Follow citations
Secondary and background sources may provide a helpful window into the primary sources that historians typically rely on. The citations may lead to published collections in books (in which case you can look the book up in OBIS), to archival collections (e.g. the link in the New York Times article you read for today to the Paul Revere letter in the Massachusetts Historical Society), to newspapers, to paintings, ect. If you're not sure how to find the item that was cited, ask a librarian for help!
Search Digital Primary Source Collections
Tip: Search for the name of your historical figure using a phrase search in quotation marks, e.g. "Deborah Sampson."
- America's Historical Imprints This link opens in a new window
Full-text, searchable scans of source material of all types from the 17th and 18th centuries; an important resource for primary information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America.
- America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1876) This link opens in a new windowCover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as full text searchable scanned page images.
- AM-Explorer This link opens in a new window
Access millions of pages of primary source collections spanning content from the 15th-21st centuries.
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new windowHathiTrust is a repository of digital content from 50 research libraries, including electronic versions of nearly 8 million books at the time of writing.
