Library Subscribed Collections
This is a very small selection of library-subscribed databases that may be helpful. Please ask a librarian for specific recommendations based on your topic, type of material needed, and the time period.
You may also want to browse the full American History research guide.
Historical Newspapers
- 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.
- New York Times (1851 - 2018) This link opens in a new window
Search by keywords or browse images of full pages by date.
- African American Newspapers (1827-1998): Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Provides online access to hundreds of historical U.S. newspapers chronicling the African American experience. Series 1 includes titles from the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. Dates of Coverage: 1827-1998
- Leftists Newspapers and Periodicals (1845 - 2015) This link opens in a new windowA collection of English-language publications spanning beyond the 20th century (1845-2015) covering Communist, Socialist and Marxist thought, theory and practice. Issues covered include workers’ rights, organized labor, labor strikes, Nazi atrocities, McCarthyism’s rise after WWII, Civil Rights, and modern-day class struggles. Coverage: 1845 - 2015.
TIP: When searching newspapers, you're dealing with a lot of text. Some search techniques like phrase searching (putting names, places, or specific phrases) into quotation marks (e.g., "Clean Water Act") will result in more relevant results.
Proximity searching may vary by database but allows you to look for two words near each other, e.g., "water pollution" NEAR3 epa. This looks for the phrase within three words of EPA.
Dates matter. Know when things would likely have appeared in a newspaper or magazine. Narrow your dates once you see your initial result set.
American Magazines
- Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982) This link opens in a new window
Indexing of articles in historical American popular magazines of all types.
- 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.
Primary Source Digital Collections
- AM-Explorer This link opens in a new window
Access millions of pages of primary source collections spanning content from the 15th-21st centuries.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America (OhioLINK Access) This link opens in a new window
Digital archive of diverse source material pertaining to the histories of Indigenous peoples and their intersections with European peoples in North America. Sources include manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, photographs, motion pictures, images of artwork, and more. Part of Gale Primary Sources.
- 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).
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a repository of digital content from 50 research libraries, including electronic versions of nearly 8 million books at the time of writing.
Note: As of May 2023, Oberlin is a HathiTrust member. Oberlin students, faculty, and staff can access member features by clicking on the “LOG IN” button, choosing “Oberlin College and Conservatory”, and using their ObieID to authenticate.
Congressional Documents
- ProQuest Congressional Publications This link opens in a new windowInformation about and by U.S. Congress, including hearings, reports, documents, legislative histories, and the Congressional Record.
Public Digital Collections
American Newspapers
- Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers This link opens in a new window
A collection of freely accessible historical American newspapers from all regions of the United States, developed by the Library of Congress. Dates of coverage: 1836-1922
Official Records
- DocsTeachHosted by the National Archives and Records Administration, this sprawling collection of photographs and written material covers all periods of U.S. history. Searching by historical period can be difficult on this site, and the environmental history content can be limited, but exploring with some key search terms can reveal some valuable documents.
- EPA HistoryA resource curated by the Environmental Protection Agency. This online database does not include all documents related to the EPA’s history, but it does provide some useful (and otherwise difficult-to-find) sources like press releases, clippings, interviews, and images.
- National Agriculture LibraryA large digital database covering the administrative history and extensive publications of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Collections include USDA Publications (more than 23,000 entries), Animal Welfare Act History, Smokey Bear Digital Collection, and the USDA Chestnut Tree Research Records.
- National Park Service History Electronic Library and ArchiveA large database of digital resources related to the National Park Service and its many administrative zones. This a great starting place for a research project related to national parks, national monuments, or the National Park Service more broadly.
Personal Papers
- Aldo Leopold ArchivesAn expansive collection of writings, drawings, and photographs of forester and pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold made available by the University of Wisconsin.
- John Muir PapersThe digitized writings (correspondence, journals, notebooks) of renowned American naturalist John Muir made available by the University of the Pacific.
- Rachel Carson PapersA select collection of digitized writings and photographs of the science writer Rachel Carson made available by Chatham University.
Photographic Collections
- American Lumberman Photographs of the Southern Pine Lumber CompanyA collection of photographs collected by the Southern Pine Lumber Company and published in the American Lumberman magazine between 1903 and 1907.
- DOCUAMERICAA digitized collection of photographs taken by the Environmental Protection Agency in the mid-1970s in order to document subjects of environmental concern.
- Forest History Society Photographic CollectionA database containing thousands of images, mostly from the 1920s to 1960s, covering the history of forestry and adjacent subjects in the United States.
Specialized Records
See your course syllabus for specific recommendations for specialized collections, such as the Love Canal Collection (University of Buffalo) or the Three Mile Island Recovery and Decontamination Collection (Penn State University).
For the two large sites below, links to specific collections are in your syllabus.
Digital Public Library of America: This website, designed for teachers, contains sets of primary sources for a number of subjects in American history. Each collection is rather small, and none are close to comprehensive, but the quality of each is phenomenal. Relevant Primary Source Sets include Environmental Preservation in the Progressive Era; Boomtimes Again: Twentieth-Century Mining in the Mojave Desert; When Miners Strike: West Virginia Coal Mining and Labor History; The Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age; Postwar Rise of Suburbs; and The United Farm Workers and the Delano Grape Strike. The full website also includes a searchable database with other primary source materials.
Library of Congress Digital Collections: These curated collections of documents are broken down by a variety of themes. Some collections of interest include Mapping the National Parks; Sanborn Maps; Frederick Law Olmsted Papers; Benjamin Harrison Papers; Garden and Forest; Theodore Roosevelt Papers; William H. Taft Papers; Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives; Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs; Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945 to 1982; and the Climate Change Web Archive.