The following are publically available, free digitized archives. The sources in the following collections are largely English language-based.
For a helpful guide for how to navigate archival research, I’d encourage you to look at:
Laura Schmidt, “Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research,” Society of American Archivists, March 26, 2016.
Library of Congress Collections
A collection of primary sources collected and digitized by the Library of Congress and UNESCO.
Library of Congress: Indian Land Cessions 1784-1894
Library of Congress Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection
Library of Congress American History Digital Collections
This is a very large collection with many sub collections of early American archived documents, including correspondence between the founding fathers and Revolutionary War manuscripts.
Library of Congress, Civil Rights History Project
This collection is mostly video of oral history interviews done with people alive and active during the Civil Rights Movement.
Library of Congress Oral Histories
Chronicling America – Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
Digitized American newspapers published from 1789-1963
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
Consists of a linked set of published congressional records of the United States of America from the Continental Congress through the 43rd Congress, 1774-1875.
First Person Narratives of the American South – part of the LOC Documenting the American South collection
General
ArchiveGrid includes over 7 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,400 archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
British History
This is the British National Archives. It has a variety of collections from military records, to wills, to many other administrative documentation. It appears to also serve as a point of intersection for a variety of other archives across the country. It allows for searching by time period, subject/theme, or only for items within (or outside of) The National Archives.
British History Online is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles.
This online archive of the United Kingdom Parliament allows scholars to have access to the Hansard, the official transcripts of Parliamentary debates and reports in Britain. The transcripts include a lot of Parliamentary debates and speeches that have been delivered since 1802. This archive can be a valuable source for anyone who seeks to learn more about the political, economic and social history of the United Kingdom and other related European nations. It also allows scholars to search for the daily agendas of British Parliament.
Oral Histories
US International Relations
The Foreign Relations of the United States, Office of the Historian
Collection of documentary historical record of U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.
Wilson Center Digital Archive (International Relations)
Human Rights
Activism includes collections emanating from individual, organizational and mass movements for social, cultural and political change. The Alternative Press and Human Rights Collections contain materials ranging from the early 20th century to the present consisting of thousands of newspapers, serials, books, pamphlets, photography, posters, personal papers, ephemera and artifacts documenting activist themes and organizations. Subjects include the Vietnam era, prisons, LGBTQ, child labor, liberation struggles, peace and justice, civil rights, anarchism, student activism, feminism and related unrest among many others.
Duke Human Right Archive: Digital Collections for Remote Access
This is a collection of books, pamphlets, and periodicals related to feminist (and anti-feminist) movements around the world. The publications date from 1543-1945, and there are sources in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. You can search based on date, language, type of publication, location, etc.
Archive of primary and secondary sources about the history of medicine. The collections are particularly strong in visual culture, with over 250,000 prints, paintings, drawings, photographs and digital images from the 14th century to the present. They also have examples of visual culture in their ephemera collections, including stamps, advertising, trade cards and public information leaflets. Our audio-visual collections include 20th and 21st-century public health information films, surgical training films, interviews, oral histories and broadcast radio and television programmes.
US legal, political, and governmental sources
The American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara)
Presidential speeches, debates, interviews, and other sources
Includes access to official governmental publications for all three branches of the Federal Government.
Oyez for U.S. Supreme Court cases
Summarizes most important case info, including appellant, appellee, attorneys, citation, dates argued and decided, facts of the case, question, conclusion, etc. If applicable, includes links to transcripts and audio of oral arguments
Includes links to case syllabi and opinions at https://supreme.justia.com/
The CDC has a searchable database of their past reports and newsletters, broken down by report type
o Also includes public health reports from other health organizations
US Department of Health and Human Services Archive
o Policies, reports, and legislation such as the Affordable Care Act
o Thousands of hours of C-SPAN programming, including Congressional hearings, meetings, etc.
National Archives and Records Administration
National Parks Service Archives
Established in 1972, the archives include internal NPS archives, photograph collections, oral histories from NPS employees.
Migration
Also helpful for sources for ethnic and race histories.
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Socialist System Online
Digitized transcriptions of interviews with refugees from the USSR taken in the early 1950s.
University of Arizona “Borderlands” Archive
Archival materials as well as printed texts on the Borderlands of the Southwest and Northwest of Mexico, from Baja, California to Tamaulipas, Mexico. These collections document the region’s culture and history, from the colonial period to the present. Accounts of Native Americans and their ancestors, the impact of Spanish and Mexican settlement and the influx of people into the region during the 19th century are also included.
Immigration History Research Center Archive
The University of Minnesota has a large collection of oral histories, photographs, and digitized immigrant letters (1850-1970). It also has a substantial number of sources recording refugee experiences.
Ellis Island Photographs (1902-1913)
Contains both photographs of regional immigration facilities, as well as digitized documents
Immigration Data and Statistics
Government statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, including statistics from prior to the creation of the Department in 2002.
Federal Census digitized records from 1790 until 1940.
Japanese American Digitization Project
Includes collections from California State University campuses, the Japanese American National Museum, the California Historical Society, among others. Include documentation of Japanese American incarceration during WWII.
Vietnamese American Oral History Project
Includes Vietnamese and English language transcripts of interviews, brief summaries, and photographs of narrators. Also includes audio and video. Focuses on VIetnamese American community in the US since the US war with Vietnam.
From the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Migration Studies in the Department of History, the archive provides a repository for immigrant experience.
The Bracero History Archive contains oral histories and artifacts that pertain to the Bracero program from 1942-1964. The archive documents the experiences of the Mexican agricultural workers that crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in the US. Materials in the collection include those contributed by individuals from the public as well as the project’s historians (and are marked accordingly).
Immigration to the US, 1789-1930
Collection from Harvard Library that documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression. Includes both individual, personal histories (diaries, letters, etc.), as well as broader political and legal archival material (government documents, maps etc.). The collection also includes contextual information on voluntary immigratnion and quantitative data.
Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation interviews
From Rice University’s Chao Center from Asian Studies.
South Asian Oral History Project
Based at the University of Washington Libraries, this project represents one of the first attempts in the U.S. to record pan-South Asian immigrant experiences in the Pacific Northwest using the medium of oral history.
Brooklyn Historical Society has a substantial oral history collection. The interviews are from 1973 to present. The interviews are conducted in English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin, and include narrators born as early as 1880.
South Asian American Digital Archive
Migration Archive Results: Centro For Puerto Rican Studies:
Video recordings and documents related to the migrations of Puerto Ricans during the second half of the 20th century.
Initiative of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Focus on humanitarian emergency resulting from the ongoing expulsion of refugees and migrants from Central America, and the responses to this situation from different communities and individuals.
Indigenous Histories
US/Native Treaties Archive (Yale)
U.S. Supreme Court Decisions on Indian Law Archive
New York Public Library Digital Collections
After Columbus: 400 Years of Native American Portraiture
Ayer Digital Collection at the Newberry Library
Since 1911, the Ayer endowment fund has enabled the library to collect in excess of 130,000 volumes, over 1 million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings on the subject. The collection features more than 65,000 digitized images and texts from the Ayer materials. Read more about the Ayer Collection and American Indians and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry.
An online catalog of indigenous language materials in archives at the University of California, Berkeley. It includes physical and digital materials held by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the Bancroft Library.
National Archives – American Indian Records
Native American Census Rolls Archive
Northwestern Digital Library Collections: Edward Curtis’s North American Indian
Edward Sheriff Curtis published The North American Indian between 1907 and 1930 with the intent to record traditional Native American cultures. The work comprises twenty volumes of narrative text and photogravure images. Each volume is accompanied by a portfolio of large photogravure plates. Search tip: shortcut to a list of just the text volumes by searching “illustrated books” in the search bar.
University of New Mexico: Indian Affairs Collection
The Indian Affairs collection contains correspondence and documents relating to Indian affairs in New Mexico during the Territorial Period. Most of the materials either originated in Santa Fe, or were sent to Santa Fe from Pueblos including Laguna, Cochiti, Isleta, Zia, Santa Ana, Sandia, San Felipe, Nambe, Jemez, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, and Taos. Thematically, land issues, specifically, boundary questions, predominate the collection. Controversies concerning water rights, livestock trespassing, and railroad right of ways (including issues between the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company and the Pueblos of Isleta and Santo Domingo) are documented via correspondence with Indian agents (N.C. Walpole, C.J. Crandall), legal petitions, original Spanish land grant documents (sometimes with English translations), records from the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims, and abstracts and translations from the archives of the Surveyor General of New Mexico. Complaints from various Pueblos and individuals concerning encroachments by Mexicans, other Indians, Italians, and Anglos form another significant part of the collection. A glimpse into the workings of the Indian schools, specifically, the Cochiti Day School, is seen through correspondence between the supervising teacher, the superintendent in Santa Fe, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C.
US Empire
La Coleccion Puertorriqueña, Universidad de Puerto Rico
Digitized Primary sources from the island’s main university, University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras (UPR). Contains a variety of government sources and reports that are difficult to find in other databases.
National Digitized Archive, Archivo Nacional de Puerto Rico
An island archive of primary sources from colonial and 20th-century sources that cover multiple kinds of government/official records.
Hawai’i from 1898-1933
Hawai’i State Digital Archives
Alaska’s Digital Archives presents historical photographs, albums, oral histories, moving images, maps, documents, physical objects, and other materials from archives, museums and libraries throughout the state.
International Women
University of Michigan Global Feminisms Project
Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran Digital Archive
Harvard Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Pauli Murray collection
o This collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is titled “Papers of Pauli Murray, 1827-1985,” and includes six different series, organized by personal and biographical (which includes material about Murray’s family), work, writings and speeches, correspondence, subject files, and audio tapes. Much of this collection is not digitized, except for some photo albums that I found, as well as many audio interviews that Murray did later in life.
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Duke University’s Women’s Liberation Movement Print Culture Repository/Archive
Library of Congress American Women Collection
Cornell University Hearth Home Economics Archive
Middle Tennessee State University’s “Discovering American Women’s History Online”
Latin America
Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera, Princeton University Library
Particularly useful for primary sources on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Venezuela. The subject categories represented in the archive are: Agrarian and rural issues; Arts and culture; Children and youth; Economics; Education; Environment and ecology; Gender issues; Health; Human and civil rights; Labor; Minorities, ethnic and racial groups; Politics and government; Religion; Science and Technology; Socioeconomic conditions and development; Tourism.
Nicaragua Revolution: David Schwartz Collection
Directory of Carribean Digital Scholarship
This collaborative curation of digital resources concerning the Caribbean and its diasporas engages the community in compiling entries in an open, shared online dataset.
Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive
Digital Archive from the University of Texas at Austin on the Guatemalan National Police. Resource for the study of Guatemalan history and human rights in the region, spanning a broad array of topics from Guatemala’s armed conflict between 1960 and 1996 to the sexually transmitted disease experiments performed at the behest of the United States government in the 1940s. This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive. This digital archive mirrors and extends the physical archive that remains preserved in Guatemala as an important historical patrimony of the Guatemalan people.
Misc. US
These collections are particularly useful for material on US visual and material culture.
Ad*Access Digital Collection (Duke University)
Images and information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in the United States and Canada between 1911 and 1955
Can search the entire collection or browse within five major categories: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty & Hygiene, World War II
The USC has made a significant portion of their special collections available online. They include sources on the Los Angeles region, but also on topics ranging from the Korean War to Pentecostalism to Voltaire’s correspondence.
It’s a great resource in Chicago, but it also has an extensive digitized collection with over 1 million documents. Their search engine is also easy to use, and you can filter by time period and topic. If you have extra time on your hands, you can also volunteer to transcribe sources into their digital collection here. They have a collection of Native American Letters and Diaries that they are in the process of transcribing.
Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project
A searchable source for art and literary magazines from 1890 – 1922. The magazines include The Little Review, The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, and Camera Work. It also has biographies and background material on the many contributors.
The Catholic Universities of America, Digitized Online Archives
The Catholic University of America has digitized a large portion of its collections on American Catholic history since the 19th century. They have sources that would be useful for studying theological debates, Catholic labor activists such as Mother Jones, as well as Catholic practice and popular religion.
The New-York Historical Society Digital Collections
A subset of their digital collections are free and open to the public
Marion Mahony Griffin’s The Magic of America is a 1,400 page manuscript with 650 illustrations describing architecture and design in America. She was an architect, designer and artist who ran an architecture firm with her husband beginning in 1911
The New York African Free School
The records of the The New York African Free School, a school system started by the Manumission Society in 1787 to educate black students.
Shaping the Values of Youth: Sunday School Books in 19th Century America
The Huntington Digital Library
Library with particularly large holdings in the histories of the American West, slavery and emancipation, and the U.S. Civil War
North American Slave Narratives (documenting the American South)
This list is selected from part of a collaborative project. Originally, many of these sources were found by students and preceptors at the University of Chicago for the History BA Seminar. It has subsequently been added to by Jessa Dahl, Savitri Maya Kunze, Laurie Sauer, and Riley Smith.
Savitri Maya Kunze 