* American Studies & Ethnicity 

Unlike secondary sources, which comment on their topics, primary sources are actual documents from the time period, people, and events of the time under consideration. Primary sources can be any number of the following types of materials:

• diaries and correspondence
• photographs and illustrations
• newspaper articles from the time period
• manuscripts
• pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemera

For more information on primary sources and how to search for them, please see our Primary Sources Research Guide (coming soon).

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century

Black Studies Center -- historical newspapers including the Chicago Defender, Daily Defender, Atlanta Daily World, Los Angeles Sentinel, New York Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh Courier

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, 1841-1902

Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876 and Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

Newsbank Retrospective -- Full-text newspaper resource for contemporary American history (1971-1991)

Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1800

Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County, 1819-1870

ProQuest Historical Newspapers -- includes the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Sentinel, and many more. Choose historical newspapers from the Databases menu.

San Francisco Chronicle, 1865-1922-- new addition to the ProQuest Historial Newspapers series; choose historical newspapers from the Database menu.

American Radicalism Collection -- 236 reels of primary sources, mainly from the 1960s and 70s, covering the following areas. Reel index and guide available at Leavey's Info Commons Desk (Call# HN90.R3A67953 2004), Doheny Reference Desk (red binder), and Grand Depository (available for paging in four separate parts), as well as online.
   Part I: Leftist Politics and Anti-War Movements
   Part II: The Religious and Radical Right
   Part III: Race, Gender, and the Struggle for Justice and Equal Rights
   Part IV: 20th-Century Social, Economic, and Environmental Movements

Rafu Shimpo -- Key California Japanese American newspaper. USC currently has partial coverage of 1936-1953, and is continuing to build its collection for these years.

Please see also resources under "Archives" and under "Web Primary Sources."

19th Century Masterfile The largest resource for pre-1920 studies, with over 6 million citations online. Search relevant printed index to material from 1800-1899

20th Century African American Poetry

Accessible Archives  USC currently holds two Accessible Archives collections:

• African American Newspapers: The 19th Century  This enormous collection of African-American newspapers contains a wealth of information about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. They also contain large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience
• Civil War 1860-1865: A Newspaper Perspective  This database contains the full text of major articles gleaned from over 2,500 issues of The New York Herald, The Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Enquirer, published between November 1, 1860 and April 15, 1865

American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900 (Archive of Americana) Broadsides printed between 1820 and 1900 and ephemera printed between 1760 and 1900

American Drama Plays by American dramatists that chronicle the history and culture of America

American History and Culture Online: Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 This collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's, including books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more

American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900 Includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Godey's Lady's Book to Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.Choose Interdisciplinary--APS Online from the Databases list

American Poetry, 1600-1900 Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century

ArtStor  Provides access to nearly a million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index Draws on indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles from over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers

Canadian Poetry Full text of over 12,000 poems by Canadian poets

Digital National Security Archive Full text US government documents related to international issues and crises

Early American Fiction 1789-1850 Provides both images and text for a well-defined and comprehensive collection of early American fiction

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 (Archive of Americana) Resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 (Archive of Americana) Provides a comprehensive set of American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century

Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This resource contains nearly 1500 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs, and accounts of early encounters

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) One of the largest resources of rare materials ever collected in microfilm or electronic formats, including holdings holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private and public libraries worldwide

Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945 Contains more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945; the broad scope of the collection allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others

Godey's Lady's Book  Key 19th-century publication geared to women

Harpweek Contains scanned images of Harper's Weekly, a prominent 19th-century American magazine. The database currently has all issues from 1857-1874, covering the Civil War and Reconstruction periods

History Resource Center U.S. Provides integrated access to over 4,000 historical (primary) documents, articles from more than 30 reference titles, and over 110 full-text journal covering themes, events, individuals and periods in U.S. history from pre-Colonial times to the present

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction This resource brings together more than 100,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latin authors working in the United States

Making of Modern Law Combines 19th- and 20th-century legal collections from America and Britain to form the world's most comprehensive full-text collection of Anglo-American legal treatises anywhere, containing more than 21,000 works from casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches and more

North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950 Includes 150,000 pages of diaries and letters from over 1300 women

Noticias en Espanol Full text Spanish-language news of interest to Spanish speakers in the US

Periodicals Archive Online  An archive of hundreds of digitised journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences, providing researchers with access to more than 200 years of scholarship, spread across a wide variety of subject areas.

Poole's Plus: The Digital Index of the Nineteenth Century American popular periodicals and government information from the 19th century

Special Collections  USC's Special Collections offer access to a wide range of primary source material in all formats, including resources of interest to researchers in American Studies and Ethnicity. Special Collections encompass rare books, manuscripts, and archival collections. In addition to housing a high proportion of rare and unique materials, Special Collections also contains many thematic special collections whose individual parts may not be 'valuable' or 'rare', but, as an aggregate, constitute a historically significant body of material. Search Special Collections 

Virginia Company Archives  This online project presents those Ferrar Papers which are in Magdalene College, Cambridge; transcripts of those documents that throw light on the Virginia Company of London; and the four volumes of The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C., 1906-35), edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 Brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life