Digital Libraries

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 offers full text for a variety of digitized print materials and archived web pages (Wayback Machine), as well as films, audio files, TV News, and more.

Digital Public Library of America offers textual, visual, and sound resources contributed by numerous libraries, archives, and museums. Searches catalog records, not full text.

Food & Nutrition section of the Home Economics Archive at Cornell University

Food Studies Online

Food and Drink in History

Everyday Life and Women in America, c.1800-1920 provides material from the New York Public Library and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women s History and Culture, Duke. Includes books, broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals.

What America Ate (Michigan State University) offers an extraordinarily rich window into "how ordinary people bought, cooked, ate, and thought about food," especially in the 1930s Depression era. It includes oral histories, ads, community cook books, and more. Search with an eye to discovering ways that "science," "medicine" and "health" interacted with emerging ideas of nutrition, with consumerism, with new forms of industrial food production, and with assumptions of the time about ethnic identity, race and gender.

Historical Dietary Guidance Digital Collection 

  • Lisa Jahns, Wendy Davis-Shaw, Alice H Lichtenstein, Suzanne P Murphy, Zach Conrad, Forrest Nielsen, The History and Future of Dietary Guidance in America, Advances in Nutrition, Volume 9, Issue 2, March 2018, Pages 136–147, https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmx025

More online digital collections from the Culinary Institute of America

Digital Libraries by State: These websites list hundreds of local, state, and regional resources.

Some more food-related digital collections are listed on the Online Primary Sources for History guide