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History 430: Seminar in U.S. History (Quinney)

Sources and methods in researching the history of US foreign policy and affairs..

CSUSM Primary Source Collections on Political Extremism

These collection are generally password-protected as CSUSM licenses the content from commercial providers. Use your campus ID and password to gain access. 

This is a sampling of collections from the CSUSM databases. Depending on your topic, there may be other databases that would be helpful. Below this box is a list of newspapers for public opinion and reaction and a list of some internet (free-access) quality websites. 

Newspaper Archives Databases

A number of CSUSM databases are backfiles of newspapers. There are other newspaper collections freely available on the internet and are listed in the Internet Primary Collections section. More current issues are available as separate databases in the CSUSM Databases collection.

Internet Collections

These collections are assembled by universities, archives, museums and other organizations for free access. You will need to give citation credit for materials used even if they are free of charge. Some collections are more US-centric than others. 

Library of Congress Digital Collections includes documents and images held in the Library of Congress. 

American Memory from the Library of Congress covering topics including protests and rebellions, containing documents, photographs, music files and more. 

Chronicling America contains newspapers not available in fee-based digital databases, generally smaller papers with localized coverage. Date range 1789-1963. 

Internet Archive offers an interesting range of digitized materials including books, moving images, and sound files. This collection depends on volunteer contributions so the range of topics is widespread and not necessarily deep on some topics. 

Primary Sources: Activism from our neighbor, UCSD. A wide range of collections from late 19th-21st century. 

 

Examples of specific archival primary source collections

Marxist Internet Archive well-known and the not-so-known individuals who have been identified with a variety of social movements with a number of scanned primary source images and documents. 

Primary/Original sources on Terrorism (Dudley Knox Library of the Naval Postgraduate School) contains documents from a variety of declassified sources regarding jihad, Osama bin Laden and more. 

Federal Bureau of Investigation Reading Room (The Vault) contains redacted documents from FBI files on a number of well- and lesser-known individuals and groups identified as terrorist. 

United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism offers documents regarding 20th and 21st century terrorism, extremism through a global lens. 

National Security Archive (hosted at George Washington University) has actively collected declassified documents on a wide variety of topics for over 30 years.

Declassified Government Documents (University of Texas, Austin) has not been updated since 2015, but most of the links continue to work. Note some links will take you to databases restricted to UT users.

Homeland Security Digital Library (Department of Homeland Security) provides access to CSUSM as a Federal Depository Library. This includes CRS Reports and selected Congressional testimony.