Primary Sources for History

Covering primarily the 1950s and 1960s, this collection provides access to primary source documents that focus on how ordinary citizens in the smaller communities viewed, participated in and lived through this historical era. The collection includes letters, general correspondence, logs, demonstration plan outlines, transportation logs and plans, meetings, worship services, photographs, newsletters, news reels, interviews and musical recordings from Black, Latine, Native American and Asian American Pacific Islander communities.

This module consists of a large variety of collections from the U.S. National Archives, a series of collections from the Chicago History Museum, as well as selected first-hand accounts on Indian Wars and westward migration. It focuses on American Indians in the first half of the 20th Century. The two major collections on the 20th Century in this module are Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and records from the Major Council Meetings of American Indian Tribes, and there are a number of collections on American Indians in the 19th Century, with a focus on the interaction among white settlers, the U.S. federal government, and Indian tribes.

Provides access to primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. The material demonstrates how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, and erotica, from the 16th century forward.This archive includes LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part I & II, Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, and International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture.

A digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture. Also called the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, from which the collections draws its content, it works to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1960.

The focus of the Federal Government Records module is on the political side of the freedom movement, the role of civil rights organizations in pushing for civil rights legislation, and the interaction between African Americans and the federal government in the 20th century. Major collections in this module include the FBI Files on Martin Luther King Jr.; Centers of the Southern Struggle, an exceptional collection of FBI Files covering five of the most pivotal arenas of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s: Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, Selma, and Memphis; and records from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, detailing the interaction between civil rights leaders and organizations and the highest levels of the federal government. This module also contains important documentation that shows the longer arc of the freedom struggle both before and after the highpoint of the post-World War II civil rights movement.

This collection explores the cultural and trading relationships that emerged between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Content includes manuscripts, rare printed sources, visual images, objects and maps.

Documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. The project brings coherence to a wide range of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, and letters.

Compiles primary documents and scholarly commentary into a collection covering the decades between the end of the Civil War and the election of Theodore Roosevelt. Includes a selection of key treatises that reflect the social and cultural ferment of the late nineteenth century, as well as songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. Video interviews with scholars and numerous topical critical documentary essays are also included. Covers themes such as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage.

Historical primary source of 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.

Provides access to the investigations made by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the massive immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century. The files cover Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states; Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930; and European immigration. There are also extensive files on the INS's regulation of prostitution and white slavery and on suppression of radical aliens.

Claims presented to Congress and/or brought before the Court of Claims or the Indian Claims Commission, as well as important Supreme Court decisions; and maps

Covers political, social, and cultural history of native peoples from the sixteenth century well into the twentieth century. Topics include trade and communication, Arctic exploration and tribes, the Iroquois Confederation, Canadian Catholic Indian missions, Indian removal, Indian wars and the frontier army, establishment of the Canadian Indian and Aboriginal Department, Indian delegations and Indian-federal relations, Canadian Indian treaty policy, government boarding and missionary schools and curricula, Dawes Severalty and the allotment system, dances and festivals, Alaskan Indian policies, Indian languages and linguistics, assimilation and the Indian New Deal, relocation, termination, and the Indian Claims Commission, water and fishing rights, civil rights, radicalism, poverty, and the American Indian movement.

Case documents and primary sources relating to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1912-1990.

This first module provides a comprehensive view of the NAACP's evolution, policies, and achievements from 1909-1970. Included are thousands of pages of minutes of directors' meetings, monthly reports from officers to the board of directors, proceedings of the annual business meetings, significant records of the association's annual conferences, plus voluminous special reports on a wide range of issues.

This collection provides complete FCO 7 and FCO 82 files for the entire period of Richard Nixon’s presidency. It inlcudes top-level Anglo-American discussions and briefing papers, and material on social conditions, domestic reforms, trade, culture and the environment. There is strong coverage of US policy decisions by the FCO and the British embassy in Washington; White House staff appointments and UN discussions; views on Europe; the deployment of F-111 aircraft on US airbases in the UK and Nixon’s battles over funding from Congress; visits to the US by Harold Wilson and Edward Heath; and the internal situation in the US and domestic reform.

Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to the United States and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Includes contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives.

This collection integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files from American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples, resulting in a representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them.

A collection of letters and diaries of 1,325 women who lived in North America before 1960.

This module, subtitled Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest, traces the development from 1950s austerity to the excess of the 1970s through a range of printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera and video footage including: pamphlets, letters, government files, and eye witness accounts covering key events of the period; the renowned Social Protest Collection from University of California, Berkeley; underground magazines including OZ and IT; as well as American fanzines and alternative press titles from Bowling Green State University; photographs depicting the people and events of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; ephemera and memorabilia – posters, pins and artifacts; a collection of carefully selected video footage that brings the sights and sounds of the period to life.

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 diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary from the 1960s. The database covers subjects in arts, music, and leisure, civil rights, counter-culture, law and government, mass media, new left and emerging neo-conservative movement, student activism, Vietnam War, women's movement, and 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 includes petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected over a four year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The petitions document the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level and with amazing candor. Slavery and the Law also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.

This resource explores domestic consumerism, life and leisure in America between 1850-1950. It includes illustrated primary source documents that highlight commercial tastes and consumer trends.

The collection provides a window into American social history (illustrates both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave) by bringing together the instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social norms across the twentieth century.

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.

Aggregates digital collections of primary source material from all 10 UC libraries, as well as other libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and cultural heritage organizations in California. The collections provide open access to photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.

Provides public access to detailed descriptions and finding aids of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.

Provides access to an extensive range of diaries, letters, and memoirs of persons somehow involved in the American Civil War. Includes previously unpublished manuscripts such as the letters of Amos Wood and his wife and the diary of Maryland Planter William Claytor.

Contains full-text articles from periodicals, including campaign newspapers, published from 1860 to 1865. The database also contains a sample selection of Union and Confederate letters from the larger database, American Civil War: Letters & Diaries. Document types include advertisement, article series, biographical sketch/obituary, cartoon, editorial, fiction, government announcement, humor / satirical commentary, illustration, map, news story/item, panoramic view, poetry, portrait, publisher's notice, and travel narrative.