CSUSM Primary Source Collections
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. For a complete list of databases with primary sources, click below:
- U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980Coverage of the activities of Congress including debates, messages from the President, and discussion of all aspects of American life and world events.
- American State Papers, 1789-1838Collection of U.S. Congressional business after the Continental Congresses and before the U.S. Congressional Serial Set began.
- Sabin Americana, 1500-1926Books, pamphlets, serials and other documents about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's.
- Accessible Archives (now History Commons)
19th century US primary sources, including newspapers.
- Making of Modern Law: Primary SourcesOver 300 years of legal codes.
- Making of the Modern WorldDigitized texts from the Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1914 provides access to over 62,000 primary source works on economics and business.
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.
- San Diego Union Newspaper ArchiveCollection of newspapers published in San Diego under various titles, including the San Diego Union 1872-1983.
- Los Angeles Times (Historical)Archival issues and articles beginning with 1881. Issues published during the past twenty-four years are not available in this database.
- New York Times (Historical Collection)Full page and article images including the NY Daily Times (1851-1857). The most recent four years are not included in this historical collection.
- America's News Collection (NewsBank)A variety of newspapers from the US including newswires, broadcast transcripts and videos. Date coverage is not well-defined, but the San Diego Union coverage starts with 1983.
- Times (London) digital archive 1785-1985Provides access to the complete digital edition of The Times (London). The search function allows category searching.
- Ethnic NewsWatchFull-text ethnic newspapers, searchable in English or Spanish.
- Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980Spanish and English language newspapers offering news, advertisements, opinion and more from across the nation.
- African American Newspapers, 1827-1998Newspapers digitized from 37 states chronicling African American experiences and influence in a variety of events.
- ProQuest - News & NewspapersCoverage starts in 1985 through current.
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. Options for limiting results to photographs or documents are on the left of the results list.
American Memory from the Library of Congress covering topics ranging from advertising to Westward Expansion, 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. To search the California newspapers only, see the California Digital Newspaper Collection.
Calisphere is a cooperative effort between California scholarly institutions to provide access to image collections and digitized materials. A companion site is the Online Archive of California but much of the content listed in OAC is not digitized.
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.
Some examples of specialized or un-expected primary collections:
Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution (referring to the 20th Century revolution as opposed to earlier rebellions.) Materials have been translated and some are excerpts due to difficulties with the original.
Perry-Casteñada Historical Map Collection from the University of Texas offers digital maps of the world, specific regions and a wide variety of time periods.
Women's Suffrage Digital Collections is a collection of links leading to digitized primary source collections regarding women and the right to vote. This sort of collection is useful as when you browse the list, you will see a number of different aspects of the broad topic.
FRASER (Federal Reserve) Archives contains materials not found in US federal government archives searches as this organization is not part of the US government structure.
U.S. Census of Population and Housing 1790-2010 includes special reports from various periods. Options for searching Census records through 1940 are available here.
