Primary Source Collections
- Gale 19th Century Collections Online: Science, Technology and Medicine, 1780 - 1925Nineteenth Century Collections Online provides full-text, searchable content from a broad range of primary sources including a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more. Selected with guidance of an international team of experts, these primary sources cover a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of study. They include works in Western and non-Western languages, and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other venerable institutions from around the globe.
After opening the link to Gale 19th Century Collections, scroll down to select
- North American Women's Letters & Diaries -- Colonial to 1950This collection includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
When searching primary sources, it can sometimes be helpful to use the terms for medical conditions that were used at the time, e.g. "consumption" for tuberculosis.
Sample entry:
Diary of Rebecca Cox Jackson, 1832 written by Rebecca Cox Jackson, 1795-1871 (1832); edited by Jean McMahon Humez, 1944-; in Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 65-69
- Everyday Life & Women in AmericaThis digital collection provides access to rare primary source material on American social, cultural, and popular history from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History, Duke University and The New York Public Library. It comprises thousands of fully searchable images (alongside transcriptions) of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes, emphasizing conduct of life and domestic management literature, the daily lives of women and men, and contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures.
- Vogue ArchiveA complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month. Every article, cover, photo shoot, illustration and advertisement has been digitized to the highest standard, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by designer and brand names.