Library Research Guides: AMERICAN STUDIES: Primary Sources

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Spotlight: AM Explorer

AM Explorer This link opens in a new window
Primary source collections primarily from American and British archives. Collection themes include empire and globalism, gender and sexuality, history, literature, politics, theatre, and war and conflict.
Dates: 15th Century-20th Century CE

Primary Sources

Primary sources are original, uninterpreted information, such as firsthand accounts of events in letters, diaries, interviews, or historical news reportage.

Gerritsen Collection This link opens in a new window
Premier international collection of digitized material (1543-1988) on the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights.
Gilded Age and Progressive Era This link opens in a new window
A wide variety of primary sources focused on America's transformative age of industrialization, urbanization, expanding wealth, extreme inequality, and social change, with an emphasis on 1870-1920. Themes include art and literature, charity and philanthropy, protests and strikes, roles of women, and more.
Dates: 1800-1976 CE
HistoryMakers Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
A growing collection of nearly 3,000 oral history video interviews with both well-known and unsung African Americans, highlighting the history, lives, careers, and accomplishments of African Americans across a wide variety of fields.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Searchable database of 150,000 pages of letters and diaries, drawn from journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings.
Twentieth Century Advice Literature This link opens in a new window
A fulltext collection of advice manuals covering all aspects of social, political, cultural and professional life in the United States.
Vogue Archive This link opens in a new window
The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s reform activities

North American Slave Narratives
UNC Library
American Memory
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Digitized collections from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University
Some of the digitized collections include: Advertising in the U.S. 1850-1920, Historic American Sheet Music & Civil War Women.
Making of America
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
Women Working,1800-1930
Part of the Open Collections Program at Harvard University Library, this is a great place to look for primary sources of women working in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. The digitized collection includes: books, pamphlets, images and some manuscripts. It is easy to browse or search the collection.
Ad*Access
Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
Ad Views
Thousands of television commercials created or collected by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency, dated 1950s - 1980s.

Subject Guide

Karen Storz

she, her, hers

Email Me

Contact:

781-283-3372
kstorz@wellesley.edu

Research & Instruction Librarian
Office: Clapp Library 218B

Subjects: Africana Studies, American Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Cultures, East Asian Studies, English, German & German Cultural Studies, Italian Studies, Latin American Studies, Portuguese, Russian & Russian Area Studies, Spanish