LibGuides: Religion & Politics in American History: Primary Sources Online

Primary Sources in Religion

The key primary sources for most religions are the religious texts themselves, but primary sources in religion can also include: books, works of art, pamphlets, sermons, government documents, and other contemporary writing by religious officials or members of a particular organization. Try searching for the names of people, legislation, or religious organizations.

Text-Based Primary Sources in Databases & on the Web

There are an increasing number of digitized primary source materials available in library databases and on the web from libraries, museums, educational institutions, and more. Explore the resources on this page to find texts, images, and much more on this topic. Below is a sample of some of the resources that you can find but remember, this is only a sample, so use JumboSearch to find more or Ask a Librarian for help!

African American Communities
1800-2000 CE | Pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and oral histories
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
Digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-Century black women writers. This collection provides access to the thought, perspectives, and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.
America in World War Two
1939-1945 CE | Oral histories and personal accounts
American History, 1493-1945
1493-1945 CE | Correspondence, diaries, government documents, business records, books, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, photographs, artwork and maps
American West
1718-1968 CE | Manuscripts, rare books, pamphlets, periodicals, broadsides, ephemera, maps and illustrative material

Colonial America
1606-1802 CE | Volumes of the Colonial Office 5 series from the British National Archives.
Early American imprints. Series I, Evans (1639-1800)
An online collection reproducing every extant book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1819 - the complete printed, non-serial source materials of American culture for the 17th and 18th centuries. Covers titles in the Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker bibliographies.
Early American imprints. Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker

Evans Early American Imprint Collection
This project transcribes and encodes the page images of books from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints. This work, and the resulting text files, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. Ultimately, all of the TCP’s work will be placed into the public domain for anyone to use. The texts can be searched through web interfaces provided by the libraries at the University of Michigan and University of Oxford.

Everyday Life & Women in America, c.1800-1920
1800-1920 CE | Monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides.
Jewish Life in America, c. 1654-1954
1654-1954 CE | Correspondence, scrapbooks, autobiographies, notebooks, and photographs from the American Jewish Historical Society, New York.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository with over 10 million volumes including content digitized via the Google Books project, Internet Archive, and by local libraries. Public domain content is full-text; non-public domain content (post-1923) is for full-text searching only. Since Tufts is a member, those with a Tufts login can download the pdf of pre-1923 materials and can build a personal collection. To login select Collections, then select login from the upper right; choose Tufts University and login using your Tufts username and password.
Law Journal Library
This HeinOnline collection consists of full-text access to over 2,300 law journals, usually starting with the first volume and available through the most current content.
The Nixon Years, 1969-1974
1969-1974 CE | Records from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
1950-1975 CE | Manuscripts, printed material, photographs, and ephemera.
Congressional Publications
Provides users with access to a comprehensive collection of historic and current congressional information. Includes full text of congressional publications, finding aids, a bill tracking service, public laws and other research materials. The database is an effective source for general research in many academic disciplines, in addition to research related to specific legislative proposals and laws. Researchers can access information about Congress, including member biographical and committee assignment information, voting records, and financial data.
Race Relations in America
1943-1970 CE | Case studies, audio recordings, scrapbooks, correspondence, government documents, and photographs.

Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
From the Library of Congress, the efforts of the Founders of the American nation to define the role of religious faith in public life and the degree to which it could be supported by public officials that was not inconsistent with the revolutionary imperatives of the equality and freedom of all citizens is the central question which this exhibition explores. Includes digitized primary source documents.

Virginia Company Archives
1537-1935 CE | Correspondence, legal documents, and business records.

Historical Newspaper Collections

Accessible Archives
includes African American Newspapers (19th century), the Pennsylvania Gazette, among other historic U.S. newspapers
African American Newspapers Guide
Marist College maintains a list of free historical African American newspapers by title and by region.

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
African-American Newspapers ultimately will contain the complete text of the major African-American newspapers published in the United States during the 19th century.

African Newspapers, 1800-1922
more than 40 fully searchable African newspapers
America's Historical Newspapers
includes Early American Newspapers (1690-1922), Hispanic American Newspapers (1808-1980), and African American Newspapers (1827-1998)
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America
Explore manuscripts, artwork, and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers right up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century. Browse through a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps and travel journals.
California Digital Newspaper Collection
Contains over 1,500,000 pages of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-present, including the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California. It also contains issues of several current California newspapers that are part of a project to preserve and provide access to contemporary papers.

Black Studies Center
A portal to several resources in black studies (African American Studies, African Studies, and Diaspora Studies) including essays from Schomberg Studies on the Black Experience, indexes and full-text from black journals and periodicals covered by the International Index to Black Periodicals, the Marshall Index (formerly A Guide to Negro Periodical Literature), and the Black Literature Index. Also includes the full-text of the Chicago Defender newspaper, 1912-1975.

Newspapers.com
Provides online access to 3,000+ historical newspaper, dating from the early 1700s into the early 2000s, (but mostly 18th and 19th centuries, with a little 20th). Contains full runs and portions of runs of well-known, regional and state titles to small local newspapers in the United States and some other countries.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
1860-1922; Library of Congress project that has digitized pages from newspapers from the following states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington
Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat)
U.S., Canada and Caribbean newspapers. Many search features.
Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections
This collection contains 118 newspaper titles, 140,474 issues comprising 1,488,968 pages and 6,887,660 articles. Most of the newspapers in this collection were published in Illinois but it also includes newspapers published in other locations such as the Vaudeville News and the New York Clipper.
Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection, 1799-1971
includes 130 newspapers in ten languages from 25 states, including many rare 19th Century titles. Emphasis is on Americans of Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Welsh descent.
Ethnic NewsWatch
1959 to the present; newspapers and periodicals from the ethnic, minority and Native American press
Latin American Newspapers Series 1, 1805-1922
more than 45 fully searchable Latin American newspapers
Latin American Newspapers Series 2, 1822-1922
includes newspapers published in English, Spanish and Portuguese from 20 countries.

Other Historical Periodicals

American Periodicals
This database contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.

Christian Herald
The Christian Herald was an American weekly newspaper reporting on topics relevant to Evangelical Christianity that was published from 1878 until the late 20th century.
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
More than 170 periodicals by and about African-Americans: academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, bulletins of organizations, annual reports, and other genres.
Harper's Magazine
Search the archives of Harper's Magazine from 1850 to the present.
The Nation Archive
1865-; Full access to the complete backfile of the oldest continuously published weekly journal in America.
OpinionArchives
Search across some of the oldest continuously published magazines in America in OpinionArchives. Titles include: American Spectator, Commentary, Commonweal, Dissent, Harpers Magazine, NACLA, The Nation, The National Review, The New Republic, New York Review, The New Yorker.
Independent Voices
Includes complete runs of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals from the US (primarily 1960s-1980s), with a particular focus on feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, gays, lesbians and more.