IU Bloomington is home to many collections of primary sources. The types of material include personal papers, institutional records, physical artifacts, audio and visual materials, and archaeological collections. See the slides below for some of the places that hold these materials or look at this longer and more detailed list.
These are just a few of the historical newspapers and periodicals available online at IU. For a longer list of newspapers, see here. In addition to the databases below, you can find individual titles in IUCAT.
Important note: Many historical newspapers and periodicals are available in print and on microforms. This includes the Indiana Daily Student. While some years of the IDS have been digitized, most are only available on microfilm in GIMMS, which is on the 2nd floor of the East Tower of Wells Library.
Provides searchable, online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. Includes newspapers from more than 35 states covering life in the Antebellum South, growth of the Black church, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, political and economic empowerment, and more.
Some titles lasted a short time, or few extant issues have been found, so that the database may contain as little as a single issue from a source. Other newspapers had longer lives, and long runs of issues are available.
African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998:
Beginning with Freedom’s Journal (NY)—the first African American newspaper published in the United States—the titles in this resource include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York
Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN).
African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956:
Key titles include Frederick Douglass’s New National Era (Washington, DC), Washington Tribune (Washington, DC), Chicago Bee (Chicago, IL), The Louisianian (New Orleans, LA), The Pine and Palm (Boston, MA), National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), New York Age (New York, NY), Harlem Liberator (New York, NY), North Carolina Republican and Civil Rights Advocate (Weldon, NC), and Southern News (Richmond, VA).
Digital archive of historical newspapers. Each issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images.
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, features more than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other genres.
Digital access to the American Antiquarian Society’s collection of American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912.
Founded in 1812 by Revolutionary War printer Isaiah Thomas, the American Antiquarian Society is both a learned society and a major independent research library. The AAS library contains books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, music, and graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary texts, bibliographies, and digital resources and reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century.
Many of the online databases that you have access to at IU include digitized diaries. The list below is not comprehensive. I have arranged it thematically: travel/empire, wartime diaries, women's diaries, and miscellaneous. Contact me if you have any trouble finding what you are looking for.
Full text of letters, diaries, and memoirs from the American Civil War, with biographies and an extensive bibliography.
The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries knits together diaries, letters, and memoirs from more than 2,000 authors to provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war, including what was happening at home. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, farmers, seaman, wives, and even spies are included. The letters and diaries are by the famous and the unknown, giving not only both the Northern and Southern perspectives, but those of foreign observers also. The materials originate from all regions of the country and are from people who played a variety of roles.
Several of the links below are portals to dozens of other primary source databases. Click here for a longer, more detailed list. For help choosing a particular database, contact me.
Archival collections documenting topics in eighteenth- through twentieth-century American history. Provides access to digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.
These are mostly general databases, covering many topics. For help finding information on your particular research question, contact me or look at this much longer list.
Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
In addition to the principle English language sources in the field, it includes some (about 10%) in other languages, as well as some state and local history journals. All aspects of historical inquiry are represented: diplomatic, ecclesiastical, agricultural, cultural, economic, political, military and others. The index also provides citations to book and media reviews from about 100 journals and references to abstracts of dissertations in the field. All abstracts are in English.
Provides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.