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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:
19th century US primary sources, including newspapers.
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.
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.