Primary Source Databases in US Literature and History
The Library provides networked access to many more full-text, primary source databases than can be listed here. Others may be located through the Library Catalog and Databases, which contains an alphabetical list of online resources related to Linguistics, Language and Literature as well as the History: Primary Sources list.
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19th Century MasterfileSearchable index to 19th century Anglo-American periodical articles and other materials published before 1930. Many links to full text. Aggregates indexes to books, periodicals, newspapers, government documents and patents into a single resource.
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African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century"...a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable." - Schomburg Center, NYPL.
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American PeriodicalsAmerican Periodicals includes two full text resources: American Periodicals Series Online (APS Online) and American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries. Both contain digitized images of American special interest and general magazines, labor and trade publications, scientific and literary journals, and photographic periodicals, as well as other historically significant titles, from the 19th century through the dawn of the 20th century. Because the database contains digitized images of periodical pages, researchers can see all of the original typography, drawings, graphic elements, and article layouts exactly as they were originally published.
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Brown University Women Writers Project"The mission of the Brown University Women Writers Project is to create, develop, and make accessible a state-of-the-art electronic textbase of women's writing in English before 1830. The WWP textbase is intended to support a wide range of activities, including new research on texts, information technology, and cultural history; publications and other textbase products; and innovative approaches to teaching."--Title screen
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Early Encounters in North AmericaAssembled from hundreds of primary sources, documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850, this 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. It includes works by American Indians as well as a wide range of Europeans. It captures first impressions, records hundreds of years of observations of flora and fauna, describes encounters with native peoples presents a new literature with words and metaphors created in response to new places, and much more. The database includes prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, photographs, and original facsimile pages all searchable by standardized vocabulary.
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Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)ECCO is a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which has aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. Subject categories include history and geography; fine arts and social sciences; medicine, science, and technology; literature and language; religion and philosophy; law; general reference. Also included are significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered.
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Literature OnlineA full-text collection of poetry, drama, and prose with complementary references sources. Primary texts include English poetry from 600 to the present; American and African-American poetry from 1603 to the present; English drama; English prose; articles, monographs and dissertations from the Annual bibliography of English language and literature (ABELL); full-text articles from literary journals; and biographical information on widely studied authors.
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Making of America (MOA)Digital versions of selections from Cornell University Library's collection. Features monograph volumes and journal articles published in the nineteenth century. Focuses on the major journal literature of the period, ranging from general interest publications to those with more targeted audiences such as agriculture.
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North American Slave NarrativesContains full text of "books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920."
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Victorian Popular CultureAn essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Consists of four components: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; and Moving pictures, optical entertainments & the advent of cinema. Includes full-text, full-color reproductions of books, ephemera, handbills, pamphlets, photos, posters, programs, scripts, and other types of materials. Coverage is most extensive for Great Britain; but there is also a fair range of materials for the U.S.A.
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Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875"A collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2887 texts included (1,883 unedited, 1,004 fully edited and encoded) by 1,450 authors"--Title screen.
Digital Book Archives
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Google Books
Full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. -
HathiTrust
Collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world -
Internet Archive
A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts (print, film, etc.) in digital form. Freely accessible to the public. Contains raw OCR. -
Project Gutenberg
A source of free, downloadable ebooks. Fairly clean plain text.
Rare Books & Mss.
That book you're reading doesn't end with the last page. It may have a long and fascinating history. The Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) includes 400,000 printed volumes, more than 70 million manuscripts, and another million photographs, paintings, prints, and other visual media that may be a part of that history. Deepen your appreciation of the text and take your research to the next level -- find out what RMC has to offer.