History Databases
America History and Life
Covers North American (US and Canadian) history from prehistory to the present, providing references to journal articles, books, dissertations and reviews. America: History and Life covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide, including all key English-language historical journals and selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals.
Historical Abstracts
Indexes and abstracts journal articles, book reviews, and dissertations covering world history. Subject coverage is from 1450 to the present and includes Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Middle East. See America: History and Life for coverage of North America (U.S. and Canada).
17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
The newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. The present digital collection, that helps chart the development of the concept of 'news' and 'newspapers' and the "free press", totals almost 1 million pages and contains approximately 1,270 titles. Many of the Burney newspapers are well known, but many pamphlets and broadsides also included have remained largely hidden. Newly digitized, all Burney treasures are now fully text-searchable in Gale Digital Collection.
19th Century Masterfile
An index to nineteenth century periodicals, newspapers and government documents, including British Parliamentary debates. Nearly every periodical of the Nineteenth Century is covered. Full-text links are available for some articles.
Academic Search Complete
Offers a good starting point for research on nearly any topic, covering most areas of academic study and containing full text for 5,500 periodicals, including 4,600 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,500 journals.
Accessible Archives
Primary source material from 18th and 19th century periodicals, particularly useful for civil war and genealogical research. Includes: Godey`s Lady`s Book, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Charleston Mercury, The New York Herald, Richmond Enquirer, 19th Century African American Newspapers, The 19th Century American County Histories to 1900, The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County, The Industrial Revolution in Delaware County /w Vital Statistics, The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County.
ACLS Humanities E Book
A digital collection of more than 5,400 full-text high-quality books in the humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars.
AM Explorer
AM Explorer contains hundreds of thousands of primary source documents from 88 unique collections. Themes include area studies, cultural studies, empire and globalism, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality, history, politics, literature, theatre, war and conflict. Content ranges from medieval times to the present.
America's Historical Newspapers
Contains more than 150 newspapers, including major titles from every region of the U.S. Coverage throughout the Civil War and into the critical postwar period.
American Civil War Collection
Featuring more than 13,500 works published between 1860 and 1922, this fully searchable collection offers printed items addressing all facets of the Civil War and its aftermath. These diverse materials, all filmed in full-resolution color, include broadsides, lithographs, maps, books, pamphlets, photographs, political cartoons, stereographs, and more. Coverage extends throughout the Civil War and well beyond into the critical postwar period.
American Civil War, 1855-1868
The American Civil War, 1855-1868 collection consists of periodicals that span the immediate years before the Civil War to the beginnings of Reconstruction. Significantly, this collection contains a number of long-running periodicals that chronicle the war from various perspectives, such as Harper's Weekly and the Atlantic Monthly. Less conventional titles can also be found in this collection, such as the Millennial Harbinger and Gleason's Literary Companion. Additionally, this collection contains a number of abolitionist and secessionist titles that led up to the war and record veterans' remembrances afterwards. Part of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections.
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on July 1, 2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
American Indian Histories and Cultures
American Indian Histories and Cultures features a wide range of materials including:Manuscripts (treaties, speeches, petitions, diaries, travel journals, ledger books, Artwork (illustrations, sketches, watercolours, oil paintings, American Indian art), American Indian Newspapers covering the 1960s to 1990s, Rare Printed Books,Photographs,and Maps. Scope of the Collection: Allowing for the study of American Indian history from the early colonial period to the civil rights movement of the twentieth century,American Indian Histories and Cultures provides a rich variety of material from the Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library. The project covers topics such as early encounters between American Indians and Europeans; American Indians and the colonial powers, and later, the US government; the indigenous peoples of Mexico; conflict, wars and military contact; the fur trade and Indian traders; education and American Indian boarding schools, and the civil rights movement and political activism.
American State Papers, 1789-1838
Contains legislative and executive documents of the first 14 U.S. Congresses and extensive coverage of the major events that helped to shape the Early Republic.
Ancestry Library Edition
A wide range of resources for genealogical and historical research, including United States Census; military records; court, land and probate records; vital and church records; directories; passenger lists and more.
APS Online - American Periodical Series Online
APS Online contains full digital images of over 1,100 periodicals spanning nearly 200 years-from colonial times to the advent of American involvement in World War II. This unique collection contains digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals that originated between 1741, when Andrew Bradford's American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine were launched, and 1900. Titles range from America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository, to popular magazines like Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal.
Archive Finder (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 07/31/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
ArchiveGrid
ArchiveGrid is a free database that allows searching across hundreds of institutions' special collections records, including the collections of The West Virginia and Regional History Center.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index
Articles from high impact research journals in each field of the humanities, with option for cited reference searching to trace scholarship. (Part of Web of Science)
British Periodicals
Digital images of 500 periodicals, published from the 1680s to the 1930s, tracing the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals.'
Chronicling America
Chronicling America provides free access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Users can also access the list of digitized newspapers from West Virginia.
Civil War: Antebellum to Reconstruction, 1843-1877
Primary source documents for research into the American Civil War - provides access to more than 150 newspapers, 50,000 government documents and 4,000 rare broadsides and pieces of ephemera. Extensive local and national coverage of American culture, politics and society during this tumultuous period.
CQ Almanac
Coverage of the people, elections, legislation, and controversies in the US Congress from 1945-2008, providing in-depth review and analysis of legislation and policy for each year, organized by policy area. Comprehensive roll call votes for all major legislation.
CREDO Reference
A collection of nearly 500 encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference books provides a good starting point for research.
Digital National Security Archive
Collections of declassified government documents covering U.S. policy toward critical world events - including their military, intelligence, diplomatic and human rights dimensions - from 1945 to the present.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1630-1800
37,000 books, pamphlets and broadsides provide primary source documents on nearly every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft.
Early English Books Online (ProQuest)
Early English Books Online (EEBO) features page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700. Over 200 libraries worldwide have contributed to EEBO. From the first book printed in English through to the ages of Spenser, Shakespeare and of the English Civil War, EEBO's content draws on authoritative and respected short-title catalogues of the period and features a substantial number of text transcriptions specially created for the product.
EbscoHost
All EBSCOhost databases, cross-searchable, providing coverage for journal articles and other information in academic disciplines. Databases included are described on the database selection page. Many include links to full text of the articles indexed.
Economist Historical Archive
A complete searchable copy of every issue of The Economist from 1843 to 2003. New full-colour images, multiple search indexes, exportable financial tables and a gallery of front covers highlighting a key topic of each week - all combine to offer a primary source of research covering the 19th and 20th centuries.
Eight Centuries
Eight Centuries is a comprehensive database aggregating vast scholarly indexes to journals, newspapers, books, documents, artwork, and images.
This growing database contains 27,408,426 discrete links to primary source historical documents.
Formerly known as 19th Century Masterfile.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
138,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800, digitized and fully searchable. ECCO includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
Empire Online
Original documents, primary source material, essays, and biographical information related to empire studies, with an emphasis on the British Empire.
European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
Guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750 from "European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed In Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750." Part of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections.
Fold3 (formerly footnote)
Historical documents collections, most never before available before on the Internet, relating to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, WWII, U S Presidents, historical newspapers and naturalization documents. Users will need to create an account in order to download PDFs.
Gale Primary Sources
Discover primary sources from 7 digital archive collections including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, the Times Digital Archive and 19th Century British Newspapers. Special tools for analysis include term frequency and term cluster.
GenderWatch (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 9/30/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
HarpWeek (Harper's Weekly) (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on July 1, 2023. We suggest Harper's Weekly (partial serials index), an open access index of historical Harper’s Weekly, courtesy of the Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, as an alternative resource. This serial archive offers partial digital access to persistent holdings of complete issues of Harper's Weekly, an important 19th century political and social magazine, published from 1858-1870.
For additional assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Incites Journal Citation Reports (formerly Journal Citation Reports)
Journal impact factors and citation data for scholarly and technical journals. Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison. Users must create an account in order to export data.
International Medieval Bibliography (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 12/31/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
Iter
Scholarship related to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700), including citations for books and journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies). Includes more than 842,000 records. Updated daily and with thousands of new records added annually, this research tool is useful to scholars of the Middle Ages and / or Renaissance (400-1700).
Izvestiia Digital Archive
Among the longest-running Russian newspapers, Izvestiia was founded in March 1917 and during the Soviet period was the official organ of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Remarkable for its serious and balanced treatment of subject matter, Izvestiia has traditionally been a popular news source within intellectual and academic circles. You can access Izvestiia on the old East View platform here, East View Information Services UDP Platform.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, primary sources, and high-quality images. It has an archive of more than 1,000 scholarly, interdisciplinary journals, with full coverage for all but the most current 3-5 years. Images are contributed by universities, museums, and community and private collections. JSTOR is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
Keesings World News Archive
Keesing's publishes approximately 150 new articles each month on topics ranging from Political and Military Conflict, Human Rights, Major Legal Cases and War Crimes Trials, Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution, Budgets and Major Economic Developments just to name a few. Coverage only includes 2012 - 2016.
LGBTQ+ Source
LGBTQ+ Source provides scholarly and popular LGBT publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines and newspapers. It also includes a specialized LGBT thesaurus containing thousands of terms.
Monthly Catalog of US Government Publications 1895-1976
The Libraries' subscription to this resource will end on Sept. 30, 2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
Comprehensive index to historical information published by the United States federal government, describing over one million items published between January 1895 and June 1976, the Monthly Catalog helps you identify important and useful information on all subjects.
New York Times (Proquest Historical Newspapers) (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 8/31/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu. Full-image articles for the New York Times dating back to the beginning of the paper in the 19th century.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Twelve collections of primary source material covering various aspects of the long nineteenth century. Coverage for literature, science & technology, women, commerce, travel and more.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Includes approximately 150,000 pages of women's letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950, including 7,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. The material is drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings
Open Library of Humanities
The Open Library of Humanities publishes international, peer-reviewed scholarship across the humanities disciplines: from classics, theology and philosophy to modern languages and literatures, film and media studies, anthropology, political theory and sociology.
Oxford African American Studies Center (5 users)(discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 7/1/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
Oxford Handbooks Online: History
Articles from 21 Oxford Handbooks review the key issues, reveal original arguments and concepts, and set the agenda for new research in history, on topics such as cities, food, fascism, witchcraft, Europe, and more.
Pravda Digital Archive
Pravda ("Truth") was the official voice of Soviet communism and the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1918 and 1991. Founded in 1912 in St. Petersburg, Pravda originated as an underground daily workers' newspaper, and it soon became the main newspaper of the revolutionary wing of the Russian socialist movement. Throughout the Soviet era, party members were obligated to obligated to read Pravda. Today, Pravda still remains the official organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, an important political faction in contemporary Russian politics. You can access Pravda on the old East View platform here, East View Information Services UDP Platform.
Project Muse
Project MUSE provides searchable, full text access to hundreds of academic journals and books. It covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others.
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global
This is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997. It contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers-Black Newspapers
ProQuest Historical Newspapers-Black Newspapers includes 9 newspapers and offers primary source material for the study of American history and African-American culture, history, politics, and the arts. Newspapers included are: Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles Sentinel, Atlanta Daily World, The Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Philadelphia Tribune, and Cleveland Call and Post.
Readex - AllSearch
Easily search across the entire ReadEx historic documents collections from a single search box. These collections include American Historical Imprints (Civil War Broadsides and Ephemera, Evans, and the American Civil War Collection), American Historical Newspapers, American State Papers, House and Senate Journals, Senate Executive Journals, and U.S. Congressional Set.
Social Sciences Citation Index
Articles from high impact research journals in each field of the social sciences, with option for cited reference searching to trace scholarship. (Part of Web of Science)
Stalin Digital Archive (Discontinued)
The Libraries' subscription ended on 12/31/2023. For assistance in identifying an alternative resource(s), please email researchservices@mail.wvu.edu.
Times Digital Archive
Digital images of the Times (London) complete from 1785 to 2012.
U.S. Congressional Serial Set
Historic reports, documents and journals of the US Senate and House of Representatives, originally published in approximately 13,800 bound volumes. Digitization is on-going. When complete, coverage will extend through 1980.
U.S. Declassified Documents Online
The most comprehensive compilation of declassified documents from the executive branch. The types of materials include intelligence studies, policy papers, diplomatic correspondence, cabinet meeting minutes, briefing materials, and domestic surveillance and military reports.
World History Encyclopedia
The World History Encyclopedia covers a wide range of topics in world history, from ancient times to the first colonies in the Americas. It contains background information, multimedia, primary sources, and other learning materials in a range of formats.