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African American Studies  Tags: africanamerican studies  

to provide an intellectual arena in which students learn to critically examine, analyze, interpret and affect the experiences, traditions, and dynamics of people of African descent and by extension, develop a fuller understanding of humankind.
Last update: Oct 09th, 2009 URL: http://guides.temple.edu/blackcrescent  Print Guide  RSS Updates

Primary Sources - United States             Print Page
  
 

Making of America

 

"Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily 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" (University of Michigan).

  • Making of America Books - The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books with 19th century imprints.
 

DocSouth

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs" (University of North Carolina).

 
 

Primary-Source Databases - MultiSearch

Search for Primary Sources

Enter a focused search term into the text box below. If you'd like to search for two terms connect them with the Boolean operator AND, e.g. Frick AND Berkman. Click the Search button to simultaneously search the following primary-source history databases:

  • America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1922 (a.k.a. Early American Newspapers, Series 1-5)
  • The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
  • American Periodicals Series Online, 1741-1900
  • Black Historical Newspapers, 1909-2003
  • CQ Historic Documents
  • Early American Imprints I and II, 1639-1819
  • Early English Books Online, 1475-1700
  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online
  • The Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945
  • Early Encounters in North America
  • In the First Person
  • Making of Modern Law
  • New York Times, 1851-2003
  • North American Immigrant Letters and Diaries
  • North American Women's Letters and Diaries
  • Reader's Guide Retrospective, 1890 to date
  • Times [of London] Digital Archive, 1785-1985
  • U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978
  • Wall Street Journal, 1889-1989
  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
Note: Because MultiSearch searches so many databases simultaneously it might take several minutes to execute your search. Please be patient. If your search takes too long, click "Stop Searching" to see available results. Remember that a single, narrowly focused or unusual keyword works best with MultiSearch.

Primary-Source Databases - U.S. History (All)

The following databases -- most Temple-only, one open-access -- provide electronic reproductions of full-text primary-source documents including maps, letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs and other personal narratives. Many of these databases are relevant to the history of other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

  • African American Experience  
      
    The African American Experience (AAE) includes the full-text of over 300 reference works from Greenwood Publishing as well as over 4,000 interviews with former slaves from the WPA slave narratives project. Excellent mix of primary and secondary material.
  • American Civil War Letters & Diaries  
      
    This database, like other Alexander Street Press databases, is well indexed. It can be searched by date (including by day), geographic location, and personal event in the life of the diarist (e.g. participation in in a battle, death of a child, etc.)
  • Black Thought and Culture  
      
    Landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major black leaders in North America. Works by teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and others.
  • CQ Researcher (1923- )  
      
    Founded in 1923 as Editorial Research Reports, CQ Researcher is noted for its in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Reports published weekly. Update: Now includes reports back to 1923!
  • Early Encounters in North America  
      
    This primary-source database documents the relationships among native, African, and European peoples and the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850. Nearly 1,500 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, and memoirs.
  • The Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945  
      
    This database constitutes a tremendous collection for the study of women's history around the world, including in the U.S. It contains both books and periodicals spanning roughly the first 400 years of the Modern Era.
  • In the First Person (FIRP)  
      
    FIRP indexes and links to oral histories and other "first-person" accounts available for free on the web, but it no longer indexes primary-source material in other Alexander Street Press databases.
  • Letters & Diaries Online  
    Letters and Diaries Online: Social and Cultural History from Alexander Street Press in its entirety forms perhaps the largest online archive of social experiences over time. Click the "i" icon for more information.
  • North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, & Oral Histories  
      
    North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories (IMLD) includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
  • North American Women's Letters and Diaries  
      
    When complete, this database will be the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled. Spanning more than 300 years, it will bring the personal experiences of 1,500 women to researchers, students, and general readers.
  • Oral History Online (OHI)  
      
    This Alexander Street Press database indexes over 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. Click "Places" on the Homepage, and then the plus (+) icon next to the words North America > United States > State Name > City Name.
  • Oxford African American Studies Center  
      
    Over 7,500 articles, images, and maps dealing with African American history and culture drawn from Oxford University Press reference sources. A wide range of primary sources are available as well. See also African American Experience, above.
  • Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (The Johns Hopkins University Press)   
    Online version of the 21 volume print collection of the same name, which includes the most significant letters, memoranda, cables, and directives written or dictated by Eisenhower from the years prior to World War II through the full term of his presidency. This collection includes documents, many of them previously classified, from private collections and public archives in the U.S. and U.K., as well as papers from the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
  • Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809-1870  
      
    This database is a listing of marriages, deaths and obituaries from the Village Record, published in West Chester, PA. Included, however, is information about emigration patterns, customs and traditions, important events, medical history, biography, etc.
  • Sanborn Maps (Digital), 1867-1970  
      
    Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970 provides digital access to more than 660,000 large-scale maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities.
  • Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974   
    This database brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.
  • Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice, 1490-2007   
    Important resource for slavery and abolition studies, this database brings together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world.
  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000  
      
    A database of 60+ document projects with 1,600+ primary documents & 20,000+ pages of additional secondary material including book reviews. Nice mixture of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources such as encyclopedias and bibliographies.

Primary-Source Databases - U.S. History (Books Only)

The following databases -- four Temple-only, one open-access -- provide electronic reproductions of full-text primary-source books. See also the Find Books tab.

  • Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800)  
      
    Based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans, EAI "is the definitive resource for every aspect of life in the 17th- and 18th-century British colonies of North America and early United States".
  • Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)  
      
    Covering every aspect of life during the first two decades of the 19th-century, this primary source collection provides full-text access to roughly 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides.
  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)   
      
    With the recent acquisition of ECCO II, this combined database now contains over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) — in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language book printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of titles printed in America.
  • Google Books  
    This open-access database offers thousands of titles published prior to 1900. The Advanced Book Search, while not as flexible as Diamond or OCLC's Worldcat, nevertheless permits a researcher to limit by title (e.g., Pittsburgh) and date published (e.g. 1865-1890).
  • Making of America Books (University of Michigan)  
      
    "Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction."
  • Pennsylvania County Histories to 1900  
      
    Full-text, page-image access to county histories written during the late 19th century. Researchers will appreciate the inclusion of beautiful period maps, illustrations, and portraits of prominent individuals. Note: Click "Search American Counties".

Primary-Source Databases - U.S. History (Periodicals)

The following databases -- many Temple-only, a few open-access -- index and in most cases provide electronic reproductions of full-text, primary source magazines, journals, and newspapers.

  • African American Newspapers: The 19th Century  
      
    Full-text, full-page image coverage of 19th Century America through the prism of the African-American experience. Available titles: Freedom's Journal (1827-1829), The Colored American (1837-1841), The North Star (1847-1851), The National Era (1847-1860), Provincial Freeman (1854-1857), Frederick Douglass Papers (1851-1859), and The Christian Recorder (1861-1902; completed through 1898, excluding 1892).
  • American Periodicals Series Online  
      
    This unique and valuable collection contains digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals that originated between 1741, when Andrew Bradford's American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine were launched, and 1900.
  • Black Historical Newspapers   
      
    This database provides full-text, full-page access to six highly influential 20th-century African-American newspapers: Chicago Defender (1909-1975), Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002), New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), and now the Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001) and the Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988).
  • C19: The Nineteenth Century Index  
      
    C19 indexes millions of documents published between 1790 and 1919. It is comprised of numerous sub-databases. Click on the "i" icon for more information.
  • Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (BETA)  
      
    This Library of Congress project allows users to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
  • Early American Newspapers (EAN), Series 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5  
      
    EAN Series 1 (1690-1876), 2 (1820-1860), 3 (1861-1900), 4 (1756-1922), and 5 (1777-1922) are major components of NewsBank's Archive of Americana.
  • Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974-1996  
      
    FBIS is an important new digital archive of full-text translations of foreign news sources from all areas of the world. Click "i" for more information.
  • Google News Archive  
      
    Paper of Record was a freely accessible database of historical newspaper images from around the world. In January 2009 the site's content disappeared after having been purchased by Google for its Google News Archive, causing much consternation among historians. Click "i" for more information.
  • HarpWeek  
      
    The HarpWeek database contains all the pages of Harper's Weekly (1857-1877) as scanned images, together with a series of manually generated indexes.
  • Historical Newspapers Online (title list from UPenn)  
      
    Nick Okrent, history librarian at the University of Pennsylvania, maintains his own list of primarily U.S. historical newspapers available online. Many but not all of the titles available on Nick's list are freely accessible. Most of the subscription-only newspaper titles listed there are available to Temple affiliates through the databases described and linked to in this box, e.g. Early American Newspapers and others.
  • ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers (CRL)  
    "This page highlights and links to past, present, and prospective digitization projects of historic newspapers. The focus is primarily on digital conversion efforts, not full-text collections of current news sources" (Center for Research Libraries).
  • Making of America Journals (University of Michigan)  
      
    "Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction." Over 50,000 journal articles currently available.
  • New York Times (1851-2003)   
      
    Full-text, full-page image access to the most important U.S. newspaper. The NYT is also available full-text, but not full-page image, from our Lexis and Newsbank databases. See the Newspapers Libguide for more information. Update: Now includes the Historical New York Times with Index! The index allows researches to search by location, person, or subject for focused and targeted results.
  • Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1800  
      
    Full-text access to the newspaper often called the "New York Times of the 18th Century". Invaluable source for the study of colonial American history.
  • Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819-1870  
      
    This database documents the industrialization of the predominantly agrarian culture established by Quaker farmers in the 18th century.
  • Reader's Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)  
      
    This retrospective version of the well-known Reader's Guide indexes 400 popular U.S. magazines of the past century, 200 of which are full-text. Limit by article type (feature, review, short story) and physical description (chart, illustration, etc.).
  • Wall Street Journal (1889-1989)  
      
    Via Proquest's Historical Newspapers database; full-text, full-page image access. The WSJ is also available full-text, but not full-page image, from 1984 to date in the ABI/INFORM database. See the Newspapers Libguide for more information.
 

Subject Librarian

Profile ImageAlbert Vara
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artemus@temple.edu
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African American

 
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