Digital resources

Black Self-Publishing is an ongoing collaborative research project based on a working list of books that are known to have been or may have been self-published by people of African descent who resided in North America and either were born before 1851 or first published before 1877. 

Digital library of  books, diaries, newspapers, and poems by 18th and 19th century American children. Research tools and recordings of past programs to explore children's lives more deeply. Teachers will find a variety of guides and lesson plans to help bring the past to life for their students.

African American Newspapers provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers.

African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956 complements and expands on African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998. The more than 75 newspapers in Series 2, are written for or by African Americans.

Covers the history of Africa and its diverse people over nearly 400 years. More than 1,300 books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.

African Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1800-1925, offers coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped the continent during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

One of the world's preeminent collections for African-American studies. Books, pamphlets, and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints. Spans nearly 400 years, from the early 16th to the early 20th century.

America's Historical Imprints provides access to a number of Readex's historical collections. America's Historical Imprints includes the following Readex collections under one umbrella, making it possible to search these collections simultaneously.

Millions of fully text-searchable issues. Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820  provided the foundation for the original filming project, the core of which is formed by the AAS collection of colonial and early national period newspapers.

Works by authors of African or African-American descent. A fascinating look at the creative efforts of black authors over three centuries. Compiled by the curators of the acclaimed Afro-Americana Imprints collection.

More than 150 newspapers, including major publications from every region of the U.S.

More than 8,000 works about crime, criminal law, and the criminal justice system 1664-1819, featuring text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

This digital series has been designed for the use of K-12 educators.

Offered via a partnership with the New York Historical Society.

More than 7,000 works about early American Science and Technology 1663-1819, featuring text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

Nearly every printed work, including sermons on politics, society, religion, and family life. More than 8,000 sermons, 1652-1819, featuring text exploration tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.

More than 3,500 printed works, all digitized in full color Includes books, pamphlets, graphic materials, and ephemera.

Over 2,000 works covering every aspect of the American theater, with text-analysis tools and suggested search paths for browsing and discovery.

A retrospective republication of approximately 6280 numbered publications, largely Congressional but also containing Executive Department materials, the American State Paper volumes, issued from 1832-1861, were published in ten classes in a total of 38 folio volumes.

The newspapers in American Underworld: The Flash Press covered the seamier aspects of urban life: crime, scandal, brothels and blackmail, combined with reviews of the bawdiest theatrical performances on offer and reports on sporting events such as cock-fighting, boxing and horse racing. The more than sixty papers, dating 1826-1876, were collected by AAS and are among the rarest of all American newspapers.
 

Works by authors of African or African-American descent. 

The experience and impact of African Americans as recorded by the news media, 1704 to today.

Covers the diverse history of Caribbean islands over nearly 400 years. Includes books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera.

Includes more than 66 newspaper titles from 22 islands published in the 18th and 19th centuries. Created in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society

Rich with illustrations; includes song sheets, poems, envelopes and more. Scarce documents shed new light on the war... and beyond. Illuminates the struggles of the soldiers and the families they left behind.

Containing nearly every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America from 1639 to 1800, Evans Digital Edition consists of more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images. Based on Charles Evans' comprehensive American Bibliography and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, the collection was first published by Readex in cooperation with AAS as a microform set. Evans Digital Edition will include every item previously produced on microform plus more than 1,200 additional works located, cataloged and digitized since completion of the earlier effort.

Contains newspaper titles from 14 states between 1808-1980.

Readex AllSearch allows users to search seamlessly across all Readex digital collections and document types, including historical imprints, newspapers, and government documents. Broad searches of this kind are often called “cross-searches.” They help users make new and unexpected discoveries because the content is not limited to just one format (for example, just newspapers).

Journals of the executive proceedings of the United States Senate 1789 to 1980, covering the first Congress through the 96th Congress.

Search or browse the reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Representing the largest fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from around the globe, the World Newspaper Archive will advance research and offer opportunities for fresh insight across wide-ranging academic disciplines. 

An amateur journal is a periodical created to afford pleasure to its readers as well as to its editor and its publisher. The rage to publish, rather than profit, is the motive that most often induces people to become amateur journalists; and, throughout the history of the genre, most but not all amateur journalists have been juveniles. The Amateur Newspaper collection at the American Antiquarian Society consists of about 50,000 issues. There are more than 5,500 titles, from every state except Alaska and Hawaii, thus making the Society’s holdings among the largest and most extensive in the United States.

American Fiction, 1774-1920, demonstrates the utility of having more than 18,000 works of fiction in one place, in a consistent format. Titles up until 1900 are sourced from Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction: A Contribution Towards a Bibliography. Titles after 1900 are sourced from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction and the Geoffrey D. Smith bibliography.

Gale’s American Historical Periodicals, Series 6 and 7 provides all newly digitized material, bringing the previously published Series 1-5 more firmly into the 20th century, with titles running up to 1923. Series 6 and series 7 combine to contain over 500 titles, offering diverse primary source material for studying the thought, culture and life of the United States through contemporary eyes. These series include unusual and short-lived magazines as well as better-known titles with long runs. Topics encompass a broad spectrum including agriculture, anthropology, art, archaeology, education, family life, fashion, industrialization, literature, medicine, music, photography, politics, religion, science, sport, and temperance.

Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university level. Collections in Archives Unbound cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history

Children's Literature and Childhood provides a wide range of primary sources related to the experience of childhood in the long nineteenth century. Included in the archive are books and periodicals for children, primers and other material related to education, pamphlets produced by child welfare groups, documents and photos related to children and crime, newspapers produced by youths, and much more.

Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 presents a broad history of crime in the long 19th century derived from French, German, Spanish, Australian, British and U.S. sources. The collection includes trial transcripts, court proceedings, police and forensic documents, photographs, true crime literature and detective novels, and newspaper accounts.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) and more than 32 million pages, making ECCO the premier and irreplaceable resource for eighteenth-century research. Users of ECCO Part I and Part II can full-text search the collection via an intuitive user interface.

Browse all Gale research products available at the American Antiquarian Society reading room.

Access the following nine Gale databases in one interface.

• American Amateur Newspapers
• American Fiction
• American Historical Periodicals
• Archives Unbound
• Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture 1790-1920
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online
• Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
• Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

The Maps and Travel Literature archive includes a myriad of maps representing the long nineteenth century.

Selections have been culled from the vast map repositories of the British Library and the National Archives at Kew. In addition to these large map collections, maps representing the Americas, and in particular America's westward expansion, have been provided by the American Antiquarian Society. Maps depicting Canada and the polar regions have been generously provided by the University of Alberta.

With digital facsimile images of both full pages and clipped articles for hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers and advanced searching capabilities, researchers will be able to research history in ways previously unavailable. For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.

Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926 is drawn from Joseph Sabin's famed nineteenth century bibliography Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Book relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time. This digital collection offers a perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late fifteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Developed under the guidance of a board of scholars, it includes 3.0 million cross-searchable pages: 10763 books, 131 serials, 32 manuscript collections, 377 supreme court records and briefs and 194 reference articles from Macmillan, Charles Scribner's Sons and Gale encyclopedias.

Women's Studies Archive connects archival collections concerning women's history from across the globe and from a wide range of sources. Focusing on the evolution of feminism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archive provides materials on women's political activism, such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism, and on women's voices, from female-authored literature to women's periodicals.

Visual, manuscript and printed materials gathered to help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.

The stories of individuals and families who buillt new lives in North America and Australasia between 1800 and 1980. Unique primary source diaries, correspondence, photographs, oral histories and journals narrate the vivid realities of ocean travel and life in adopted homelands. Organisational correspondence, government proceedings, shipping company papers and records of advocacy groups provide key context to migrants’ everyday struggles.

Taught by Literature is a collaborative project honoring Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s lifelong commitment to education.  Taught by Literature celebrates Dunbar-Nelson’s legacy by recentering Black women writers, beginning with Dunbar-Nelson herself and extending to other Black women from the Harlem Renaissance and earlier. 

A daily image of an advertisement published in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago that day.  Brief commentary accompanies each advertisement.

Ancestry provides access to census, military, birth, marriage and death records.