FYSE-109: Finding Your Roots

1. Talk as a group about some of the kinds of primary sources you hope to find for your own project. What people, places, or events might you use as keywords?
   • Review the set of primary sources that your group has been assigned, and choose one database/collection to explore
   • Decide as a group which topic/ keywords you will use to search (choose one, don't search on everyone's topic)
2. Once you're searching in a database/collection, consider the following:
   • What do the items in this collection have in common? Why are they together?
   • Can you search the site? If so, what terms did you try? if not, what did you do instead? What happened?
3. Choose one source from the collection and answer the following:
   • What kinds of questions could you answer with this source? What questions does it raise?
   • Does this source lead you to others? For example, are there other related sources in the same collection? Can you gather additional information (like keywords or proper nouns) you might use for a future search?
4. If you have time, explore a second database/collection to search as a group.

Amherst College Digital Collections

• Amherst College Digital Collections 

  Digitized art works, photographs, manuscripts, books, and other media from Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and the library's Art & Architecture Collection.

Collections from other institutions

• Smithsonian Institution 

  Gallery of digitized collections held by the Smithsonian.

Collections organized by era

• Making of the Modern World (1450-1914) 

  Primary source materials (including broadsides and pamphlets, serials, and monographs) tracing British and US economic history from 1450-1914.

• Electronic Enlightenment (18th century) 

  Full text of over 53,000 letters and documents from the best critical editions.

Collections organized around slavery and abolition

• American Slavery Collection (1820-1922) 

  Digital edition of the American Antiquarian Society's holdings of slavery and abolition materials, with more than 3,500 works.

• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 

  Over 2,000 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former enslaved people, collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project.

• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection 

  This collection from Cornell University includes pamphlets and leaflets documenting the anti-slavery struggle at local, regional, and national levels.

• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice (1490-2007) 

  Thousands of pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images documenting the varieties and legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today.

Collections organized around social identities & social histories

• Archives of Sexuality & Gender : LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940 (1940-2014) 

  Primary sources like newsletters, organizational papers, government documents, manuscripts, and pamphlets, focusing on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world.

• Black Studies Center (25,000 BC to present) 

  Cross-searchable gateway to black studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, reference books, and more.

• Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture (1790-1920) 

  Two million pages of trial transcripts, police and forensic reports, detective novels, newspaper accounts, true crime literature, and related ephemera, focusing on nineteenth-century criminal history, law, literature, and justice.

• Digital Transgender Archive 

  An online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. The DTA treats "transgender as a practice rather than an identity category in order to bring together a trans-historical and trans-cultural collection of materials related to trans-ing gender."

• Mass Observation Online 

  Primary-source collection containing original manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organization, as well as printed publications, photographs, and interactive features.

• North American Indian Thought and Culture 

  Autobiographies, biographies, publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files of indigenous people from across North America.

• Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974 

  Diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary from the 1960s.

• South Asian American Digital Archive 

  Archive of South Asian American history includes photographs, oral histories, correspondence, ads and more.

• Umbra Search: African American History 

  Collection of over 400,000 digitized sources in African American history, from more than 1,000 libraries, museums and archives.

Collections organized by geographic region

• Digital Commonwealth 

  Primary source documents from the collections of museums, libraries, and archives across Massachusetts.

• dLOC: Digital Library of the Caribbean 

  Maps, oral histories, legal documents, books and other sources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.

• Digital Public Library of America 

  Catalog of public domain and openly licensed images and other digitized materials from archives, libraries, museums, and other U.S. cultural heritage institutions.

• EuroDocs 

  Guide to digitized European collections organized by country. Covers the Medieval era to the present. From Harold Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

• Oxford Islamic Studies Online 

  Interdisciplinary reference content and commentary, plus Quranic materials, primary sources, images, maps, and timelines. Includes Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World and other core reference works on Islam.

• South Asia Archive 

  Fully searchable digital archive of documents ranging from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century.

Collections organized around political histories and political activism

• Civil Rights Resource Guide 

  Digital collections and a curated list of more specific websites from the Library of Congress.

• Free Speech Movement Digital Archive 

  The Free Speech Movement (FSM) Digital Archives document the Free Speech Movement (University of California, Berkeley, September-December 1964), as well as its origins in political protest and civil rights movements.

• Freedom Summer Digital Archive 

  More than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts, including "official records of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the personal papers of movement leaders and activists such as Amzie Moore, Mary King and Howard Zinn, letters and diaries of northern college students who went South to volunteer for the summer; newsletters produced in Freedom Schools; racist propaganda, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and brochures, magazine articles, telephone call logs, candid snapshots, internal memos, press releases and much more."

These databases have collections of newspapers published generally pre-1990, often digitized from print or microfilm. They are searchable, but be aware that the results won't be as accurate as born-digital newspapers.