Research Guides: HIS 301: Making History: Find Books & Pamphlets

Freely-available collections

The following contain works in the public domain:

EHPS: European History Primary Sources
Searchable index of scholarly digital repositories containing primary sources related to the history of Europe. From the Library and the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy; part of the WWW Virtual Library History Central Catalogue.
Google Books
Limit your search to "Full view only" or "Public Domain only" in order to find books that you can view cover-to-cover and/or download.
Hathi Trust
Digital collection of works held by a number of major research libraries.
Limit your search to "Full view only" to view works that you can view cover-to-cover.

Subject terms in WorldCat

Use one or more of the following terms to find primary sources in WorldCat and other library catalogs:

Archives
For people and organizations only.
Correspondence
Diaries
Facsimiles
Interviews
Pamphlets
Personal narratives
For eyewitness acounts of events and wars.
Pictorial works
Sources

Note about interlibrary loan

Rare and archival materials cannot be borrowed on interlibrary loan. You can sometimes locate microfilm or microfiche copies of these documents in the library catalog; to find microform copies of primary sources, enter your search terms and then apply a "subtype limit," choosing "Microform" as the format.

Davidson Library Catalog: Book Search

Tip: After you perform your search, use the limits (publication date, author) in the left side-bar.

Notable book & pamphlet collections

Archives Unbound
A multi-disciplinary resource, this is a set of collections that cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Particular strengths include U.S. foreign policy; U.S. civil rights; global affairs and colonial studies; and modern history.
Primary sources, unpublished historical documents from private and governmental collections.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
(1701-1800) Digital facsimiles of 185,000 books, pamphlets, almanacs, advertisements, songs, and other materials published in Great Britain and British North America during the eighteenth century.
Also available on Artemis.
Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850
(1450-1914) Digital facsimiles of over 61,000 books and 460 pre-1900 periodicals covering a wide variety of topics related to economics, including agriculture, banking, colonies, finance, politics, mercantilism, slavery, social conditions, trades and manufacturing, and transportation.
Part of Gale Primary Sources.
Drawn from the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library, the Kress Collection of Business and Economics at the Harvard Business School, the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University, and the Yale University Libraries.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
(c.1730-1916) Digital collection of primary sources from the long nineteenth century. The content is sourced from the world's preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.
Contains the following collections: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Covey Collection; Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest; Photography: The World Through the Lens; Science, Technology and Medicine, 1780-1925; Women: Transnational Networks.

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