Library Guides: HIST 401: Historical Research: U.S. Primary Sources

U. S. National Archives

National Archives of the United States
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.
Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you

Featured Resources

Making of America - Univ. of Michigan
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
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Cornell University also provides a "Making of America" collection.
Making of America - Cornell Univ Collection

Census Records

THe Bethlehem Public Library makes available a database called HERITAGE QUEST. This product provides a searchable database for the images of the Census Enumerator records from 1790 through 1930.This allows you to search over 25,000 family and local histories. Users must have a Bethlehem library card account. Lehigh students are eligible for public library cards. Visit their website and search for Heritage Quest on the list of reference databases.

Other PA libraries may also make this source available. Check your local library.

Primary Sources Databases

Finding Primary Sources in the popular literature of the day: You may be able to find articles, speeches, and personal accounts that qualify as primary sources in the magazines, newspapers and popular literature of the day. Lehigh's library also makes available a significant number of online sources that provide the searchable full text of historic materials and publications. These resources are for use by the Lehigh Community only. Be sure to look at the Newspaper tab in this guide for other resources.

American Periodicals Series This link opens in a new window
Full text of over 1,100 periodicals published between 1740 and 1900.
Includes special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.
African American Periodicals: 1825-1995 This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 170 African American Periodicals published between 1825 and 1995.
Early American Imprints: 1639-1800 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to primary sources covering nearly every aspect of early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics and every day life. Coverage from 1639 to 1800.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 is based on Charles Evans American Bibliography and the Supplement to Evans American Bibliography by Roger Bristol. These bibliographies attempted to gather all American imprints (published works) from the 17th and 18th Centuries. These works identify historic publications that are in microfiche collection known as Early American Imprints, 1639-1800. The Early American Imprints: Series I: Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1659-1800 is an ongoing project of digitizing and making full text searching available for all of the 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.
Early American Imprints: 1801-1819 This link opens in a new window
In addition to its books, pamphlets and broadsides, this collection features many state papers and government materials, including published reports; presidential letters and messages; congressional, state and territorial resolutions. Coverage from 1801 to 1819.
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) provides full-text search capabilities and access to an image database of the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. Continues Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I: Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1659-1800. This primary source database is based on the bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Digital access to nearly 150,000 items including books, broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons and printed ephemera and includes works by many well-known and lesser-known authors published between 1701 and 1800.
Full-text searching allows researchers access to information in many fields including history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more. The basic and advanced search tools available allow the researcher a variety of search types including an advanced "fuzzy" search to help find the variant/approximate spelling found in documents of this era and the ability to search by ESTC numbers.
Harper's Weekly: The Civil War Era 1857-1865 This link opens in a new window
Provides Harper's Weekly online for the years 1857 to 1865.
All the pages of Harper's Weekly (1857-1865) are viewable as scanned images, together with a series of four indexes: subject, illustrations, literature & publishing, and advertising.
Readers Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States. Reflects the history of 20th century America.
The database covers the years 1890 through 1982. For access to current general periodicals indexing, see Academic Search Premier

Primary Sources on the Web

Libraries, Archives, Museums and other institutions are digitizing enormous amounts of primary source materials from their collections and making them freely available on the internet. It is always useful to conduct a web search, using Google or other search tools to locate primary sources.

American Memory
Free and open online access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions.
Avalon Project
A collection of historical, diplomatic and legal texts from Yale Law School
Documenting the American South
19th century American South materials from the University of North Carolina
NYPL Digital Collections
Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, the New York Public Library Digital Collections offers drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more.
Valley of the Shadow
Details life in Augusta County, Va. and Franklin County, Pa. during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Contains letters, diaries, newspapers, speeches, census records and church records.
War Department Papers, 1784 - 1800
After a traumatic and devastating fire in 1800, many historians thought that the early files of the United States War Department were essentially lost forever. The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University completed a decade long project to locate all of these records and place them online here. During this time period, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, and naval affairs.
Wayback Machine from Internet Archive
View archived versions of public websites from as early as 1996.

Archives and Manuscript Collections

ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
Provides a search interface for primary source material held in archives, special collections, and manuscript collections around the world.
ArchiveGrid also helps researchers contact archives to request information, arrange a visit, and order copies.
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections This link opens in a new window
Access to records drawn from the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and the OCLC bibliographic database that describe archival and manuscript collections in research, college, university and public and special libraries, archives, museums and historical societies in North America and worldwide.

Lehigh Digital Library
explore the primary sources in our Special Collections department which have been digitized to allow easy access.

Haithi Trust

A great source to use if you are looking for books published before 1924, is HathiTrust. Over a million books (also some magazines and Parliamentary Papers) free of copyright are available full-text and can be downloaded as pdfs. Plus you can search through the entire text to find the information you seek.

The Advanced Catalog Search provides options to search for specific titles, authors and keywords and to limit your search by fulltext availability (full view only) and publication date.

Hathi Trust's collection includes books published in Britain, the United States and other countries.

Books still in copyright are not available full-text but you can usually use the search feature to pinpoint the pages you might need. Then search for the book in our library catalog at Lehigh.

Lehigh University Libraries - Library Guides

HIST 401: Historical Research: U.S. Primary Sources