LibGuides: American Cultural Interest Group: Books, Documents, Diaries, and Letters

Uses for Books, Documents, Diaries, and Letters

Rare books and documents including fiction and nonfiction, behavior manuals, educational materials, sheet music and liberitti, government documents, broadsides, pamphlets, and ephemra, such as pictures, postcards, etc.
Diaries and letters provide a glimpse inside notable figures lives as well information on those that have held special places in society such as midwives, educators, and political activist. These items are very important when looking at how historical events may have affected the daily lives of individuals.
Diaries and letters also revel the private thoughts and conversations of major literary, social, and political figures
Looking at specific authors works and unpublished papers can enhance literary criticism.

Books and Documents

The databases listed below focus on books and pamphlets (also called monographs). Databases are searchable by key terms, author, genre, subject, place of publication, history of publishing, and language.

Project Guttenberg
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. This is a wonderful resource for 19th century children's literature and works by women and people of color.
Women Working 1800-1830
Provides access to digitized books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and images from the collections of Harvard University Libraries and Museums on the topic of women in the U.S. economy from 1800-1930.

African Diaspora
International primary, secondary source documents, and video covering the movement of African peoples across the globe. Coverage dates: 1860 - present
American History, 1493 - 1945
Primary sources about U.S. history. Coverage dates: 1493 - 1945
American Indian Histories and Cultures
American West
Primary sources about the American West. Coverage dates: 1700 - 1950
Black Abolitionist Papers
Primary source collection of African Americans' efforts to abolish slavery. Coverage dates: 1830 - 1865
Black Studies Center
Primary and secondary sources about the Black experience, from Africa until modern times. dissertations and some video. Coverage dates: 1600 - present
Black Thought and Culture
Non-fiction writings by major American black leaders from before the American Revolution to present. Essays, speeches, and articles. Coverage dates: 1750 - 2011
Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction
Primary sources including newspapers, government documents, broadsides, and ephemera. Coverage dates: 1840 - 1877
Early American Imprints
Primary source books, pamphlets, and broadsides that describe life in early American history. Coverage dates: 1631 - 1819
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Digitized materials for every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom and thousands of American works. Coverage dates: 1701 - 1800
Making of America
Primary sources covering topics in American social history. Coverage dates: 1800 - 1900
Everyday Life and Women in America 1800-1920
Images (alongside transcriptions) of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. Coverage dates: 1800-1920
Global Commodities
Primary sources about chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver and gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber, tobacco, wheat, and wine and spirits, and their global economic impact through history. Coverage dates: 1500 - present
North American Indian Thought and Culture
Represents the largest compilation ever created of biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. The database presents the life stories of American Indians and Canadian First Peoples in their own words and through the words of others. Coverage dates: 17th - 21st centuries.
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
Images, videos, and print primary source materials documenting global social, political, and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. Emphases include rock and roll, counterculture, peace, and protest movements, but topics are wide-ranging. Coverage dates: 1950 - 1975
Sabin Americana
Primary sources about the history of the Americas, including Central, North, and South America. Coverage dates: 1500 - 1926
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
Primary and secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology, and bibliography. Coverage dates: 1490 - 2007
Women and Social Movements Library
Unique content about some of modern history’s greatest activists and the movements they shaped. Coverage dates: 1600 - 2015
Virginia Company Archives
Documents from the Virginia Company of London. Includes the Bermudas, trade between Britain and America, the ethnic and gender composition of early Virginia, relations between colonists and Native Americans, and London’s early economic history. Coverage dates: 1590 - 1790

Our Own Special Collections

The TCU Special Collections is located on the second floor of the library. It holds the following collections that would be interesting to American Studies scholars:

The William Luther Lewis Collection

Represents over three hundred principal authors of English and American Literature.
The collection is composed of approximately fifteen hundred titles, nearly nine hundred first editions
Materials range in date from the 15th to the 20th centuries, and most of the works are written by outstanding figures of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, including Poe and Emerson.

Erisman Odom Collection

Consists of juvenile literature from the late 19th century to the mid 20th literature
The literature is geared toward both boys and girls
A large portion of the literature concerns adventures and growing industrial technology of that time period

The collection also contains penny dreadfuls and short runs of American periodicals. Early volumes of American periodicals can be found in our databases, in the bound periodicals, and on microfilm.

TCU Special Collections
Search TCU's digital archives and special collections.

Diaries, Letters, and Narratives

Diaries and letters can serve as excellent primary sources, allowing researchers a personal glimpse into the lives of both well-know figures and common members in society. Among scholars studying women, diaries and letters can be a crucial resource in uncovering the interpersonal and public persona of women.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Contains letters and diaries from over 1300 women as well as biographies. It extends from the Colonial period to the 1950s. Another great aspect of this database is you can search a well-known figure or you can search by a number of fields, such as occupation or historical events. The largest group of documents, however centers around the Civil War.

First-Person Narratives of the American South
Compilation of printed texts from libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documenting the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. Includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations such as women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

Rotunda
Original digital works with digital editions of the papers of major figures of the early republic plus America in the 20th century.
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
Letters and diaries written in the Civil War era. Coverage dates: 1855 - 1875

Authors and Literature Online

Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection
The site offers all of the images of HRC’s Poe collection, some with transcriptions provided by the Poe Society. It includes archival materials. It has first editions of all of Poe’s books except on and letters from historical literary figures, such as Longfellow, Baudelaire, Whitman, and Kipling.
Walt Whitman Archive
Electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. The archive includes notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry.
Library of Southern Literature
This site is part of the Documenting the American South Collection of sources at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The site "includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924." This collection charts the development of southern literature from early pre-colonial days to the early twentieth century.
Mark Twain Project
Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

Humanities & Theatre

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Mary Couts Burnett Library
TCU Box 298400
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Subjects: Citation Tools, English Literature and Composition, Film, TV & Digital Media, Library Basics, Modern Language Studies, Reference, Spanish & Hispanic Studies, Theatre, Women and Gender Studies, Writing