Library Research Guides: HIST H220 American Military History: Primary Sources

Each of these databases contains primary sources from military leaders. Each may require a slightly different strategy to find your source, but most have a way to limit your results by document type (diary, for example), year, and perhaps another useful category, such as topic or location or branch of the military.

America in World War Two
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Digital access to oral histories, correspondence, diaries, photographs, artifacts, and military records relating to military personnel and civilians during the Second World War. Covers both the United States home front and deployment overseas in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, China, Burma, and India.

Includes collections sourced from The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. Covers American military and civilian participation in all major theaters of operations, including the army, navy and air force, marines, merchant marines, coast guard, women’s forces and medical personnel.
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
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Full text of letters, diaries, and memoirs from the American Civil War, with biographies and an extensive bibliography.
American Founding Era Collection
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Includes digital editions of the papers of many of the major figures of the early American republic.

Searchable and cross-searchable, full text collection of primary and secondary materials that include The Adams Papers, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Dolley Madison, The Papers of James Madison, The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry, The Papers of George Washington, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, and Founders Early Access.
American History, 1493-1945
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Sourced from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, American History, 1493-1945 provides access to documents on American History from the earliest settlers to the mid-twentieth century.

Civil War Collections
From Michigan State University, digitized collections of Michiganders who fought in the Civil War.
Civil War Diaries
Primary resource collection of diaries from the Civil War provided by The University of Iowa Libraries.

First World War
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Primary source documents related to the First World War, covering personal experiences of men and women, recruitment, the development and dissemination of various forms of propaganda, women's war work, the Home Front and international perspectives.

Document types include: personal narratives, diaries, newspapers, posters, postcards, photographs, printed books, military and government files, ephemera, artwork, personal artifacts and film. Also includes secondary source materials such as interactive maps, and chronologies.
Medical Services and Warfare
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Provides access to primary source documents related to the history of injury, treatment and disease, and medical advances during warfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the influenza epidemic in 1918 and the discovery of penicillin in 1927.
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926
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Full-text database based on Joseph Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana covering 1500-1926.
Service Newspapers of World War Two
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Provides access to over 200 World War II service newspapers published during the war years and the immediate aftermath (1939-1948).

In addition to acting as a mouthpiece for the troops, service newspapers brought information, entertainment and camaraderie to the forces at home and overseas. Titles from all the key theaters are featured, including some non-English material in German, Czech, Hindi, Russian, French, Italian, Afrikaans, Swahili, and other African dialects. Includes access to modules 1 and 2.
The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives
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Primary resources related to the history, culture, and politics of the American 1960s
U.S. Declassified Documents Online
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Online access to over 500,000 pages of previously classified government documents.

HIST H220 American Military History

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