Catalogs / Search Engines to Find Primary Sources
- OAIster (University of Michigan)
OAIster is freely available a union catalog of digital resources which means you can search for primary sources such as images, advertisements, movies, audio files, and manuscripts from multiple sources (e.g. Library of Congress American Memory project).
Online Collections of Primary Sources
Resources that include multiple types of primary sources (e.g. letters, manuscripts, images, movies, documents, etc.)
- American Journeys
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.
- Documenting the American South (UNC University Library)
Documenting the American South provides free access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes twelve thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
- Digitized Library Resources: Murphy Library and Beyond
The digital collections of Murphy Library makes materials of historical significance accessible to a wide range of people using online, digital formats.
Collections include historical texts, such as the 1904 The Catholic History of La Crosse, Wis. : In Two Chapters. They include artistic and photographic works of historical significance, such as the 1899 work, Art Work of Valley of the Mississippi from La Crosse, Wisconsin to Keokuk, Iowa. You'll find digitized newspapers, such as the 1886-1887 Wisconsin Labor Advocate as well as a 1913 film of a downtown La Crosse Parade.
- Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, & the Environment (Alexander Street Press)
 
Assembled from hundreds of primary sources, this database documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale)
This resource contains digital images of every page of books published during the 18th Century covering all topics. Materials include: English-language titles such books, Bibles, tract books, sermons, and printed ephemera.
- In the First Person (Alexander Street Press)
This free database is an index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories for more than 300,000 people. The index covers both free and commercial subscription sites and contains information about 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letters, and 17,000 oral history entries.
- La Crosse History Unbound
Historic La Crosse County materials available from La Crosse Public Library and UW-L Murphy Library's digitized collections.
- Primary Sources of the Women's Movement, 1960 to Present (Alexander Street Press)
Primary Sources of the Women's Movement, 1960 to Present: The "Second Wave" and Beyond is a free, online scholarly community that is a companion to the Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600 to 2000 database. This resource includes bibliographies, unpublished papers, chronologies, images, oral histories, links to external Web sites, book reviews, reviews of new Web resources, syllabi, and other materials. Three scholar-editors host this online community where participants analyze compelling questions about feminist activism and theories; collaborate on new directions for historical research; ding the history of contemporary feminism.
- The Gilded Age (Alexander Street Press)
The Gilded Age brings primary documents and scholarly commentary together covering American history from 1865 to 1902. In addition to an extensive selection of key treatises that reflect the social and cultural ferment of the late nineteenth century, The Gilded Age offers a wealth of rare materials, including songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. This primary content is enhanced by video interviews with scholars and numerous topical critical documentary essays specially commissioned for the project by Alexander Street Press. Covering such themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage, these essays illuminate the rapidly changing cultural landscape of America during the decades between the end of the Civil War and the election of Theodore Roosevelt.
- Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family (Alexander Street Press)
The collection brings together the 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. The collection contains 150,000 pages of fully searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600 to 2000 (Alexander Street Press)
This database includes books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s reform activities. Resources added in 2008 include more than 72,000 pages from State Commissions on the Status of Women, as well as the first three volumes of Harvard University Press' Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary.
Letters & Diaries
- North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories (Alexander Street Press)
This database includes 71 authors and approximately 10,000 pages of information intended to provide a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. It is composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, and some audio voices of the immigrants.
Literature
- Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period (Alexander Street Press)
This release includes some 60 volumes from 47 poets. The critical and biographical essays for some poets will be added in a future release, as will selected criticism from printed works. In addition selected essays, criticism and Web resources will be added from time to time.
Oral Histories
- Suffragists Oral History Project
from the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office, collected interviews with twelve leaders and participants in the woman's suffrage movement.
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