J300/J301: Nineteenth-Century American Lives
Here are some resources and search strategies to help you get started on your research paper. For a much longer list of 19th-century resources, see our guide to Researching the Nineteenth Century.
Need more help? Contact the history librarian, Celestina Savonius-Wroth, cewroth@indiana.edu.
Books
Use IUCAT, the IU Libraries online catalog, and WorldCat, the combined catalogs of majority of US libraries: Tips: In IUCAT, use the Advanced Keyword search. Try including 19th century as a subject term. To find 19th-century primary sources, limit your search by date of publication, OR experiment with some of these subject terms: sources or correspondence or diaries or personal narratives or interviews. You can also include 19th century as a subject term.
IUCAT now links directly to Google Books and Hathi Trust for fulltext of many books published before 1923.
Newspapers and magazines
A large selection of 19th-century US newspapers are available in digital from. See ProQuest Historical Newspapers for major newspapers such as the New York Times, 1851-2001, Chicago Tribune(1890--), Los Angeles Times (1881--), Washington Post (1877--). Early American Newspapers and 19th Century Historical United States Newspapers cover many smaller, regional newspapers, with papers from the entire 19th century. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century provides an African American perspective on the issues of the period.
For magazines, American Periodicals Series Online has searchable full text of over 1000 magazines from 1740-1900, ranging from children's magazines to professional journals. Periodicals Index Online is an online index (with links to fulltext for some journals) to thousands of scholarly journals in English and other western European languages, with coverage back to first issue of journal. Limit your search by date to find 19th-century materials. Godey's Lady's Book is a digital archive of the most widely-read 19th-century American women's magazine. It's especially good for dress and fashion!
Digitized collections
You might want to explore some of these collections of digitized biographical and/or autobiographical materials:
American Civil War: Letters & Diaries
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories
In the First Person is online index to digitized biographical materials. Ancestry Library Edition is a giant online collection of "vital statistics" (birth, death, marriage, etc records). It's used mostly by genealogists, but obviously has applications for microhistory and biography!
The Library of Congress has a huge collection of digitized primary sources, the American Memory Historical Collections. This includes oral history transcripts, such as Born in Slavery, a collection of interviews with former slaves.
Archival materials
Get your hands on the raw material of history! The Lilly Library's manuscript collections contain original diaries, letters and other personal papers of famous and not-so-famous individuals. The Indiana University Archives also have personal papers, of IU-related people.
Much archival material that has not been digitized has been microfilmed. See our list of selected microfilm collections for history. If you're interested in the South, an especially good collection is Southern Women and their families (Wells Library East Tower 2, HQ1438.S63 S687 --the guide to the collection is online).
Finding secondary sources
Confused about the difference between primary sources and secondary sources? This guide to Identifying Primary and Secondary Sources may help. When you search IUCAT, you'll find both primary and secondary sources. You can limit by date of publication (using the Advanced Keyword Search) but you still need to decide if something published in 2008 or 1979 is a secondary source, or actually a new edition of a primary source.
America: History & Life is a good place to start your search for secondary sources. It's an online index to scholarly publications about North American history. Use the Time Period limit to focus your search on the 19th century, or even individual decades. This is the best way to find articles from history journals --it's also helpful for finding scholarly books.
JSTOR is a searchable digital archive of core scholarly journals, with coverage going back to first issue of each journal. You might end up using it for primary sources as well as secondary sources. Tip: use very specific keywords. Use the publication date limits (in the advanced search) --use the dates of research subject for primary sources or use 1990--present for more recent secondary sources.
last updated March 4, 2010
