Recommended Databases for Primary Sources
 |
Ancient and Medieval History Online provides thorough coverage of world history from prehistory through the 1500s, with special Topic Centers on key civilizations and regions, including the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome; ancient and medieval Africa, Asia, and the Americas; and medieval Europe and the Islamic World. |
 |
More than 650,000 biographical entries covering international figures from all time periods and areas of study. It offers authoritative reference content alongside, videos, audio selections, images, primary sources, and magazine and journal articles from hundreds of major periodicals and newspapers. |
 |
Provides balanced coverage of events in world history with relevant articles updated daily - both current thinking and established scholarly work. |
 |
U.S. History In Context is an engaging online experience for those seeking contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in U.S. History. Content includes reference works, millions of news and periodical articles, and more than 5,000 rare and vital primary source documents that range from slave journals to presidential papers. |
Websites
| Perseus Digital Library: A collection of 500 primary and secondary sources on ancient Greece and Rome | Penn Museum: Digital Penn Museum, the one stop portal for the vast range of digital content offered by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology! |
| Yale Peabody Museum: explore more than five million specimens and objects currently cataloged in our collections. In a Basic Search you can enter one or more keywords and use quotes to indicate exact terms. You can also narrow results by subject matter | Yale Digital Content: Search nearly 2 million items and half a million images from Yale's Digital Content. |
| Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library:
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has digitized approximately one million images of collection material, with new images added regularly. Particular strengths of the Beinecke Library’s digitized collection materials include medieval manuscripts, portions of the James Weldon Johnson Collections, and papyri, though virtually all aspects of the collections are represented to some degree in the digital library. |
ARTSTOR: European History Collection: Browse primary documents from European history, 1450 CE to Present Day, organized by time period and concept. |
| Docs Teach: Browse by era | Avalon Project: Documents on law, history and diplomacy from ancient times to 21st Century. Curated from Yale University. |
| Cambridge Digital Library: Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. Cambridge University Library has built a vast collection over the past six centuries, with an extraordinary accumulation of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. | World Digital Library: Explore this online resource by topic, place, time period, or type of item. Search 19,147 items about 193 countries between 8000 BCE and 2000. Narrow results using the filter on the left side. |
| Digital Bodleian: Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University; visitors can either search all collections at once, or use filters to limit searches to specific groups of materials. | British History Online: A digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. We aim to support the learning, teaching and research of our users from around the world. |
| Old Maps Online: Gateway for historical maps in libraries around the world, currently indexes more than half a million of ancient, antique, vintage and old historic maps from prominent archives and libraries, including the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. | Rome Reborn: A digital model of Rome’s development from its earliest settlement until its decline (c. 552 C.E.). Rome Reborn has gathered myriad archeological data from excavations, inscriptions, and literary sources, as well as quantitative data about building types throughout the fourteen regions of the city. All of this data has been collected in order to reconstruct the city as accurately as possible through 3D images and modeling. |
Some credit to: West Sound Academy: World IB School guide at http://libguides.westsoundacademy.org/primary_sources/world_history
ARTSTOR: Browse images, maps, artwork, and other primary source documents from U.S. History from 1491 to present day, organized by time period and key historical concepts.
Sam Houston State University: U.S. History Primary Sources
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Primary Sources
Library of Congress: Primary Source Sets
Digital Public Library of America: Discover 33,513,624 images, texts, videos and sounds from the US
Antislavery Collection, 1725-1911 : The UMass Amherst Antislavery Collection contains several hundred printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record (UVa): The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. From UNC-Chapel Hill: "We would like to emphasize that little effort is made to interpret the images and establish the historical authenticity or accuracy of what they display."