Guide to Primary Sources

On the commencement of actual war, the women of America manifested a firm resolution to contribute as much as could depend on them, to the deliverance of their country.

From the Massachusetts Historical Society

This electronic archive presents images of manuscripts and digital transcriptions from the Adams Family Papers, one of the most important collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

View digital images of important documents from America's history, from the Declaration of Independence to Elvis's letter to Nixon.

Collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards — historical documents, literary texts, and works of art — thematically organized with notes and discussion questions.

Accounts and documents pertaining to the black loyalists in the American Revolution.

Contains 277 documents relating to the work of Congress and the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Items include extracts of the journals of Congress, resolutions, proclamations, committee reports, treaties, and early printed versions of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Select an overall document or topic relating to The American Revolution and The New Nation, 1775-1815, to learn more and get links out to related primary sources.

Primary sources relating to George Washington from the official site for Mount Vernon.

A database of graphic political cartoons which includes the complete collection of over 500 political cartoons held by the JCB Library. The subject matter focuses primarily on British responses to political events in the late-eighteenth century Atlantic world.

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

UNC's digital collection of texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Sample documents from the volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History..., produced by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. Correspondence, testimony, and other works from 1861 to after 1866, from both sides of the war, are available.

Published from 1836-42, Friend of Man is one of the most significant newspapers documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements.

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers.

MoA is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

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.

The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.

Browse images of the Dust Bowl from the 1930s.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection is an online presentation of selections from a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941.

Via Academic Video Online: Premium
(Alexander Street Press)

Transcripts of FDR's fireside chats

The Radicalism Collection includes books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera covering a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, economic, and cultural issues and movements in the United States and throughout the world.

The BCRI documents the Civil Rights struggle in Birmingham, including primary sources.

This 13,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world. Includes full text primary documents, and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present.

The Oral History Digital Collection contains a selection of interview transcripts produced by the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi. Currently, a majority of the interviews in the collection document the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.

Watch recorded interviews (and download transcripts) with people discussing their involvement in the Civil Rights movement.

The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. Search issues from 1911-2011!

View digitized interviews given by those involved in the freedom rides of 1961.

Search documents published in the print edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. You can also browse featured documents.

Films, oral histories, and documents from the Civil Rights era with a focus on Virginia.

Library of Congress online exhibit showcases quotes and photographs to eyewitnesses of segregation, protests & marches, and terrorism.

From the American Archive of Public Broadcasting: "presents educational and noncommercial radio programs from the 1950s and 1960s that offer historic testimonies – in interviews, speeches, and on-the-spot news reports – from many movement participants, both well-known and unknown."