History: Primary Source Databases

Primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world.

Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars, researchers, and students at the college and university level. A multi-disciplinary resource, collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Particular strengths include U.S. foreign policy; U.S. civil rights; global affairs and colonial studies; and modern history. Collections are chosen based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.

ProQuest History Vault unlocks the wealth of key archival materials with a single search. Researchers can access digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.

Black Studies in Video is an award-winning black studies portfolio that brings together seminal documentaries, powerful interviews, and previously unavailable archival footage surveying the black experience. The collection contains 500 hours of film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.

Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.

Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of black feminism.

Border and Migration Studies Online provides historical context and resources, representing both personal and institutional perspectives, for the growing fields of border(land) studies and migration studies, as well as history, law, politics, diplomacy, area and global studies, anthropology, medicine, the arts, and more.

More than a million and a half Africans, along with many Indians and South Asians, were brought to the Caribbean between the 15th and 19th centuries. Today, their descendants are active in literature and the arts, producing literature with strong and direct ties to traditional African expressions. This literary connection, combined with the tales of survival, exile, resistance, endurance, and emigration to other parts of the Americas, makes for a body of work that is essential for the study of the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora.

Ebony is one of the key Afro-American magazines of the 20th century, covering 20th and 21st-Century current events, art, design, politics and culture, literature, advertising, and more. Their editorial philosophy is to “showcase the best and brightest as well as highlighting the disparities in Black life in the United States and worldwide”. The Ebony Magazine Archive contains indexing, abstracting and full text for the complete archive (including Covers and Advertisements) beginning in November 1945 to June 2014.

Weekly magazine-format newspaper owned by the Economist Group and edited at offices in London.

The Economist Historical Archive and serve as key witnesses to the economic and political history of the last 170 years. They provide a unique, unbiased analysis of major world events, facilitate the comparison of economic trends across continents and centuries, and offer an ideal historical resource for cutting-edge ideas in an easily digestible form.

ProQuest History Vault unlocks the wealth of key archival materials with a single search. Researchers can access digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.

Indigenous Peoples of North America provides users with a robust, diverse, informative source that will enhance research and increase understanding of the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. Researchers will explore the impact of invasion and colonization on Indigenous Peoples in North America, and the intersection of Indigenous and European histories and systems of knowledge through the use of manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, photographs, motion pictures, images of artwork, and more.

JET Magazine Archive covers the civil rights movement, politics, education, and other social topics with an African American focus.

America Latina en Video / América Latina em Vídeo / Latin America in Video gives instructors, students, and researchers of Latin American studies, Spanish, and Portuguese a comprehensive and unique perspective on the region. The first of its kind, the collection’s materials are presented in their original language with abstracts and indexing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

What we call "Latin American culture" is a composite of the rich and diverse output of 20 sovereign countries. This collection comprises 100,000 pages of literary works, along with memoirs and essays, in their original language, by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century to the present. It brings together all the voices of Latin American women and presents a tool for understanding the diversity and development of Latin America through a feminine perspective.

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction includes more than 100,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, novels, and more than 450 plays. Nearly all of the content is in copyright, and most of the other items are long out of print or have never before been published. Besides serving as a rich resource for literature scholars, the collection also supports the study of American history, ethnic diversity, immigrations issues, and political history

North American Indian Drama contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others.

North American Indian Thought and Culture brings together more than 100,000 pages, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find. The project integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files for the first time. The result is a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them.

Liberal democracies of North America, Europe, and Australasia throughout the twentieth century have experienced a variety of forms of extremism and radicalism that have shaped mainstream political thinking as well as cultural norms. To comprehend modern governmental and societal systems researchers must understand the environment that created them, their origins, and their adversaries. In the Political Extremism and Radicalism series Gale provides insight on unorthodox (by contemporary standards), fringe groups from both the right and left of the political spectrum through rare, hard to access primary sources.

Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890-1970 documents the rise of the twentieth-century public health system in the United States through correspondence, reports, pamphlets, ephemera, and more. For scholars in the fields of American history, American studies, history of science and medicine, public health studies, sociology, political science, psychology, and economics, it documents through primary sources that record the evolution and impact of public health legislation, policies, and campaigns at the local, national, and federal levels, opening for researchers a new window on the roles played by key organizations and individuals to advance public health practices and outcomes.

Current refugee crises figure prominently in world media. However, the history of refugee crises throughout the twentieth century remains largely untold through primary sources. With Refugees, Relief and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II, Gale chronicles the plight of refugees and displaced persons across Europe, North Africa, and Asia from 1935 to 1950, bringing together over 590,000 pages of pamphlets, ephemera, government documents, relief organization publications, and refugee reports that recount the causes, effects and responses to refugee crises before, during and shortly after World War II.

Throughout history, revolution and protest movements have demanded the world’s attention and driven political and social change. To understand the impact and aftermath of these events, it is imperative to shine a historical lens on the ideologies, origins, goals and stakeholders that drove them. This easily searchable collection examines the most studied and important events and themes related to revolution and protest from the 18th century through the 21st century.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries.

This collection brings together legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.

Founded in 1902 as a supplement to The Times (London), for more than 100 years the Times Literary Supplement has forged a reputation for fine writing, literary discoveries and insightful debate. Many of the world’s most notable writers, critics and thinkers have contributed to the TLS, making it a rich resource for following the developments of debate, opinion and perspective.

U.S. Declassified Documents Online provides immediate access to a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection brings together the most sensitive documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single, easily searchable database.

Women’s Studies Archive: Women’s Issues and Identities focuses on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

World Scholar: Latin America & the Caribbean serves the needs of students and researchers by bringing together in a single place a rich collection of primary source documents about Latin America and the Caribbean; academic journals and news feeds covering the region; reference articles and commentary; maps and statistics; audio and video; and more.