LibGuides: Primary Sources for United States History: Colonial Period to 18th Century

Colonial Period to 18th Century

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection This link opens in a new window
What's included?
1. Contains resources related to all aspects of American history and culture before the 20th century.
2. Date coverage: 1684-1912.
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
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
Colonial State Papers, 1574-1757 This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Papers related to the colonial history of North America and the West Indies
Congressional Hearings Digital Collection (1824-2003) This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Published and unpublished hearings between 1824 to 2003
Early Encounters in North America This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. *Personal accounts from traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women
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 Indian Thought & Culture This link opens in a new window
What's included?
*Access to resources related to North American Indians
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

Collections on the Web:

Colonial North America at Harvard Library
"When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 700,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America."
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.
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.
JCB Archive of Early American Images
"A database of graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825." From the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.
Massachusetts Historical Society
Portal to the digitized collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, including materials on John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, as well as the colonial period and the American Revolution.
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."
Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera
From the Library of Congress, "the collection contains, among other materials, posters, playbills, songsheets, notices, invitations, proclamations, petitions, timetables, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, ballots, tickets, menus, and business cards" dating from the 17th century to the present.
Slave Voyages
"This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action."