17th Century Women and Gender Studies Sources
The following resources are major tools for finding digitized texts related to the history of women and gender.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
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A collection of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineBrings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- Age of Exploration This link opens in a new window
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Includes five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration. Collection also includes images, video, and audio. - Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century This link opens in a new window
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Over 1.3 million pages of archival material (manuscripts, monographs, newspapers and periodicals) concerning Latin America and the Caribbean, including major collections about Latin American independence, Brazilian popular groups, Diplomatic activities in Cuba and more. Under this database's former name, Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean included some periodicals and reference books that have been moved to Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography and Gale eBooks. - Colonial State Papers This link opens in a new window
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Thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the 16th and 18th centuries. - Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
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Contains primary source material from British and European archives, and includes four thematic areas: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and the Family, Consumption and Leisure, Education and Sensibility, and The Body.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
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Citations from early English texts from 1475 to 1700, presented as digital images. Includes works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources. - Early English Books Online — Text Creation Partnership This link opens in a new windowSearchable SGML/XML text editions of image files contained in Early English Books Online.
- Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This link opens in a new window
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Contains full text letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters, centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico. - Empire Online This link opens in a new window
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Primary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion & Empire; and Race, Class & Colonialism, 1783-1969. - Frontier life: Borderlands, Settlements, and Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
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Primary sources from multiple archives that capture the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of people living at the edges of the Anglophone world from 1650-1920. Includes the various colonial frontiers of North America, as well as the settlers of Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. - Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954 This link opens in a new window
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Contains digitized manuscript materials covering the history of Jewish communities in America through the mid-20th century. Includes letters, scrapbooks, autobiographies, notebooks and more. - Latin American Women Writers This link opens in a new window
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A collection of full text literature and non-fiction by Latin American women from the 17th century colonial period to the present. Includes prose, poetry, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and revolutionaries, who address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region. - Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 This link opens in a new window
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Contains over 230 digitized manuscripts from the Perdita Project, which aims to rediscover lost manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Includes physical descriptions along with bibliographic information and also provides contextual essays from academics in the field.
- Project Diana: An Online Human Rights ArchiveAn international archive of human rights legal documentation, provided by Yale Law School.
- Salem Witch Trials Documentary ProjectContains court records, diaries, and other primary sources, in facsimile and transcribed versions.
- Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968 This link opens in a new window
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Contains collections from archives across the UK and Ireland for the study of the lives and experiences of lesser-known women in their own words. Spanning a date range of 1600-1968, the resource offers avenues to explore the differing conditions in which women have lived in the UK and Ireland during the last four centuries, from experiences of wartime, witch trials, suffrage and feminist movements, to the everyday lives lived.
- Women Writers Online This link opens in a new window
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A full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible and women's literate culture in the early modern period.
Manuscripts and Ephemera: Finding Aids and Indexes
Many historical materials are not available online, and housed only in archives or in harder to find publications. These discovery tools can help identify their holdings and locations.
- Online Archive of California (OAC) This link opens in a new windowCollection of online finding aids for special collections materials across California.
- UCLA Library Special CollectionsUCLA Library Special Collections is comprised of Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections; the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History of Science and Medicine Special Collections; the Performing Arts Special Collections; the University Archives; and the Center for Oral History Research. Collections include a wide variety of literary rare books, as well as manuscripts and archival collections relating to specific individuals and organizations.
- ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new windowSearches finding aids for historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.