18th 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
This link opens in a new window
A collection of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities. - Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Archives Unbound includes primary source content with broad topic clusters including: African American studies; American Indian studies; Asian studies; British history; Holocaust studies; LGBT studies; Latin American and Caribbean studies; Middle East studies; political science; religious studies; and women’s studies. - Age of Exploration This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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. - American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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. - Colonial State Papers This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
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.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineBrings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
- Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
Contains 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
- This link opens in a new window
Full text books and ephemera for significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. - Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685-1835 This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
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. - Food and Drink in History This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
From feast to famine, explore five centuries of primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production. - Frontier life: Borderlands, Settlements, and Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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.
- Human Rights Documentation InitiativeFrom the U. of Texas, this site makes available archived web resources related to human rights organizations and issues.
- International Women’s Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues (Archives Unbound) This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
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. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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. - Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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.
- Women Writers Online This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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
- This link opens in a new window
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 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.
- National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)Gateway for searching OCLC WorldCat manuscripts.