Research Guides: HIST 2600: Capitalism and Slavery: Primary Sources

How-To Video: Searching Historical Newspapers

Searching for Primary Sources
This learning module will help you understand how to develop a list of keywords and identify and search within appropriate databases to find primary sources.

Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary means written at or near the time of the historical event.

Secondary means written many years later, probably by a scholar researching the historical event.

Edited Collections

You can find some primary sources in books. Below is a list of relevant subject headings. When searching for these in the catalog, try adding "sources", "documents", "correspondence" or "letters" to your search.

North Carolina -- History -- Sources.

Moravians -- North Carolina -- History -- Sources.

North Carolina -- Church history -- Sources.

North Carolina -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Sources.

Government Documents

ProQuest Congressional Hearings This link opens in a new window
Access congressional publications dealing with the wide variety of topics addressed by Congress.
U.S. Congressional Serial Set This link opens in a new window
Reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, 1817-1962.
HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
Legal history and government documents. Contains the entire Congressional Record, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and entire databases of treaties, constitutions, case law, world trials, international trade, foreign relations, and more.

Magazines, Newspapers, Pamphlets, etc.

Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
19th Century African American newspapers, American County Histories to 1900, American Civil War Primary Sources, and more.
African American Newspapers Series 1: 1827-1998 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. This collection includes historically significant papers and features many rare 19th-century titles.
America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Searchable American newspaper collections, including African American Newspapers Series 1, 1827-1998; Caribbean Newspapers, 1718-1876; South Carolina's Historical Newspapers; Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980; and selected historical newspapers.

American Memory Project (Library of Congress)
Primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the U.S.

American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Full text periodicals published between 1740 and 1940.
Charlotte Observer (1886-present) This link opens in a new window
Charlotte Observer online from 1886 to the present.

Chronicling America: Historic Newspapers 1789-1963
Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Supported by the NEH and the Library of Congress.
Documenting the American South
Primary source materials relating to Southern history. Open access.
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A collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. Includes: First-Person Narratives of the American South; Library of Southern Literature; North American Slave Narratives; The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865; The Church in the Southern Black Community.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text and full-page-image access to books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in America from 1639-1800.
Gale NewsVault This link opens in a new window
Platform for cross-searching a range of historical UK newspaper and periodical collections, including 19th century British Library Newspapers (Parts I and II); 19th Century UK Periodicals, Series 1; Times Digital Archive (1785-2006); and, Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (1902-2007)
Harper's Weekly: 1857-1912 This link opens in a new window
A 19th century illustrated newspaper from 1857-1912. Includes news stories, illustrations, cartoons, editorials, biographies, literature and advertisements.
New York Times Historical Archives (1851-2020) This link opens in a new window
Major global newspaper including news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, as well as photos and advertisements.

North American Slave Narratives (DocSouth)

North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Colonial to 1950 - includes the experiences of 632 women as revealed in diaries and letters.
North Carolina Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
North Carolina Historical newspapers from late 1700s to 1859

Race and Slavery Petitions Project
The Race and Slavery Petitions Project offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years.
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The Project contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners.

South Carolina's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
South Carolina Historical newspapers from late 1700s to 1859.
Times Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
Historical newspaper archive with full-text coverage of the Times from 1785 to 2013. Supports research across multiple disciplines including business, humanities, political science, and philosophy with coverage of all major international historical events.

DPLA

DPLA
A portal to digitized content made available by libraries, archives and museums

HathiTrust

A repository for digital collections. Items in the public domain (works published before 1923) are freely accessible online.

Internet Archive

A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Includes digitized books, periodicals, media, and more.

Internet Archive