Primary Sources for History

FBIS Daily Reports issued by the U.S. Government. Translations of broadcasts, news agency transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements from nations around the world.

This collection of digitized archival material covers a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, and economic issues and the foreign relations interactions between Central American and South American countries. In the Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic are represented. This collection includes cables, memoranda, correspondence, reports and analyzes, and treaties.

Historical primary source visual, manuscript, and printed materials documenting the trade of major commodities around the world from the 16th century to the present day. Commodities are: chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver/gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber, tobacco, wheat, and wine/spirits.

A collection of historical Latin American newspapers, including newspapers published in the 19th and early 20th century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Provides access to primary source titles based on Joseph Sabin's bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana. Materials describe every aspect of life in the Western Hemisphere from 1500 to the early 1900s. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more.

A collection of books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering the history of the slave trade. This documentation covers such topics as legal issues, the Caribbean, the American South, race and the Civil War, children and women under slavery, modes of resistance, and emancipation and life thereafter. The collection includes introductory and scholarly essays as well.

This resource is designed as a portal for slavery and abolition studies. It compiles documents and collections covering 1490 to 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today. Content includes: original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps; links to other significant online sources; contextual essays. Topics include the African coast; the Middle Passage; the varieties of slave experience (urban, domestic, industrial, farm, ranch and plantation); spiritualism and religion; resistance and revolts; the Underground Railroad; the abolition movement; legislation; education; the legacy of slavery and slavery today.

This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba.

A collection of thousands of video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. The interviews have been conducted in 65 countries and 43 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence. It also includes testimonies about contemporary acts of violence against Jews.

Provides access to a digital collection of primary (and secondary) source documents about Latin America and the Caribbean. The scope ranges from the colonial period to the present and includes monographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, expedition records, journals, periodicals, reports, maps, diaries, descriptions of voyages, newspaper accounts, news feeds, audio and video, and more.