LibGuides: COMM 832: Methods in Communication History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources Databases available at the WSU Libraries

Original documents, records, and historical artifacts related to Communications. For additional primary source databases, click here.

African American Communities This link opens in a new window
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Geographic focus: Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, and North Carolina. Personal diaries and scrapbooks, pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, oral histories, photographs, postcards, maps and ephemera.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America This link opens in a new window
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Browse through a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps, newspapers, photographs and travel journals. Dates range from earliest contact with European settlers to the Civil Rights movement.
American Periodicals Series (1741-1988) This link opens in a new window
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American Periodicals Series includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century (1741-1988). Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's. Terms of Use
Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
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A platform that allows searching across all of Gale primary source collections. Collections include: 19th Century UK Periodicals, The Economist Historical Archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Indigenous Peoples: North America, Making of the Modern World, Ninteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Sabin Americana 1500-1926, and the Times Digital Archive
Disability in the Modern World This link opens in a new window
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Disability in the Modern World will include 150,000 pages of primary sources, supporting materials, and archives, along with 125 hours of video.
LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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Archival materials (as well as books and periodicals) documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.
Vogue Archive This link opens in a new window
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The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day, reproduced in high-resolution color page images.
Women's Magazine Archive Collection 1: 1883-2005 This link opens in a new window
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Women’s Magazine Archive 1 provides access to the complete archives of the foremost titles of this type, including Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal, which serve as canonical records of evolving assumptions about gender roles and cultural mores. Other titles here focus on narrower topics but deliver valuable source content for specific research areas. Parents, for example, is of particular relevance for research in the fields of children’s education, psychology, and health, as well as reflecting broader social historical trends. Terms of Use
Women's Magazine Archive Collection 2: 1846-2015 This link opens in a new window
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Women’s Magazine Archive 2 features several of the most prominent, high-circulating, and long-running publications in this area, such as Woman’s Day and Town & Country. Collection 2 also, however, complements the first collection by including some titles focusing on more specific audiences and themes. Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, for example, are oriented towards a younger readership, while black women’s interests are represented by Essence. Women’s International Network News differs in being a more political, activist title, with an international dimension. Terms of Use

Digital Archives related to Communications

Digitized archival materials publicly available online

Digital Public Library of America
An all-digital library that aggregates metadata — or information describing an item — and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
Ad*Access (Duke University Libraries)
Over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955, concentrating on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.
Internet Archive
The Moving Image Archive within the Internet Archive provides access to nearly a quarter million films, uploaded by Archive users, and ranging from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
Kansas Memory
The digital collections of the Kansas Historical Society. Includes nearly 600,000 archival images and state government records from the State Achives.
Museum of Broadcast Communications
Link to the museum's collection database. Not all content is available online.
University of Maryland Special Collections in Mass Media and Culture
Special Collections in Mass Media and Culture holds a wide-ranging collection of resources documenting the history of radio and television broadcasting. Important collections include the National Public Broadcasting Archives (NPBA) and the Library of American Broadcasting (LAB).
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968. The collection spans the presidential administrations of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The core collection includes evening news from ABC, CBS, and NBC (since 1968), an hour per day of CNN (since 1995) and Fox News (since 2004).
Women in Journalism
The project includes comprehensive, full-life interviews with women journalists—from pioneers of early women’s journalism, to champions of civil rights, to celebrities in the world of broadcast television—who have made significant contributions to society through careers in journalism since the 1920s.