Research Guides: HIST 373B: Women, Gender & the American Revolution: Primary Sources Online

Women & Social Movements Online Collection

Women and Social Movements in the United States: A Document Collection

Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, Women & Social Movements is an online collection of about 2,800 documents plus additional full-text interpretive material.

TIP: Try limiting your search by the year the item was written, for instance, 1775-1782.

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America brings together digital collections from hundreds of libraries across America. The database will lead you to freely available content: photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and much more.

Online Collections

Papers of the more famous individuals of the Revolutionary period may be available online. For example the George Washington Papers are at the Library of Congress site. Do a Google search to find others.

Some reputable collections and web sites with digital content for the late 18th century and early 19th century include:

Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive
Documenting the American South: The North Carolina Collection
The Elizabeth Murray Project: A Resource Site for Early American History
Documents and other archival material presented by the University of California Long Beach.
Founders Online
From the National Archives, a collection of primary documents from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.
John Bull & Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations
Martha Ballard's Diary
Massachusetts Historical Society Collections
The items in the subject "women" include correspondence between Mercy Otis Warren and Hannah Winthrop and the Mary Cooke Saltonstall Harrod (1723-1804) letters, and more.
Mercy Otis Warren Papers, 1709-1841
A New Nation: The Thomas Addis Emmet Collection of Illustrations Relating to the American Revolution and Early United States
Papers of Benjamin Franklin
Sponsored by The American Philosophical Society and Yale University, this site allows for searching the collection by keyword or browsing by name or date.
Revolutionary Era Broadsides
Collection at the New York Historical Society.
South Kingstown Colonial Records
Records from the clerk's office of South Kingstown, Rhode Island dating back to the late seventeenth century chronicling the social relations and material culture of this early American town; they document the existence of enslaved people.
Spy Letters of the American Revolution
Witness to the Early American Experience
Primary materials drawn from the collections of New York University and the New-York Historical Society.
Worlds of Change: Materials from 17th and 18th Century North America