InfoGuides: American History Sources 1600s-1820s: Find Primary Source Periodical Publications

Major Periodical Collections

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Collects digitized American periodicals published from 1691 through 1820 with subject strengths in Afro-Americana, agriculture, children's literature, education, eighteenth-century imprints, leisure and hobbies, Masonic works, medicine, religion, science, technology, trade, and women's literature.
Tutorial for the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 1 database.
American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Tutorial for the American Periodicals database.

Major Newspaper Collections

Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
Full text, searchable collections of American 18th and 19th century primary sources with bibliographic citations. Access eyewitness accounts of historical events, descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements and genealogical records.

Contains Several Newspapers such as:

The Pennsylvania Gazette — 1728 through 1800
The South Carolina Gazette — 1732–1775
The South Carolina & American General Gazette — 1764–1775
The South Carolina Gazette & Country Journal — 1765–1775
The Gazette of the State of South-Carolina — 1777–1780

Caribbean Newspapers 1718-1876 This link opens in a new window
Access more than 150 years of Caribbean and Atlantic history, cultures and daily life. Features more than 140 newspapers from 22 islands, chronicling the region's evolution across two centuries through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, obituaries and other news items.
Tutorial for the Caribbean Newspapers 1718-1876 database.
Early American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1690-1900 This link opens in a new window
Includes fully searchable issues from almost 1000 historical American newspapers. Focusing largely on the 18th and early 19th centuries, this online collection is based on Clarence S. Brigham's ?History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820? and other authoritative bibliographies.
Tutorial for the Early American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1690-1900 database.
Early American Newspapers: Virginia This link opens in a new window
Access the early newspapers, often printed by small-town printers, which documented daily life in Virginia communities, supported different political parties and recorded both majority and minority views for nearly three centuries (1736-1920); as well as the Richmond-Times Dispatch (1903-1986).
Tutorial for the Early American Newspapers: Virginia database.
Nineteenth Century US Newspapers This link opens in a new window
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Provides access to primary source content, both full text and images, in numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.

Virginia Chronicle
Virginia Chronicle is a historical archive of Virginia newspapers, providing free access to full text searching and digitized images of over a million newspaper pages.
This collection contains 150,076 issues comprising 1,106,770 pages and 183,885 articles. Virginia Chronicle expands on the Library's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program's Chronicling American collection with the inclusion of Virginia imprint titles out of scope to the NDNP. The collection is full text searchable, as well as browseable by both title and date.
Virginia Gazette
The Virginia Gazette was the official newspaper of Virginia, printed in Williamsburg from 1736 until 1780. When the capital of Virginia moved to Richmond in 1780, printers transferred their businesses to the new seat of government. Both Dixon & Nicolson and Clarkson & Davis resumed their papers in Richmond.
Newspapers in the Digital Library are based on microfilm assembled by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture in 1950. As a result, issues in the Digital Library include only those that were known to be extant at that time. Other issues may exist but are not available here.
Maryland Gazette (MSA SC 2731) 1758-1765
Contains digitized pages scanned from microfilm of the Maryland Gazette between 1758-1765. This set is not keyword searchable.

Bibliographies and Other Resources

Loyalist Newspapers of the American Revolution1763-1783: A Bibliography
An article listing loyalist newspapers presented by state. Link is to pdf prepared by the American Antiquarian Society.