Lloyd Sealy Library

A library guide to researching primary sources.

Multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program.

A comprehensive collection of early English newspapers from London, the British Isles, and colonies, including many American titles.

Archive containing manuscripts, books, broadsheets and periodicals from 1790 - 1920. Collection covers Europe, North America, India and the Antipodes.  Includes  raw data about crime, its solutions, and the popular response.

Portal to digital content held at the nations' archives, libraries, museums and other cultural heritage organizations.

 

A digital archive of 150,000 books published in the eighteenth century, covering a broad spectrum of topics like law, history, science, and art.

Several historical American and international law collections incuding law reviews and journals from their first volume of publication, the Federal Register, Presidential Documents, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Attorney Generals Opinions, World Constitutions, legal classics, and the newest collection, Slavery in America and the World; History, Culture and Law. A comprehensive user's guide to this database is available at  https://heinonline.org/HeinDocs/HOLUserGuide.pdf.

To access this database you must login with your NYPL library card.  If you don't already have a NYPL library card you can apply for one here.

This is a digital collection of manuscript and archival materials focusing on the 20th Century including main collections such as:

Black Freedom Movement and Civil Rights (includes records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE).

Southern Life and Slavery (documenting the realities of slavery "at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society" providing "some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system."

A searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War. Data comes from census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. The index contains over 35,000 records and it is expected to grow as John Jay College professors and students locate and assemble data from additional sources.

An eclectic collection of digital collections of primary source materials mostly from British and American libraries.

Brings together all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. Much of the non-legal material in this collection is based on the holdings of the Buffalo Public Library. Its rare book collection contains hundreds of nineteenth century pamphlets and books on slavery.  A quick reference guide on how to ue this collection can be found at  https://heinonline.org/HeinDocs/SlaveryQRG.pdf

These freely available websites aggregate state legislative information, providing a more uniform and user-friendly search experience and the ability to compare legislative activities across the states.

1. Openstates.org
2. Legiscan.com  
3. BillTrack50.com (must register, but it is free)

Brings together primary documents, books, images, scholarly essays, book reviews, audio recordings, Web site reviews, and teaching tools, all documenting the multiplicity of women’s activism in public life.