History - Primary Sources

Sources include a variety of current and retrospective news media: newspapers, newswires, broadcast transcripts, blogs, periodicals, and web-only content.

Also included are the following Access Modules: Business News, U.S. Newswires, Military, Government, and Defense, and Acceda Noticias. Content is easily searched and sorted through an intuitive, map-based interface.

Access World News includes many California News Sources including the current San Francisco Chronicle.

On Campus Link

ProQuest Congressional provides comprehensive indexing and abstracting of Congressional publications, CIS legislative histories, and bill tracking. It includes the full text of Congressional reports, documents, prints, bills, the Congressional Record, selected testimony in hearings before Congress, Public laws, Statutes at Large, the United States Code Service, the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and the National Journal. It also provides information about members of Congress, Congressional committees, and recent legislative activities and public policy issues in the news.

Each of these collections, compiled by top scholars and experts, exhaustively covers the most critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post World War II through the 21st century. Together, these collections offer unparalleled access to the defining international strategies of our time. Glossaries, chronologies, bibliographies, overviews, and photographs are included.

Collections Include:

Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973–1990
The Berlin Crisis, 1958–1962
China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960–1998
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
El Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977–1984
El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980–1994
Iran: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977–1980
The Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal, 1983-1988
Iraqgate: Saddam Hussein, U.S. Policy and the Prelude to the Persian Gulf War, 1980–1994
Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, 1960–1976
Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978–1990
The Philippines: U.S. Policy during the Marcos Years, 1965–1986
Presidential Directives on National Security, Part I: From Truman to Clinton
South Africa: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1962–1989
The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947–1991
U.S. Espionage and Intelligence, 1947–1996
The U.S. Intelligence Community: Organization, Operations, and Management, 1947-1989
U.S. Military Uses of Space, 1945–1991
U.S. Nuclear History: Nuclear Arms and Politics in the Missile Age, 1955–1968
U.S. Nuclear Non-proliferation Policy, 1945–1991
Terrorism and U.S. Policy, 1968–2002
Presidential Directives on National Security, Part II: From Truman to George W. Bush
U.S. Policy in the Vietnam War, Part I: 1954-1968
Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999
U.S. Policy in the Vietnam War, Part II: 1969-1975
Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, 1977–1992
The Kissinger Transcripts: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969–1977
The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited: An International Collection of Documents, From the Bay of Pigs to the Brink of Nuclear War
U. S. Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: From World War II to Iraq
The Kissinger Telephone Conversations: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977
Peru: Human Rights, Drugs, and Democracy: 1980-2000
US Intelligence Community after 9/11
The National Security Agency: Organization and Operations, 1945-2009
The United States and The Two Koreas, 1969-2000
The United States and the Two Koreas, Part II, 1969-2010
Colombia and the United States: Political Violence, Narcotics, and Human Rights, 1948-2010
US Intelligence and China: Collection, Analysis, and Covert Action
Chile and the United States: U.S. Policy toward Democracy, Dictatorship, and Human Rights, 1970-1990
Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, Part III, 1961-2000
Argentina, 1975-1980: The Making of U.S. Human Rights Policy
CIA Covert Operations: From Carter to Obama, 1977-2010
Mexico-United States Counternarcotics Policy, 1969-2013
The Kissinger Conversations, Supplement: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977
Electronic Surveillance: From the Cold War to the War on Terror
CIA Covert Operations II: The Year of Intelligence, 1975

Access to California maps only.

They are large-scale plans containing data that can be used to estimate the potential risk for urban structures. This includes information such as the outline of each building, the size, shape and construction materials, heights, and function of structures, location of windows and doors. The maps also give street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. Seven or eight different editions represent some areas.

Textual information on construction details (for example, steel beams or reinforced walls) is often given on the plans while shading indicates different building materials. Extensive information on building use is given, ranging from symbols for generic terms such as stable, garage, and warehouse to names of owners of factories and details on what was manufactured in them. In the case of large factories or commercial buildings, even individual rooms and the uses to which they were put are recorded on the maps. Other features shown include pipelines, railroads, wells, dumps, and heavy machinery.

Access the map legend provided by the Sanborn Map Company.

For help using the Sanborn Map collection see Frequently Asked Questions.

Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years.

On-Campus Link

Gale Primary Sources searches across these databases:

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926
The Times Digital Archive, 1785-2008
The Times Literary Supplement

On the Gale platform, users can engage with primary sources in ways that were never before possible through subject indexing and a range of cutting edge interactive tools:

Term Frequency

This allows users to see the frequency of their search term(s) in the content over time, which can suggest the importance of particular concepts during given periods. It allows users to ask new questions of historical data, e.g., Is there a connection between "bread" and "revolution"? Does the frequency of the word "Empire" coincide with the rise of the term "tragedy" and "comedy" in popular discourse?

Term Clusters

Users can see terms that commonly occur in relation to their own search term, which helps uncover hidden connections, or can be a helpful starting point in the early stages of research. The term cluster for "disaster" might bring up related topics such as "Mining Disaster," "Fire," or "Earthquake," prompting users down different research paths.

Gleeson Library subscribes to the following collections:
-American Indians and the American West, 1809-1971
-Japanese American Incarceration: Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1942-1946

Collection content includes:

More than 170 unique titles related to African American life and culture
Approximately 60,000 pages of searchable primary source content
Reports and annuals from African American religious organizations and social service agencies, as well as African American periodicals
Extensive coverage of African American religious organizations, churches and institutions

On-Campus Link

Northern and Southern Points of View
The Civil War Primary Source Documents collection, drawn from the holdings of the New-York Historical Society, is comprised of over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections, and focuses on the War as it was fought from both Northern and Southern perspectives.

Battlefront Perspectives and Personal Artifacts
Invaluable primary resources include letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs and illustrations. Personal accounts appear in various scrapbook journals and family portraits, and strategic initiatives are evident in maps featuring details of troop movements and local landmarks.

Insightful Correspondence and Notable Papers
Highlights include the papers of David Cronin, a famous soldier and artist, soldiers' diaries chronicling daily life and experiences as prisoners of war, Union Defence Committee records and Confederate Army records.

Content Includes:

Over 110,000 pages from over 400 individual collections
Extensive correspondence from both the Confederate and Union troops, societies and individuals and their families
Diaries from soldiers on the field and civilians on the homefront
Hand-drawn illustrations, maps, and engineering notebooks
Military content from both the army and navy, from the front lines to hospitals and prisons
Letters and first person accounts from such well-known leaders as Ulysses S. Grant, as well as accounts from individual soldiers and sailors

On-Campus Link

Digitized from one of the most important collections ever produced on microform, Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans’ renowned “American Bibliography” and Roger Bristol’s supplement. Including more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages, Series I also offers new imprints not available in microform editions.

A wide variety of 17th- and 18th-century imprints
Early American Imprints, Series I is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties and more.

Extensive indexing and easy browsing
The imprints in Series I are expertly indexed and may be browsed by genre, subjects, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Topics covered include agriculture, astronomy, auctions, capital punishment, child rearing, commerce, constitution, diseases, education, foreign affairs, French & Indian wars, geography, Indians, Latin, lotteries, masonry, medicine, military operations, missionaries, operas, religious thought, revolutionary war, slavery, suffrage, temperance, trials, witchcraft, women, work, yellow fever and thousands more.

Two dramatic expansions of Evans, 1639-1800
Readex now offers a broad range of recently uncovered imprints, most of which were not included in either Charles Evans’ monumental work or Roger Bristol’s supplement. From the acclaimed holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society come two individually available supplements to Evans, 1639-1800. Together these collections offer approximately 1,750 rare and unique items printed during a 150-year period spanning the colonial era and the formation of the new nation. Fully integrated with Evans, these two supplements enable students and scholars to locate relevant material from all three collections simultaneously.

On-campus link

It is based on the noted “American Bibliography, 1801-1819” by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. With more than four million pages from over 36,000 items—including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions—this digital edition from Readex is an essential complement to Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800, the definitive resource for researching 17th- and 18th-century America.

Explore the early 1800s in unprecedented depth and detail
Through Early American Imprints, Series II, students and scholars can extensively research westward expansion, the development of American arts (literature, music, painting, etc.), the progression of American political thought and much more. In addition to books, broadsides and pamphlets, the collection includes published reports and the works of many European authors reprinted for the American public. Additionally, a large number of state papers and early government materials—including presidential letters and congressional, state and territorial resolutions—chronicle the political and geographic growth of the developing American nation.

Extensive indexing by subject
The imprints in Series II are expertly indexed and grouped by genre, subject, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Subjects include the following: 12th Amendment, abolitionism, Adams-Onis Treaty, Bible societies, canals, Embargo Act, fur trade, Hartford Convention, Lewis & Clark Expedition, Louisiana Purchase, nationalism, Panic of 1819, Romanticism, Seminole War, Tippecanoe, Treaty of Ghent, U.S. Military Academy, War of 1812 and hundreds more. In addition to searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text that is associated with each image, Early American Imprints, Series II features bibliographic records from the American Antiquarian Society, which is also upgrading the MARC records for the Readex digital edition.

On-campus link

Orderly Books were the controlling document of day-to-day life in the military, most notably during the Revolutionary War. This one-of-a-kind collection – developed in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society – offers access to Orderly Books found nowhere else and contains handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817.

Content Includes:
Over 30,000 pages of original primary source material from two hundred handwritten volumes
Original images, fully transcribed and keyword-searchable

Subjects Include:
Both sides of the American Revolutionary War
The French and Indian War
The War of 1812
The early frontier
Other various military deployments throughout the young United States

Orderly Book Entries Include:
Information on the day, location and general orders
Proclamations from the Continental Congress
Calculations about rations, miles and routes traveled
Personal expenses and loans
“Advertisements” announcing lost items, such as clothing and equipment

On-Campus Link