LibGuides: Primary Sources for United States History: 20th to 21st Centuries

20th to 21st Centuries

American Politics and Society from JFK to Watergate, 1960-1975 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Documents from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies as well as records from federal agencies
*Issues range from women’s rights, environmental issues, urban renewal, civil rights, space exploration, international trade, War on Poverty, and the Watergate trials
Disability in the Modern World: History of a Social Movement This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Resources related to disabilities and multiple disciplines
Food Studies Online This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to resources related to food studies
Historical Statistical Abstracts (1878-2012) This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Online statistical resource on the social, political and economic conditions of the United States
Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880-1930 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Files covering Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states
*Files on Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930
*Files on the INS’s regulation of prostitution, white slavery, and on suppression of radical aliens
New Deal and World War II (1933-1945) This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Files from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, & Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to primary resources from immigrants to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950
Sixties: Primary Documents & Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Primary resources from 1960 to 1974
Socialist Party of America Papers, 1897-1976 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers of the Socialist Party of America from 1897 to 1976
Students for a Democratic Society, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Contains resources on the anti-Vietnam War organizations, especially by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
*Coverage from 1958 to 1981
Thomas A. Edison Papers This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Documents of Thomas Edison in laboratory notebooks, diaries, business records, and correspondence
Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, 1960-1975 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Records of the Associated Press’s Saigon Bureau from 1960 to 1975
*Records of the Military Assistance and Advisory Command, Vietnam
*General William Westmoreland Papers
*National Security Files from the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations.
Workers, Labor Unions, and the American Left in the 20th Century: Federal Records This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Documents related to American workers and labor unions in the 20th century

Collections on the Web:

Digital Public Library of America
"The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world."
The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives primarily "contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings" as well as "pamphlets, journals and other materials" from the 1960s to 1990s. The collections are organized by movement, including Black Liberation, Chican@/Xican@, Gender and Sexuality, and Indigenous/Native American Struggles, among many others.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a fully digital library of more than 17 million items, mostly books, from academic and research libraries. All books in the public domain are 100% viewable.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
"The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office."

To access Tredway Library's collection of historical Black newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, go to the "Newspapers & Magazines" page of this guide and click the "Black Newspapers" tab.

Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Civil rights records, including FBI Files on Martin Luther King Jr.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records, Supplement This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Civil rights records from the Ford and Reagan presidencies
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Records and personal papers from civil rights leaders
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
*Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett
*Robert F. Williams Papers
Black Freedom Website This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Primary documents related to African Americans topics from 1790 to 2000
Black Studies in Video This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to streaming videos related to topics in Black studies in the United States
*All films include public performance rights
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Collection of covering 250 years of non-fiction writings by American Black leaders
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Full coverage to resources of alternative press resources, produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century
NAACP Papers: Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers focusing on crucial issues: lynching; school desegregation; and discrimination in the military, the criminal justice system, employment, and housing
*Coverage from 1909 to1970
NAACP Papers: Branch Department, Branch Files, and Youth Department Files This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers on civil rights in the United States
*Coverage from 1913 to 1972
NAACP Papers: Special Subjects This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers on several subjects
NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, and Armed Forces This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers on equal access to education, voting, employment, housing and the military
NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Legal Department Files This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers of the NAACP Legal Department from 1956-1972
NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers focus on the NAACP’s efforts regarding anti-lynching, peonage, and discrimination in employment and the criminal justice system

Collections on the Web:

Behind the Veil Oral History Project
The Behind the Veil Oral History Project's purpose "was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s."
Civil Rights Digital Library
The Civil Rights Digital Library helps users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives primarily "contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings" as well as "pamphlets, journals and other materials" from the 1960s to 1990s. The collections are organized by movement, including Black Liberation, Chican@/Xican@, Gender and Sexuality, and Indigenous/Native American Struggles, among many others.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Images of artifacts from the museum's collection. The NMAAHC is part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Umbra Search
Umbra Search is a database that "brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country" to make "African American history more broadly accessible."

Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to resources related to U.S. Hispanic history, literature, and culture from colonial times until 1960
*This resource is indexed and searchable in Spanish and English
Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 2 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Contains primary resources related to Hispanic-American civil rights, religion, and women’s rights from the 18th to the 20th centuries
Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880-1930 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Files covering Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states
*Files on Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930
*Files on the INS’s regulation of prostitution, white slavery, and on suppression of radical aliens
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Full coverage to resources of alternative press resources, produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century

Collections on the Web:

Bracero History Archive
"The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America."
Center for Puerto Rican Studies Digital Collection
"Browse material from throughout the Centro Archive showcasing the history and culture of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora." The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños is based at Hunter College.
Farmworker Movement Documentation Project
From the University of California San Diego, the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project provides "primary source accounts by the UFW volunteers who built the movement," 1962-1993.
The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives primarily "contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings" as well as "pamphlets, journals and other materials" from the 1960s to 1990s. The collections are organized by movement, including Black Liberation, Chican@/Xican@, Gender and Sexuality, and Indigenous/Native American Struggles, among many others.
Hispanic Reading Room (Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress's Hispanic Reading Room collects digital exhibits and primary sources related to Latinx history in the U.S.
Historic Mexican and Mexican-American Press
"The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s." From the University of Arizona.

American Indians and the American West, 1809-1971 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Focuses on American Indians in the first half of the 20th century
*Contains records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and from the Major Council Meetings of American Indian Tribes
*Access to collections on American Indians in the 19th century
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Full coverage to resources of alternative press resources, produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century
Indian Claims Insight This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Treaties involving Native American lands, Indian removal or resettlement, or clarification of boundaries between white settlements and Indian lands
*Coverage from 1789 to the present
North American Indian Thought & Culture This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to resources related to North American Indians

Collections on the Web:

'Ulu'ulu Henry Ku'ualoha Giugni Moving Image Archive of Hawai'i
'Ulu'ulu "aims to perpetuate and share the rich moving image heritage of Hawai‘i through the preservation of film and videotape related to the history and culture of Native Hawaiians and the people of Hawai‘i."
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center "aims to develop a comprehensive searchable database of Carlisle Indian School resources."
The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives primarily "contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings" as well as "pamphlets, journals and other materials" from the 1960s to 1990s. The collections are organized by movement, including Black Liberation, Chican@/Xican@, Gender and Sexuality, and Indigenous/Native American Struggles, among many others.
National Museum of the American Indian
Images of artifacts from the museum's collection. The National Museum of the American Indian is part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Native American Heritage Month Exhibits and Collections
This website is dedicated to compiling primary sources, exhibits, and teaching materials for Native American Heritage Month each year as part of a "collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration."
Native Northeast Portal
"Native Northeast Portal contains primary source materials by, on, or about Northeast Indians from repositories around the world. Documents are digitized, transcribed, annotated, reviewed by the appropriate contemporary descendant community representatives, and brought together with scholarly annotations and academic/community commentary into one edited interactive digital collection."

Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880-1930 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Files covering Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states
*Files on Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930
*Files on the INS’s regulation of prostitution, white slavery, and on suppression of radical aliens

Collections on the Web:

Asian Voices
This page, part of the Digital History website hosted by the University of Houston, links significant primary source documents from 19th- and 20th-century Asian American history.
Chinese Historical Society of America: Online Exhibits
"CHSA has produced these online exhibits to make the social, cultural and political history and contributions of the Chinese in America more widely available to the general public."
Densho Digital Repository
"Hear the story of the Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it, and find thousands of historic photographs, documents, newspapers, letters and other primary source materials from immigration to the WWII incarceration and its aftermath." Densho is an educational organization focused on Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
Japanese American National Museum: Collections and Research
This page links a variety of digital collections from the Japanese American National Museum.
Korean American Digital Archive
Digitized primary sources from the University of Southern California.
SEAAdoc: Documenting the Southeast Asian Experience
"SEAAdoc is an educational resource of the Southeast Asian Archive at the UC Irvine Libraries focusing on post-1975 refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and the communities they have developed in the United States. It contains 1,500 visual images and 4,000 pages of searchable text selected from the Archive to represent a cross section of our holdings."
South Asian American Digital Archive
Containing more than 4,000 digitized items, "SAADA digitally documents, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans."

For additional databases and resources related to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, visit the WGSS Resources Guide here: https://library.augustana.edu/wgssresources.

Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Full coverage to resources of alternative press resources, produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century
LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Resources documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day
Manuscript Women's Letters & Diaries This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries
North American Women's Letters & Diaries This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to 1,300+ women's diaries and letters
Struggle for Women's Rights, Organizational Records, 1880-1990 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Records of the National Woman’s Party
*Records of the League of Women Voters
*Records of the Women’s Action Alliance
*Coverage from 1880 to 1990
Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Full coverage of women’s magazines, dating from the 19th century through to the 21st century.
*Collection contains:
1. Better Homes & Gardens
2. Chatelaine
3. Company
4. Cosmopolitan
5. Essence
6. Good Housekeeping
7. Ladies' Home Journal
8. Parents
9. Prima
10. Redbook
11. Seventeen
12. She
13. Town and Country
14. Woman's Day
15. Women's International Network News
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Resources related to women's studies In the United States between 1600 and 2000
Women at Work during World War II: Rosie the Riveter and the Women's Army Corps This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Records documenting the experience of American women during World War II
*Records of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor
*Correspondence of the Director of the Women’s Army Corps

Collections on the Web:

ACT UP Oral History Project
"The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York."
American Women's History Museum
" To create a more equitable America, the Smithsonian is researching, disseminating, and amplifying the histories of American women through its American Women’s History Initiative in preparation for the future Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum." With this goal in mind and "with a digital-first mission and focus, the Smithsonian amplifies a diversity of women’s voices in a new museum and throughout the Smithsonian’s museums, research centers, cultural heritage affiliates, and anywhere people are online."
Digital Transgender Archive
"The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world." Based at Northeastern University.
Discovering American Women's History Online
Maintained by Middle Tennessee State University's Walker Library, the Discovering American Women's History Online database
"provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States."
The Freedom Archives
The Freedom Archives primarily "contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings" as well as "pamphlets, journals and other materials" from the 1960s to 1990s. The collections are organized by movement, including Black Liberation, Chican@/Xican@, Gender and Sexuality, and Indigenous/Native American Struggles, among many others.
Gerber/Hart Library and Archives
"Founded in 1981, Gerber/Hart’s collections focus on the culture and history of LGBTQ peoples and additional marginalized sexual and gender minorities in Chicago and the Midwest. Open to all, Gerber/Hart serves these communities by collecting, preserving, and making accessible collection items of individuals, organizations, and businesses, as well as publicly distributed items. Additionally, Gerber/Hart provides programming and exhibitions related to items in its collections and on other topics in LGBTQ history and culture."
GLBT Historical Society
"The GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity. Founded in 1985, we are recognized internationally as a leader in the field of LGBTQ public history."
Iowa Women's Archive
"The Iowa Women’s Archives holds more than 1200 manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities. These personal papers and organizational records date from the nineteenth century to the present. Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders. The Iowa Women’s Archives is open to the public."
Lesbian Herstory Archives
The Lesbian Herstory Archives, a grassroots community-run archives, is "home to the world’s largest collection of materials by and about Lesbians and their communities."
Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
"The Schlesinger Library illuminates the lives of American women past and present through its collections, research support, public programming, and exhibitions, all while advancing Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s commitment to women, gender, and society."