Lists of sources for historical research, including historical newspapers and journals, digitized primary sources, and article databases. These lists are not exhaustive. Please get in touch with Catherine J. Minter if you need more help or if you have problems accessing any of these resources.
Digital archive of historical newspapers. Each issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images.
Digital archive of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century.
Based on a very comprehensive microfilm collection of American magazines and journals, 1740-1940. Contains searchable full text of all extant issues of over 1000 titles, ranging from children's magazines to professional journals. Can be cross-searched with historical newspaper archives.
Digital archive of American newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, representing every state in the U.S.
Based on a collection of rare newspapers held by the American Antiquarian Society, with contributions from the Boston Athenaeum, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Library of Congress, the libraries of universities such as Brown and Harvard, and private collections. Fully text-searchable; browseable by newspaper title.
Collections included: African American Newspapers, Series 1 ; African American Newspapers, Series 2 ; Caribbean Newspapers ; Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection ; Hispanic American Newspapers ; Early American Newspapers, Series 1-7, 11-12, and 17-19.
A digital archive of American historical newspapers from the 19th century, including over 1.5 million full-text pages, many complete with images.
This resource is a digital archive of nearly 250 American historical newspapers from the 19th century, many complete with images. Contents include digitized collections of holdings from the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the South Carolinian Library, the Scholarly Resources Archive, the Maryland State Archive, and the Boston Public Library, among others. Coverage includes major papers, minority publications, publications of social activist groups, and illustrated papers. Newspapers included are: New York Herald (NY), Lynchburg Virginian (VA), Pacific Commercial Advertiser (HI), Rocky Mountain News (CO), Southern Illustrated News (VA), Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), Milwaukee Sentinel (WI), The Bee (OH), The Mountaineer (SC).
Contains full runs and portions of runs of well-known, regional and state titles in addition to small local newspapers.
Includes access to newspapers from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom & Ireland, Australia, and Panama.
Black American and Indigenous newspapers and journals
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).
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.
Primary source materials published 1829-1922, covering the history of African American life and religious organizations.
Includes reports and annuals from African American religious organizations and social service agencies, as well as African American periodicals. Provides extensive coverage of African American religious organizations, churches and institutions.
Collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada. Includes 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016.
The bulk of the titles were founded in the 1970s, documenting the proliferation of Indigenous journalism that grew out of the occupation of Wounded Knee, meeting the demand for objective reporting from within Indian Country. Subjects covered include: self-determination era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation from an Indigenous perspective.
Collections of primary sources
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.
This resource offers more than 100,000 early American books, pamphlets, broadsides and rare printed materials. Featuring extensive indexing and full bibliographic information, they together illuminate more than 250 years of American history, literature, culture and daily life.
Most texts included are from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search Gale digital archives.
Alexander Street Press houses millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists in literature; music; women's history; Black history; psychological counseling and therapy; social and cultural history; drama, medical, theater, film, and the performing arts; religion; sociology; and other emerging areas.
Sources for research into the 19th century, comprising tens of millions of records and providing access to finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers, archives, and reference material. Includes Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (NCSTC).
The 25 million+ records in C19 Index include the following sources: Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, The Nineteenth Century publishing program, ProQuest’s American Periodicals, ProQuest’s British Periodicals, Cotgreave's Index, An Index to Legal Periodical Literature, Cumulative Index to Niles' Register 1811–1849, Periodicals Index Online, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Stead's Index to Periodical Literature, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, The U.S. Serial Set, Archive Finder, Palmer's Index to The Times, The "Bookman" Directory of Booksellers, Publishers and Authors, and Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism.
Digital image library of over 2.5 million digital images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. To save or download images, users must register for an individual account.
Users who create an account also gain access to a set of tools for sharing images, curating groups of images, downloading them directly into PowerPoint presentations, and comparing and contrasting images.
African American oral history video collection.
Includes interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as a career or participation in the civil rights movement, the interviews are life oral histories covering the person’s entire span of memories as well as his or her own family’s oral history.
Special topics: race, slavery, legislation
Provides access to primary source documents related to prejudice, segregation and racial tensions in America. Includes survey material, interviews and statistics, as well as educational pamphlets, administrative correspondence, and photographs and speeches from the Annual Race Relations Institutes.
Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
Designed as a portal for slavery and abolition studies, this resource provides access to documents and collections covering 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.
Access to legal materials on slavery in the United States and the Europe. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, the resource includes documents from several archives originally available only on microfilm. Includes the following sections: Part I: Debates Over Slavery and Abolition ; Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World ; Part III: The Institution of Slavery ; Part IV: The Age of Emancipation.
Access to over 300 years of legal sources, 1620 to 1970, for researchers of American legal history. Includes access to Part 1, Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926, and Part 2, Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1763–1970. Note that the term "primary sources" is used not in the historian's sense of a manuscript, letter or diary, but rather in the legal sense of a case, statute or regulation.
Includes legal glossaries, law dictionaries, state statutes, colonial records, legislative journals, votes and proceedings, constitutional conventions, compilations of laws, city charters, colonial charters, documentary histories, governmental proceedings and meeting minutes.
Comprehensive full-text collection of documents from Anglo-American trials. Includes unofficially published accounts of trials; official trial documents, briefs, and arguments; and official records of legislative proceedings, administrative proceedings, and arbitration sessions.
Covers adultery, commercial law, conspiracy, constitutional law, crimes against persons, domestic relations, dueling, elections, impeachment, international law, land, libel, military offenses, murder, slavery, theft, torts, treason and wills, among many other subjects. In addition to works pertaining to English-speaking jurisdictions such as the United States, Britain, Ireland and Canada, English-language titles about trials in other jurisdictions such as France are included. Collections include not only published trial transcripts, but also popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, adultery and other scandalous crimes. Access also to unofficially published accounts of trials, as well as briefs, arguments and other trial documents where these were printed as separate publications.
Special topics: women's studies, women's writing
Provides access to primary source material from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History, Duke University and The New York Public Library. Includes monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.
This database brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life.
Includes 130 document projects that interpret and present documents, a dictionary of social movements and organizations, and a chronology of U.S. Women's History. Also includes access to teaching tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects. Includes access to all new content updates through 2023.
Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, Black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of Black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of Black feminism.
Black Women Writers includes fiction, poetry, and essays. Among the authors are Nikki Giovanni, Maryse Condé, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Rhoda Reddock, Margaret Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rosa Guy, Sonia Sanchez, Olive Senior, and Barbara Ransby. Works are in their original languages, although an English translation executed by the original author may be available. Works are reproduced in their entirety and when possible, an image of the original page accompanies the text. The dates of the material range from the 1700s to contemporary pieces.
Searchable full text of letters and diaries of hundreds of North American women, from the 16th century to 1950.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Also includes biographies and an annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
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 searchable full-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.
JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of The Mellon Foundation, provides complete runs of hundreds of important journal titles in more than 30 arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. These scholarly journals can be browsed online and searched, and the page images can be printed for those available in full-text. The IUB Libraries subscribe to current content for only some titles available through JSTOR.
All journals in JSTOR start with the first volume. Many include content up to a "moving wall" of 3-5 years ago, although some journals have a fixed ending date for their content in JSTOR. Please check individual journals for exact dates of coverage.
For information about access to this resource for IU alumni, contact the Indiana University Alumni Association.
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.
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.
Gender, sexuality
Citations to articles, books, conference papers, pamphlets, dissertations and other publications about gender inequality, masculinity, post-feminism, and gender identity.
Gender Studies Database provides indexing and abstracts covering the full spectrum of gender-related scholarship. It offers over a million records from scholarly and popular publications, including journals, books, conference papers and theses.
Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.
GenderWatch is a full text database of nearly 400 periodicals and other publications that focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas. Publications include academic and scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, booklets and pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government, and special reports.
Art, literature, media
Art research database covering fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as areas of architecture and architectural design.
Features full-text articles as well as detailed indexing and abstracts for an array of journals, books, podcasts and more. Also includes periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch. Designed for use by art scholars, artists, designers, students and general researchers. Supersedes Art Full Text and includes all the material available from that database.
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature is a bibliography compiled by the Modern Humanities Research Association. ABELL lists monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations.
Contains more than 1 million records, from 1892 through to today with regular monthly updates. It indexes more than 850 journals and is a resource for literary criticism published between 1892-1962.
This resource offers worldwide full-text content pertaining to communication, linguistics, rhetoric and discourse, speech-language pathology, media studies and related fields.
Communication Source features full text for more than 800 titles, including over 600 active full-text titles and 150 full-text titles not found in other EBSCO academic databases.