LibGuides: Environmental History: Primary Sources: Books, Collections, Documents, Essays

Books, Documents, Essays

Worldcat is a comprehensive catalog of books and other materials held in libraries throughout the United States and even some international libraries. The Center for Research libraries' catalog contains more than 500,000 monographs in all formats and subject areas.The European Library searches European national libraries.

18th Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more
Based on the English Short Title Catalogue, includes over 136,000 titles (155,000 volumes) works published in the UK during the 18th century plus thousands from elsewhere. Items are primarily in English - though other languages are included.

"California As I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
Search or browse full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts from the Gold Rush to the turn of the twentieth century. It covers "the pioneer experience; encounters between Anglo-Americans and the diverse peoples who had preceded them; the transformation of the land by mining, ranching, agriculture, and urban development; the often-turbulent growth of communities and cities; and California's emergence as both a state and a place of uniquely American dreams."
Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University)
Scanned images of core agricultural books from the 19th and 20th century.

Early Encounters in North America This link opens in a new window
Narratives, diaries, journals, and letters of traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Over 100,000 books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the English language in any country from 1475 through 1700. Database Guide
Early European Books This link opens in a new window
All works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield. Database Guide
Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Essays and original documents relating to Empire Studies, race, class, imperialism, and colonialism, sourced from libraries and archives around the world.
Environmental Issues Online This link opens in a new window
Environmental Issues Online brings together multimedia materials (text, archival primary sources, video and audio) around key environmental challenges, including climate change, water/air pollution, biodiversity, conservation, agriculture, deforestation and more. The database is curated around specific environmental issues and events from the 20th and 21st centuries. Database Guide

Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920 (American Memory, Library of Congress)
Search or browse books and pamphlets, Federal statutes and Congressional resolutions, excerpts from the Congressional Globe and the Congressional Record, Presidential proclamations, prints and photographs, historic manuscripts, etc.

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
Digitized books, journals, and government documents from all countries and time periods.
Text-mine (full text search) over 17 million digitized works and create customized collections. HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries. Offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
History Vault This link opens in a new window
Access to millions of primary source, cross-searchable, full-text/full-image documents on the most widely studied topics in 19th and 20th-century American history. Search or browse digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials. Database Guide

Industrial Hygiene Collection
Housed at Carnegie Mellon's Mellon Institute Library, the collection includes a wide variety of materials on the environmental health issues of workers, such as: publications from the Air Hygiene Foundation of America, Inc., (1936-1940); the Industrial Hygiene Foundation of America, Inc., (1941-1969); and the Industrial Health Foundation (1970-present). Materials also include journals, annual reports, information circulars, and bulletins from the Chemistry and Toxicology Series, Legal Series, Medical Series, Management Series, Nursing Series, Preventive Engineering Series, as well as Proceedings, etc.
Journals of Lewis and Clark (University of Virginia)

Legal Classics This link opens in a new window
1,800 works from some of the greatest legal minds in history.

Love Canal Collections
An introduction to the history and background of the events that occured at Love Canal. Includes two chronologies of events, scanned documents of the Ecumenical Task Force, database of Love Canal articles, and a glossary of definitions for individuals, organizations, businesses, government agencies, chemical waste dump sites, and major issues relating to the Love Canal and other local environmental disaster areas.

Making of the Modern World This link opens in a new window
The Making of the Modern World (1450-1890) covers the history of Western trade, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It is also strong in the rise of the modern labor movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories that championed and challenged capitalism in the nineteenth century. In addition, the archive offers resources on the role of finance and taxation and the growth of the early modern monarchy. It features essential texts covering the function of financial institutions, the crisis of the French monarchy and the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and the connection between the democratic goals of revolutionaries and their legal aspirations.
Medieval Travel Writing This link opens in a new window
Medieval manuscripts of travelers' accounts between the 13th and 16th centuries.

New Perspectives on the West (WETA, PBS)
Maps, photographs, documents, timeline, etc.

Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new window
Find manuscripts that were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries.

River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold
e-book version

Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 This link opens in a new window
Works about the North, Central & South America, the Arctic & Antarctica and the West Indies.

Writings of John Muir (Sierra Club)
Full text, quotations, articles, books, etc.
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For More

African American History: Primary Sources
History of Technology and Science: Primary Sources
Women's History: Primary Sources
Digitized Collections
Digitized collections of material from Carnegie Mellon's University Archives

Searching Catalogs

The resources listed here are not the only ones available. Many others are in print or microform and can be found by searching library catalogs, like the CMU library catalog or Worldcat, a database of library holding thoughout the world (though mainly U. S.). Use some of these terms combined with your topic:

personal narratives
diaries
sources
correspondence
interviews
pamphlets
speeches
early works to 1800

For example:

women and diaries
slavery and "early works"
Holocaust and "personal narratives"

History Librarian

Charlotte Kiger Price

she/her

Contact:

Hunt Library 109E
Pittsburgh, PA

Subjects: Education, History, Language & Linguistics, Religion, Women's Studies