Primary Sources: Colonization & Settlement, 1585-1763

In addition to an Adams family timeline, genealogy and selection of biographical sketches, this site provides electronic access to selected portions of the Adams Family Papers manuscript collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This site provides a database of African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations in Louisiana between 1719-1820.

This collection, from the Avalon Project at Yale University, provides access to primary source materials dealing with the U.S. Constitution.

Historical collections for the National Digital Library, from the Library of Congress. Provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.

This site, from the Middle Tennessee State University Library, provides a chronology of American Women from prehistory through the present day. The site is divided chronologically and links to primary source repositories are provided for each era. For example, The 1880-1899 section of the site provides links to primary sources available through digitized texts, the Smithsonian’s National Anthropologic al Archives, the American Association of University Women’s online collections and the Harvard University’s Open Collections

The Avalon Project provides access to digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Its coverage spand from 4000bce to the 21st century.

This site features full-text primary documents and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present. Additionally, this site provides links other resources including major museums and archival research centers.

This site, compiled by the Government Printing Office, provides access to digital copies of core federal government documents. The items found on this site range from the Articles of Confederation and the Bill or Rights to the weekly compilation of presidential documents.

This online exhibition, an initiative of the Massachusetts Historical Society, provides access to primary source material dealing with the Battle of Bunker Hill. Among the items featured on this site are personal accounts and descriptions of the battle.

Sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this is an electronic collection that provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. Five different projects make up the site: Southern literature; first-person narratives; slave narratives; the Southern Homefront, 1861-1865; the church in the Southern Black Community.

This site contains accounts, maps, photos, transcript excerpts and other materials relating to over 70 famous trials, from Socrates to the Scopes to O. J. Simpson.

This collection, from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, features images, texts and maps that illustrate the African-American migration experience.

The National Archives was established in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt,. Its holdings date back to 1775.

This site provides access to copies of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration. They span a time period from 1776 (the Declaration of Independence) to 1965 (Voting Rights Act).

From the University of Virginia, this project is a collection of fully searchable texts. Among those texts are; court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies.

This site describes the 1704 raid by French and Native allies on the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts and the Deerfield residents' subsequent forced march to Canada. Among the items in this collection are digitized copies of captive's first-person accounts.

A digital collection compiled at the University of Virginia, this site consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a transcription of the court records.

This collection comes from the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. According to the website: Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance."

This site provides a research archive for the study of 18th-century periodicals, including The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-14).

This collection, form Rice University, contains two primary databases - a voyages database and an African names database. The voyages database can be searched in a variety of ways including geographic region, date, captains name, and vessel name. The database contains records of voyages from 1514 to 1866.