LibGuides: History: 79-701: Graduate Research Seminar: Books, Collections, Documents, Essays

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 CMU's library catalog, or Worldcat, a database of library holding throughout 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"

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. Europeana searches European libraries, archives, museums, and galleries.

Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
15th to early 20th century primary sources on gender such as Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and Family, the Body, etc.
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
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Full text of 150,000 18th century books.
Empire Online This link opens in a new window
15th-20th century. Essays and original documents relating to Empire Studies, race, class, imperialism, and colonialism, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. (Carnegie Mellon users only)
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
John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera This link opens in a new window
Access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising. Database Guide
Legal Classics This link opens in a new window
1,800 works from some of the greatest legal minds in history (Carnegie Mellon users only)
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.
Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new window
1500-1700. Manuscripts that were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries.
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.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Thousands of original materials related to slavery, abolition, and social justice ranging from 1490-2007.
Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family This link opens in a new window
Search the full text of handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books describing American attitudes towards family dynamics, gender roles, sexual relationships, and race relations.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Documents, sources, and other material related the history of women in social movements. Scholar's Edition.