Freely Available Information

Nearly 30 million archived images, texts, videos, and sounds.
Collection strengths include: American Civil War, Aviation, Baseball, Civil Rights, Food, Immigration, Photography, and Women in Science.

Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised items – books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for. Our dedicated thematic collections on art, fashion, music, photography and World War I contain galleries, blogs and exhibitions to inform and inspire." --- europeana

Search the full text of over 30 million books - full view prior to 1930 and limited preview afterwards. Another good source for 19th century British publications (including magazines and newsletters).

HathiTrust contains millions pre-1930 volumes (books and magazines). HathiTrust also provides both historical and more recent public domain government publications. HathiTrust offers two different sophisticated search interfaces - Advanced full-text search and Advanced catalog search - that allow for truncation and Boolean operators.

Over 10 million digitized texts (e.g. books, magazines).
Internet Archive also provides access to archived videos, images, and audio files.
One of the few archives to offer very high quality color images of older publications.

More than 300 different digital collections.
Limit your search by Subject or Format.

Google Books Magazine collection offers free access to over one hundred magazines. Though many are obscure, niche, unusual and rather recent (1980s-1990s) this collection also offers extensive runs of a few mainstream magazines such as Life, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science. This collection is particularly notable for the runs of magazines published for and about the African American community including: Black Enterprise, Black World (Negro Digest), Crisis, Ebony, Ebony Jr., and Jet.

Be sure to check "Archived Materials Online".
Be sure to uncheck "Archival Desciprions"

"Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program ... a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers." --- Library of Congress

JSTOR Early Journal Content provides free access to articles published prior to 1930 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere. JSTOR provides free access to more modern open access journal articles.

The content is curated and sourced from a wide array of libraries, museums, historical societies and individual collectors. The results are diverse thematic collections of scholarly value available to everyone everywhere. Includes the following Collections: American Prison Newspapers, HIV AIDS & the Arts, Student Activism on Campus, and Independent Voices.

"Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century." --- JSTOR