Primary Sources

This project contains a searchable database of tens of thousands of documents from U.S. presidents from 1789 to the present. It covers inaugural addresses, press briefings, signing statements, and debates.

A collection of primary sources from the 1790s-2000s including images, writings, news, government and court documents, and more.

materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries.

University of Houston’s Digital History database offers a wealth of links to textbook, primary sources, and educational materials in digital history. The database has multimedia, an interactive timeline, active learning, and resources for teachers.

A vast project that works with many cultural heritage institutions to bring together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums.

Over 6 million digitzed objects- from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.

View maps & photographs; read letters, diaries & newspapers; hear personal accounts of events; listen to sound recordings & watch historic films.

Investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents.

The National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents.

Umbrasearch.org brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity.

Use this website to view digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents. Highlights include: Harley Golden Gospels, Beowulf, the Silos Apocalypse, Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebook, the Petit Livre d’Amour, the Golf Book, almost 900 Greek manuscripts, The Royal Manuscripts and Botany in British India, Over fifty Thai manuscripts and the Chakrabongse Archive of Royal Letters, early Singapore manuscripts, Persian manuscripts, and Hebrew manuscripts.

Selected transcriptions, facsimiles, translations from Western Europe.

Provides access to digital collections from archives, museums, and special collections across Europe. Also includes a rotating gallery and digital exhibitions.

Presents texts from ancient to modern times. Material touches on the Crusaders, Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, French Revolution, and many other topics.

The Internet History Sourcebooks are collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts. Topics include Ancient, Medieval and Modern histories. Also presents material grouped by subject: Africa, East Asia, Global, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Lesbian/Gay, Science and Women's history.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 35,000 slaving vogages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

A collection of treaties and international agreements registered or filed and recorded with and published by the Secretariat since 1946.

Search 16,561 items about 193 countries between 8000 BCE and 2000.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Aggregating 18 million historic newspaper pages for Europeana and The European Library, the project converted 10 million newspaper pages to full text.

free access to scanned archives of newspapers and links to other newspaper archives on the web, both free and paid. Some of the news archives date back to 1700s.

This guide provides a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google. Much of the content is available for free, though some is under restricted access. It includes archives of current papers and papers that are no longer operating. It does not include papers that are currently running and only offer access to the most recent articles.

Over 4,000 interviews on almost every topic imaginable. The vast majority of these interviews have been transcribed and made available online.

55,000 black and white (more coming) and 1600 color photographs from the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information collection have been digitized.

Subtitled Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943, this searchable site contains over 900 posters from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 (EAA) presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States.

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.

Over 400,000 digital representations of create works from cultures around the globe.

An American map collection 1500-2004

The historical map collection has over 22,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented.

Large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to the present and depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico

Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s 2D and 3D digital items and images. This open repository includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.