling America, enhancing access to historic American newspapers (1836-1922) (Library of Congress) offers searchable full text.  For a list of digitized newspapers for each state, choose All Digitized Newspapers 1836-1922. Also includes the valuable U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present, in which searches for newspapers can be limited by language and ethnicity.

College Newspapers

Collegiate Chronicle Collection brings together a few college newspapers from various U.S. colleges & universities. 

Boston College

  • The Heights - 1919-2018 (student weekly newspaper)
  • The Stylus - 1883-1977 (literary magazine that had some athletics coverage, especially before 1913)

Yale University: Yale Daily News (1878-1995)

Cornell University: Cornell Daily Sun (1880-1986)

Dartmouth College: The Dartmouth (1993-2020)

Columbia University: Columbia Daily Spectator (1877-2015)

Princeton University: Daily Princetonian (1876-2015)

Brown University: Brown Daily Herald (1891-2013)

University of Pennsylvania: The Daily Pennsylvanian (1885-2002)

Oral Histories

To find oral histories in HOLLIS or WorldCat search: topical keyword (or Subject term) AND (interviews OR "oral histor*"); search (interviews OR "oral histor*") as Subject keyword.  Most oral histories are available as transcripts, but some online sources have recordings, and recording are often available in the holding repository.  Limit to Resource type: Sound recordings and to Videos/Film for recordings In HOLLIS and WorldCat.

Online Full Text

Oral History Online indexes oral history collections, with links to interview-level bibliographic records and to full-text materials, audio files and visual files where these are available.

HistoryMakers: An African American oral video history archive

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories (1800-1950.) includes 342 authors.

Personal Writings

HOLLIS: Search for your topic keywords, plus the subject terms Diaries OR Correspondence OR Narratives OR Autobiographies.

Black thought and culture: African Americans to 1975 contains essays, speeches, writings, and interviews from leaders of the Black community.