United States - Primary Sources - History - LibGuides at Walsh University

Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine
Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes. It revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who enter the site's URL into a search box. The intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. The overall vision of the machine's creators is to archive the entire Internet.

The Wayback Machine is a great place to look if a website has changed and you need something on the older version.

Where Can I Find Primary Sources?

The list below is just a starting point! There are many places to find primary sources depending on your research topic and needs. Contact LuAnn Boris lboris@walsh.edu for assistance.

Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) search engine provides access to millions of texts, images, audio files, video files, and other resources digitized by libraries, archives, museums, and other organizations in the United States. The DPLA is a incredible resource of historical primary source material.
Documenting the South
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes twelve thematic collections of b
Hanover Historical Texts Collection
The principal aim of this website is to make primary texts readily available to students and faculty for use in history and humanities courses. Geographic coverage is worldwide and historical periods range from ancient to modern.

HarpWeek *OnCampus Access ONLY* This link opens in a new window
HarpWeek is the electronic version of Harper's Weekly from the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, 1857-1871. HarpWeek includes all the pages of Harper's Weekly as scanned images, together with a series of indexes. Harper's Weekly was a leading national weekly during the second half of the nineteenth-century, providing information and insights on political, military and social issues and events prior to and during the Civil War. HarpWeek includes news, editorials, stories, illustrations, book reviews, serialized novels, advertising and maps from the weekly. It also includes biographical information about period leaders.
Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Historical Statistics of the United States is the standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. HSUS provides data on social, behavioral, humanistic, and natural sciences including history, economics, government, finance, sociology, demography, education, law, natural resources, climate, religion, international migration, and trade - quantitative facts of American History. The fully searchable and downloadable electronic edition permits users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting their own particular areas of interest.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes.

Many primary sources can be found here.
The Library of Congress
The Library of Congress ("LOC") is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The LOC has many digitized collections that include documents, photographs, newspapers, and more.
Making of America
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
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The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents, which comprise the National Archives.
Wright Brothers Digital Photographs
Wright Brothers Digital Photographs is a collection of photographs documenting the invention of the airplane, the lives of the Wright Family, and the Wrights' flying exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
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The collection provides thorough coverage of the Wrights' early inventive period documenting their early gliders and flight testing in both North Carolina and Ohio. Much of it should show that Orville and Wilbur Wright were technically excellent photographers who painstakingly documented their process of invention. The content posted to date also provides a valuable record of their home life, camp life, and the flora and fauna of the Outer Banks 100 year ago.
Americas Archive
The Americas collection strives to represent the full range and complexity of the Americas history by bringing together key documents that examines political and cultural relationships from a hemispheric perspective. Its goal is to represent the full range and complexity of a multilingual “Americas” that includes Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America from the beginning of colonization to the present.
The American Presidency Project
The American Presidency Project, non-profit and non-partisan, is the source of presidential documents on the internet. They are hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara.