The Library provides access for UIUC faculty, staff, and students to several major collections of digitized texts. These are available from the Online Research Resources page off the Library Gateway. Enter the title of the database in the search box and follow the links. These resources require authentication with a UIUC net id.

The Archive of Americana includes the full text of all titles listed in Early American Imprints, series I (1639-1800) and Early American Imprints, series II (1801-1819), the U.S. Congressional Serial Set (1817-1980), American State Papers (1789-1838), and America’s Historical Newspapers, 1690-1876. There are options for searching both by keyword and subject term (e.g., “Slave Trade”) in Early American Imprints. You can search across the full text of several hundred early American newspapers in America’s Historical Newspapers, 1690-1876, or you can limit your search to newspapers published in a particular state, among other options.

African-American Newspapers: The Nineteenth Century provides the full text (in transcribed form) of seven African-American newspapers published between 1827 and 1876: Freedom’s Journal, Colored American, North Star, National Era, Provincial Freeman, Christian Recorder, and Frederick Douglass Paper (which continues North Star). This database offers only the transcribed text of the original newspapers, not a digital facsimile of the original. It is available on the Library’s Online Research Resources page or through the link to Historical Newspapers under Quick Links on the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library web site.

The Gerritsen Collection on Women's History,  1543-1945, contains roughly 4,500 monographs and pamphlets and more than 400 periodicals, fully digitized.  Somewhat more than half of the material is in English, and the remainder is in German, French, and other European languages.  The material is searchable by keyword and/or subject headings, and the page images can be downloaded as .pdf files.

Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers offers about 700 newspapers as fully searchable digital facsimiles.  For many of these titles, only a handful of issues are available, while for others, several decades' worth of issues are included.  The database is available through the link to "Historical Newspapers" under Quick Links on the HPNL web site.

Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment is a collection of 320 transcribed primary source texts, linked to maps and images, with advanced browsing and searching capability. The sources comprising the database include accounts by explorers, traders, missionaries, naturalists, government officials, and military personnel, written between 1534 and 1860. These original sources range from individual documents, such as the eight-page Message of the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1831) to extensive multi-volume sets, such as the Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden.

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries contains writings by hundreds of female authors from the colonial period to the mid-20th century. The 515 texts included in the database are transcribed, rather than reproduced as digital facsimiles, and they are extensively indexed, as well as searchable by keyword. Biographical information is provided for each author, as well as synopses of many of the source documents, reprinted from Joyce Goodfriend’s 1987 bibliography, The Published Diaries and Letters of American Women.

Women and Social Movements in the United States. 1600-2000 is produced by historians Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin.  It includes an online journal and more than 1,600 primary source documents and several hundred images.  Also included are a dictionary of social movements and organizations, a chronology of U.S. women's history, and a series of subject-based teaching strategies.  The database is searchable by movements, authors, sources, a controlled vocabulary of subject terms, and other parameters.