Digital primary collections sourced from around the world.
Tips for using this collection are available in the Adam Matthew Digital Help Centre.
Includes these collections:
5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events.
Guide to historical records, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world
Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.
Topically-focused digital collections of historical documents.
Includes these collections:
Primary sources from several libraries, including books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, all searchable.
Primary texts as well as secondary sources, covering prose, theater, and poetry from 1500 on.
Includes these databases.
Literature & Fiction:
Drama:
Poetry:
Combines primary source databases with British, American, and some international content. Allows analysis of content using frequency and term-relationship tools.
Includes these collections:
Videos, newsreels, and primary documents on United States history, world history, and women in social movements.
Includes these collections:
Primary sources for 19th and 20th century U.S. history.
Includes collections in the following areas:
Maps, manuscripts, motion pictures, sheet music, photos, sound recordings, and books and text, arranged by topic, time period, and place.
American Memory is a digital record of American history and creativity, providing free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.
Full-text searchable histories and atlases of Michigan counties, dating from about 1866 to 1923.
Plays published in the United States in the nineteenth century.
This text collection consists of over 4,700 plays published in the United States from the early nineteenth century to its close. Included within Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture & Entertainment, 1820-1900 are hundreds of annotated copies of prompt books and manuscripts that serve to reveal the changing intentions of authors and the artistic views of directors. Also included is a wide variety of works, such as historical plays, melodramas, political satires, minstrel shows, comic operas, musical extravaganzas, parlor entertainments, adaptations of novels, and many others. The resource seeks to shed light on areas of study generally supported to this point only by imprints and newspapers: daily life in the United States; politics, both local and national; culture in all of its forms; and the shifting and evolving tastes of Americans from across the country.
Large-scale plans of urban areas. Maps of over 12,000 US cities and towns.
Sanborn maps, large-scale plans of a city or town, were created to assist fire insurance companies assess the risk associated with insuring a particular property. This collection includes 660,000 maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities.
Nearly 3 million 2D and 3D images from the Smithsonian Institution's 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Brings together instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of conduct.
Searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books of instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. When complete, the collection will contain 150,000 pages that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.
1740-1940. Special interest & general magazines; literary & professional journals; children's & women's magazines; other historically significant periodicals.
Collections of primary source documents from American history.
Includes: America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1922; America's Historical Imprints; Afro-Americana Imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1535-1922; African American Newspapers, 1827-1998; African American Periodicals, 1825-1995; Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980.
Archive of historical and current issues of the Detroit News, 1873 - present.
Full-text access to the complete backfile of the Detroit News, going back to 1873. Important notes about searching the Detroit News:
Keyword(s): Michigan
Local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations, by sympathetic publishers, and by Klan opponents 1921-1932.
Local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations and by sympathetic publishers across the United States. It also includes key anti-Klan voices from newspapers published by ethnic, Catholic, and Jewish organizations. Covers 1912-1936.
Provides cross-searching of British and American historical newspapers and periodical archive collections, ranging from the 18th century until a few years ago.
Includes these newspapers and collections of newspapers, which can also be searched separately:
All issues of the oldest general interest monthly in America, publishing essays, fiction, and reporting on politics, society, the environment, and culture.
Online version of the 19th-century American magazine Harper's Weekly, with original page images and searchable full-text.
Digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals.
Drawn from the special collections of participating libraries, these periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press, and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Independent Voices is made possible by the support received from libraries and donors across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Full-text searchable access to the complete backfile of the Michigan Chronicle, a leading voice for Blacks in Detroit and beyond.
Provides searchable, full-text access to the full archive of the Michigan Chronicle. The Michigan Chronicle was founded in 1936 by John Sengstacke, the owner of the Chicago Defender, and has continued to be a leading voice for Blacks in Detroit and beyond. Early on, the paper gained national attention for what was viewed at the time as its radical point of view by supporting both organized labor and the Democratic Party.
Michigan Chronicle played a pivotal role in civil rights of the 20th century including its involvement in negotiations at the Attica Prison uprising in 1971. It consistently reported on efforts of Black citizens to better themselves in the 1950s and 60s as they integrated into Detroit neighborhoods. In 1974, the Chronicle took the lead on supporting Coleman Young, Detroit's first Black mayor, and in its relentless reporting on violence against African Americans.
This newspaper offers primary source material essential to the study of American history and African-American culture, history, politics, and the arts. Examine major movements from the Great Migration and Civil Rights to the election of America's first Black president. Explore nearly nine decades of everyday life as written from the perspective of this Detroit-based paper providing researchers with unprecedented access to perspectives and information excluded or marginalized in mainstream sources.
Major general interest, opinion, and popular special interest magazines from the 20th century, and in some cases, also the 19th and 21st centuries.
Includes the following:
Custom cross-search of full-text backfiles of dozens of United States and international English-language newspapers. Click "More info" for individual titles.
Includes:
Numerous publications for women. and including many female writers.
Includes the following collections, which can also be searched separately: