A busy few months have meant little time for blogging, but I find myself with a slight lull on a Friday afternoon at long last! The
History Thesis Fair for 2nd year undergraduates is also fast approaching, and it seems timely therefore to put together a post which might help in answering one of the questions that I most frequently get asked by undergraduates considering writing their thesis on some aspect of US history: is it possible to find sufficient primary source material without travelling to the United States?
Obviously we do subscribe to
many extensive electronic resources that provide a wealth of primary source material, and we also have a substantial collection of
primary sources available on microfilm in the library, but increasingly you are by no means limited to what we have purchased here in Oxford. The amount of primary source material that is being digitised and made freely available on the web by all sorts of institutions, organisations, and people in the US is vast, growing, and transformative. This whole area could fill several blog posts and still only scratch the surface, but what I will do here is provide some tips and suggestions for places to start looking beyond just throwing your search terms into Google and hoping you strike lucky. I will aim to follow up with more detailed posts on some of the resources mentioned here over the next few months.
Firstly, a plug for what we’ve been doing at the VHL to help our readers find useful web resources. We have a
page on a site called Delicious which we use to save links to websites that we find as and when we come across them. It would be well worth checking
our delicious page for the subject or area that you are interested in first to see what we have already found – you can search or use the tags on the right-hand side of the page to filter the full list to more relevant links for you. Delicious can also be a useful site to search in general. If you haven’t come across it before, it is a site entirely devoted to lists of useful websites created by its users; anything you find on Delicious has been consciously and deliberately saved by someone, and therefore evaluated at least to a certain extent, so you can perhaps be a little more confident in its quality than just from a random Google search. Other libraries are also using Delicious to create and maintain lists of free web resources too – the
History Faculty Library has a page too, for example.
A strategic way to approach your search for primary source material on the web is to think about it in terms of the libraries, archives, and other institutions that are likely to be the homes for the originals. Almost all of these institutions are engaged in some kind of digitisation to a greater or lesser extent; you may not be able to travel to them physically but it’s amazing what you can find by visiting them virtually. The websites of the
Library of Congress and
US National Archives are both wonderful places to start. The Library of Congress have extensive digital collections available at
http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html (click on the ‘Digital Collections’ button at the top of their homepage), including
American Memory (numerous themed historic collections on all sorts of topics),
Chronicling America (historic newspapers – see
the earlier post on this blog for more information) and
Prints & Photographs. They also have a huge list of thematic bibliographies and guides at
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/bibhome.html to help you navigate their collections (both physical and digital) as well as pointing out to other useful online resources from elsewhere. The
National Archives have less material on
their main website, but are making thousands of digitised sources available on other, dedicated sites such as
DocsTeach (aimed at teachers and schools) and the
Digital Vaults, and subscription-based sites such as
Fold3 (which has a military/veterans focus).
Other institutions are all doing the same kind of thing. If you’re interested in a particular geographical location, start with the website for the relevant
State Historical Association or
major universities in the area; many states also have digital library programs, designed to provide access to digitised resources from many different institutions throughout the state on a single website. Examples are
Calisphere (for California),
Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts),
LOUISiana Digital Library,
Digital NC (North Carolina), the
Portal to Texas History, and so on. These kind of sites are particularly good for documents such as letters and diaries, photographs, oral history, audiovisual materials, and maps.
An earlier post on this blog gives pointers to some places to look for historic American
newspapers online.
Likewise, if your area is political history, particularly for 20th century Presidents, the website of the relevant
Presidential Library would be a good place to start. Some of them, like the
JFK Library, are engaged in particularly extensive digitisation projects. If you’re looking for material on Presidents and their administrations, the
Miller Center at the University of Virginia have a really good
reference resource arranged by President on their website which points to all sorts of sources both from their own collections and elsewhere on the web.
As well as looking for digitised collections, another good tip is to search for
exhibitions, either fully online ones or websites set up to accompany physical exhibitions, such as those listed on the
Library of Congress or
National Archives websites. Exhibitions are a big driver of digitisation, but tend to be more narrowly focused on their theme than the kind of material you may find in the more extensive digital collections portals.
Another tip is to look at the various
social media profiles of many of these institutions, as these are often used for outreach and promotion with digitised materials frequently posted. As well as
Facebook and
Twitter pages, look at institutional profiles on sites such as
Flickr,
Tumblr, and
YouTube. Flickr has a project called the
Flickr Commons, where many libraries and archives are uploading their historic photographs and other images. An excellent example on Tumblr is
Today’s Document from the National Archives. There are also some fantastic mash-up sites such as
Old Maps Online and
HistoryPin which overlay historic maps and photographs from all sorts of institutions onto Google maps, for example.
There are a few things to be aware of when looking for and making use of free web resources though. Unlike library-purchased e-resources, you will often find that these are not full-text searchable and are often just images; you may well have to decipher handwriting and may not be able to easily find which particular page of a document is going to be relevant to your needs. The cataloguing can be less extensive as well, and you may have to rely on browsing through the documents and images rather than expecting to find what you want by searching. And what is freely available can be rather hit-and-miss itself. While it’s true that there is now a huge amount of material available in this way, it’s still a tiny drop in the ocean, and so you may be lucky and find a lot for your topic, or you may find that there’s hardly anything relevant to your particular area of research. It’s always worth having a look though! And if you come across something useful that we don’t have on our Delicious list, please let us know so that we can save it for others to find too.
The Vere Harmsworth Library is home to the Philip & Rosamund Davies US Elections Campaigns Archive, an extensive collection of campaign ephemera from American elections at all levels. The archive has been donated to the library by Professor Philip Davies, Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and is the result of many years of active collecting. The majority of the material dates from the later 20th century, but there are examples of older items dating back as far as 1840. The archive continues to grow as Professor Davies collects and donates material from each new round of elections in the United States.
The archive has now been fully catalogued and can be made available to researchers in Oxford. While items such as those contained in the archive were intended to be ephemeral at the point of production, they can tell researchers a great deal about the campaigns and candidates they were produced to support (or indeed protest). They are physical evidence of the issues on which campaigns were fought, and the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the candidates who fought them. Not just the literature, but the slogans and design of buttons, posters and bumper stickers, as well as the very items branded for campaigns indicate the way candidates chose to present themselves and their opponents. As well as providing insight into the campaigns themselves, the literature and artefacts contained within the collection also demonstrate wider developments in society, politics and technology.
