Primary Sources: Databases

A full-text searchable, image database containing newspaper publications from rural and urban areas across the U.S. Includes topics relating to the the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life.

Gale Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows users to search across all of their Gale primary source collections.

The Coronavirus Research Database is a collection of journal articles, preprints, conference proceedings, dissertations and more related to COVID-19 and other coronaviruses. It includes comprehensive research background coverage of past pandemics and epidemics, like MERS and SARS, to give researchers and students context around the current global crisis.

Consists of pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries. Topics include the history of slavery and it’s legal issues, the Caribbean, children and women under slavery, and modes of resistance.

This database contains more than 200 years of the Times, with every page of every issue from 1785 to 2013. Research spans multiple areas of interest, including business, humanities, political science, philosophy, and numerous other subjects with coverage of all major international historical events.

This rich digital library includes more than 500,000 images from the areas of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, and other forms of visual culture. Images are drawn world-wide from such sources as museums, archaeological teams, photo archives, slide collections, and art reference publishers. Descriptive information is given for the individual images. The mission of ARTstor is to assemble image collections across many time periods and cultures and to create an organized resource that supports the noncommercial use of images for research, teaching, and scholarship.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings of images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

The Social Justice Suite includes four databases: Slavery in America and the World, Gun Regulation and Legislation in America, Civil Rights and Social Justice, and the Open Society Justice Initiative.

Examines numerous facets of societal life across cultures and time periods. Areas of life explored include: domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, religious, and geographic. Information gathered from reference works, books, and primary documents. Searching can be by topic or by topic combined with other concepts such as time period and area of the world. Information may be emailed or printed.

Calisphere is developed and maintained by the California Digital Library. It provides free access to artifacts, photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.