Having trouble accessing government information? See the Libraries’ guide to Alternative Sources for Federal Information and Data.
HIST 398.001: Leisure-Time in the Making of Modern America: Other Primary Sources
Digital Collections
- ProQuest History VaultProvides access to historical documents of the history of the American South and African American History. This collection is organized into two main groups; Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle AND Southern Life and Slavery. Notable modules include the NAACP Papers and Southern Women and their Families in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Holdings of the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection (Series 1 & 2)Archive of publications focused exclusively on U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture from colonial times until 1960. Series 1 focuses on the creative life of U.S. Latinos and Hispanics. Series 2 focuses on Hispanic American civil rights, religion and women’s rights from the 18th through the 20th century.
- North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral HistoriesCoverage: 1840 - 1920
Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. With more than 100,000 pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, the collection provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Several thousand pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews, indexed and searchable for the first time, are included, along with thousands of political cartoons. - Black Studies CenterMajor indexing and full text database for African American studies. It includes the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, a series of essays by leading scholars about the Black Experience; HistoryMakers, a streaming audiovisual collection of 100 oral history interviews (of 2-3 hours each and corresponding transcripts) with prominent contemporary African Americans; historical backfiles of The Chicago Defender and Daily Defender; the International Index to Black Periodicals, which covers scholarly and popular Black Studies journals, including full text for many titles; and Black Literature Index, which contains bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.
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America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894 to 1915A Library of Congress digital collection. Work, school, and leisure activities in the United States from 1894 to 1915 are featured in this presentation of 150 motion pictures. Highlights include films of the United States Postal Service from 1903, cattle breeding, fire fighters, ice manufacturing, logging, calisthenic and gymnastic exercises in schools, amusement parks, boxing, expositions, football, parades, swimming, and other sporting events.
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North Carolina HBCU History Available on DigitalNCDigitalNC hosts historic materials from ten different Historically Black Colleges and Universities in North Carolina. This collection includes yearbooks, student newspapers, photographs and more dating back to 1881.
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College Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher EducationDiaries, letters, scrapbooks and photographs from the archives of a select group of the earliest women’s colleges in the United States (description from website).
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Southern Oral History ProgramSearch the Interview Database (linked above) for specific types of leisure and recreation.
- Archives of Sexuality & GenderIncludes "Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century"
Adam Matthew Digital Collections
- AM ExplorerSearch across all the Adam Matthew primary source collections together via the search box, or browse the list of collections individually. The search will be limited to the Adam Matthew collections that have been purchased by UNC Chapel Hill.
- Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture: The History of Mass TourismA primary source collection dealing with the evolution of European and American working class tourism between 1850 and 1980s. Includes guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs and personal travel journals that provide insight into the expansion, accessibility and affordability of tourism for the masses and the evolution of some of the most successful travel agencies in the world.
- Travel Writing, Spectacle and World HistoryWomen's travel diaries and correspondence from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 1835-1976.
- Everyday Life & Women in America, c1800-1920Everyday Life and Women in America, c.1800-1920 comprises thousands of fully searchable images of rare books, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. Material is especially rich in conduct of life and domestic management literature, offering vivid insights into the daily lives of women and men, as well as emphasising contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures.
- Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954Based on original manuscript collections from the holdings of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Covers a wide range of dates and topics related to Jewish history in the US, from Early Jewish Settlements in the US through the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th Century.
- American History: 1860-1945: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Modern Era: 1860-1945This collection includes letters, diaries and documents from the Civil War, alongside images, newspapers, and magazines from the war. It also includes presidential correspondence, and documents on the rise of industrial America, the Ku Klux Klan, and World War II.
- Indigenous Newspapers in North AmericaAmerican Indian Newspapers offers the publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.
- World's Fairs: A Global History of ExpositionsPrimary source materials on over 200 World's fairs, from the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in London (1851) through the 20th century, focusing on Northern European, North American, Australian and East Asian expositions.
- Victorian Popular CultureA collection of primary sources documenting popular culture in the second half of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, primarily in Great Britain but also in the United States. The four modules of this collection are: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema.
- Trade Catalogues and the American HomeA collection of trade catalogues, cards and marketing ephemera tracing the rise of the ‘American dream’ and evolution of commerce throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1850-1950). The content is sourced from three collections of trade literature in America: the Lawrence B. Romaine collection at UC Santa Barbara, the Hagley Museum and Library and the Winterthur Library.
- J. Walter Thompson: Advertising in AmericaDocuments the history, operation, policies and accomplishments of one of the world's largest and oldest advertising firms.
- Food and Drink in HistoryPrimary source collection consisting of printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government documents, marketing reports, films and illustrated content from around the globe documenting the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere (1514-1980). Highlights of Module I include the cookbook collections from the University of California San Diego and Michigan State University, with a focus on Mexican, Latin American, Pacific Rim, Chinese early Californian, African and Asian cuisine.
Digitized Archival Resources at UNC
- Digitized Collections @ Wilson LibraryLife histories, private papers, yearbooks, institutional records and more, all available online. Compiled for this course by Matt Turi, Manuscripts Research and Instruction Librarian at Wilson Library.
Other Archival Resources
The databases below help identify primary source repositories around the world. Many archival institutions put finding aids or guides to their collections on the web. They also may have some of their collections digitized and available online.
- ArchiveGridServes as a single point of entry that provides online access to descriptions of archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives worldwide. Allows discovery of information about primary source materials - both personal papers and corporate records.
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National Archives CatalogThe online catalog of the National Archives and Records Administration's nationwide holdings, including the Washington DC area, Regional Archives, and Presidential Libraries. It can also be used to search a subset of NARA documents that are available online.
About AM Primary Sources
Adam Matthew is an academic publisher of primary source material. The digital collections found here are presented in a similar fashion, allowing you to search for items based on keywords but also providing several options for browsing. Browsing can help you develop a topic. Additionally, if you find a subset of the collection that has material relevant to your topic, you can restrict your search to a particular module, theme, or archival collection. When given the option, you may want to limit your search by region, as this provider also has a lot of material related to the UK. Overall, this is a good option for gaining familiarity with digitized archival material.
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You can cross-search all of their digital collections through AM Explorer
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You can find a full list of all Adam Matthew Products through their website (note: we do not subscribe to all modules)
LibGuides on Selected Resources
Records, Papers, Archives
The Libraries offer many primary source documents, in a variety of formats.
Many digitized collections can be found within this guide and on the History databases page.
You can also search the online catalog for primary sources, using words such as: personal narratives, autobiographies, diaries, letters, records, sources, interviews, archives, or archival sources:
Visit our Wilson Special Collections Library. Additionally, many of these materials have been digitized. You will also find extensive digitized materials available on the Finding Aids for individual collections.
The guide for Using Records about Slavery in the Southern Historical Collection is a fantastic resource for the topic, but also an excellent guide to using Finding Aids and other research strategies for special collections.
Take some time to familiarize yourself with the various special collections. Keep in mind that our collection is extensive, going far beyond NC related material, and could include something relevant to your research no matter what your topic may be. Also, explore the special collections at Duke's Rubenstein Library using the same login you made when setting up an account for accessing material from Wilson Special Collections.