Guide to Primary Sources

Library of Congress: Search the collection of American Cartoon Prints ca. 1766-1876

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

The Printed Ephemera collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the collection comprises 28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. Broadsides (newspapers) are the bulk of the collection, but it also includes pamphlets, advertisements, programs, timetables, and more.

This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1860s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

Web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Browse by county, photographer, and date.

Hi-res historical images are available to download from this site free of charge, for any usage, under a Creative Commons Attribution Only – CC-BY licence. Special focus on medical/clinical images.

Project details life in two communities-- one white, one black-- in the Civil War era (John Brown's Raids through Reconstruction). Materials include letters & diaries, census & other official records, newspapers, images, church records.

Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.