Published Primary Sources
You may also find formally published archival sources available in published, edited collections or sourcebooks/document collections.
For example, some authors will have published correspondence selected from archives.
Other relevant terms that may appear in subjects are: biographies, diaries, documents, sources, etc.
Selected Primary Source Databases
Databases
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AM-Explorer This link opens in a new windowCollections include Early Modern England; Eighteenth Century Drama; Eighteenth Century Journals; Literary Print Culture; Welcome to Romanticism: Life, Literature, and Landscape; Shakespeare in Performance; Shakespeare's Globe Archive.
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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.
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Early English Books Online This link opens in a new windowSearchable scans of nearly all existing English books up to the year 1700; this collection now contains over 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Dates of Coverage: 1473-1700
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Eight Centuries This link opens in a new windowA vast index to British and American periodicals, newspapers, books, and other sources documenting the 19th century. Dates of Coverage: 1300-1930
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Eighteenth Century Collections Online (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
Scans of over 200,000 volumes published in English (mainly in the UK) in the 18th century, based on the English Short Title Catalogue. Dates of Coverage: 1701 to 1800. Part of Gale Primary Sources.
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English Short Title Catalogue This link opens in a new windowEnglish Short Title Catalogue is drawn from the extensive collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries. The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 460,000 items published mainly in the British Isles and North America between 1473 and 1800. Items listed are mainly, but not exclusively, in English. Dates of Coverage: 1473-1800
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Gale Primary Sources (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
Topically focused collections of historical documents, including the American Civil Liberties Union Papers (1912-1990), Archives Unbound, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, British Library Newspapers, The Economist Historical Archive (1843-2014), 18th Century Collections Online, Indigenous Peoples: North America, 19th Century Collections Online, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, Political Radicalism & Extremism in the 20th Century, Sabin Americana (1500-1926), and The London Times Digital Archive (1785-1985).
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Women Writers Online This link opens in a new windowA full-text collection of early womens' writing in English, published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on rare texts; wide range of topic and genres included.
Freely Available Online
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American Verse ProjectA collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.
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Project GutenbergA volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that an be used on almost any computer.
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Victorian Women Writer's ProjectAn Indiana University project primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
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Wright American FictionAttempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875. It includes works by well known writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with a great many forgotten authors, whose works may have been very popular in their own time.
Historical Newspapers
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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.
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British Library Newspapers (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
National and regional English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh. Stengths include coverage include political and social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule, and penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes. Dates of Coverage: 1800s. Part of Gale Primary Sources.
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Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
Full text searchable articles representing most US states. Includes searchable page scans of the originals. Part of Gale Primary Sources. Dates of Coverage: 1800-1899
Historical Magazines
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American Periodicals (1740-1940) This link opens in a new windowScanned periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and more.
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Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982) This link opens in a new window
Indexing of articles in historical American popular magazines of all types.
Audio
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Naxos Spoken Word Library This link opens in a new windowContains the world's greatest literature - many classic novels, plays and poetry, from medieval times to the twenty-first century under various categories, such as Children's Classics, Classic Fiction, Shakespeare's Plays. New titles are added every month.
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LIbriVoxLibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.