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"
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.
15th to early 20th century primary sources on gender such as Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and Family, the Body, etc.
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. Includes the “Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, 1960–1969, Europe and Latin America” Collection Database Guide
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, 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 manuscripts of travelers' accounts between the 13th and 16th centuries.
Thousands of original materials related to slavery, abolition, and social justice ranging from 1490-2007.
