Primary Sources

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 1926 and limited preview afterwards. Another good source for 19th century British publications (including magazines and newsletters).

HathiTrust contains millions pre-1926 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.

"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