18th Century
- American History, 1493-1945 This link opens in a new window
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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s archive of letters, diaries, maps pamphlets, printed books, newspapers, and ephemera sheds light on the political, economic, and social history of the United States up until the 20th century. The majority of the collection is unique manuscripts, with special emphasis on the revolutionary, early national, antebellum, and civil war eras. - American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
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Published between 1741 and 1900, these periodicals include special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children and women magazines, and many other historically significant periodicals. - Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
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Content pertaining to US Hispanic history, literature, and culture from colonial times to 1960. Includes historical articles, books, broadsides, newspapers and pamphlets in both Spanish and English. - British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
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Facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. - 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 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. - Early Experiences in Australasia: Primary Sources and Personal Narratives 1788-1901 This link opens in a new window
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Online portal of first-person accounts, including letters and diaries, narratives, and other primary source materials. - Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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Thousands of books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more, based on the English Short Title Catalogue. A comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with major works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Text Creation Partnership) This link opens in a new windowStandardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early printed books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
- Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage This link opens in a new window
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Features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library, an archive of almost every play submitted for license in Britain between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Also includes searchable database of The London Stage, 1660-1800. - Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685-1835 This link opens in a new window
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A collection of rare newspapers and journals printed between 1685 and 1835 in the UK and colonies, including India, the Caribbean, and Canada, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Includes an index to The Lady's Magazine, 1770-1818. - 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. - Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
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A cross-search platform of 21 databases available from the Gale Group, including historical newspapers (formerly NewsVault), The Making of Modern Law, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, among others. They can be searched as a group or as a selected subset. - Grand Tour This link opens in a new window
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Letters, diaries, journals, account books, guidebooks, travel writing, sketches, drawings, and maps from English travelers, circa 1550 to 1850, a period during which the tradition of a Grand Tour of the continent was a rite of passage for wealthy, intellectual young men.
- International Women’s Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new window
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Historical women’s periodicals in the lives of women, the role of women in society and, in particular, the development of the public lives of women as the push for women’s rights—woman suffrage, fair pay, better working conditions. - 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.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more.
- Literary Manuscripts from the Brotherton Library This link opens in a new window
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Digital images of over 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse, from the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. In addition to the manuscripts themselves, which allow users to see how the verses were produced, recorded and circulated in a way not possible in modern printed editions, this resource also includes interactive essays, biographies and a paleography section on 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
- North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 This link opens in a new window
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Collection of letters and diaries of women of varied age groups, ethnicities, and geographical regions, spanning more than 300 years. Includes both published and previously unpublished materials. - Shakespeare in Performance This link opens in a new window
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Annotated prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library, chronicling Shakespeare’s plays as performed in British, US, and international theaters between the 17th and 20th centuries. - Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new window
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Collection of digitized documents, maps, and essays concerning the Atlantic slave trade, primarily from British and North American libraries. Includes 18th and 19th-century court records from Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina. - 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. - 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. - 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.
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 windowFinding aids for primary source collections in all UC campuses and other contributing institutions, including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California.
- UCLA Library Special CollectionsCollections and access information for the UCLA Library Dept. of Special Collections, including papers and manuscripts on a range of topics.
- 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.
- National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)Gateway for searching OCLC WorldCat manuscripts.