Archival collection descriptions and finding aids from over 1,000 institutions.
Some collection descriptions include links to images, sound recordings, or other online materials. You can narrow your search results to those that have links to digital content.
NOTE: Visits to Special Collections will be restricted during the fall 2020 semester. Please contact the Special Collections staff for more information.
This database provides access to finding aids that describe and inventory the manuscript and other archivally-managed holdings of the University of Delaware Library Special Collections.
To find records for books and other imprints located in Special Collections, enter your keywords and limit your search location to Special Collections.
The Library recently added over 50 primary source collections by Adam Matthew. While staff work to link to these resources from the main databases page, please use this spreadsheet to access the collections.
Full text of 1,462 plays written by 233 playwrights from North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries, together with selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Provides primary source materials on The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, including letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records and diaries.
History Vault is comprised of many American history primary source collections. The UD Library focuses on providing access to those modules related to African American history. (Purchase of the NAACP Papers, Plantation Papers, and Slavery & the Law was made possible through a grant from the Unidel Foundation.)
Presents the publications of all 47 states involved in the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the most controversial and contentious program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), which ran from 1933 to 1943
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction: 1840-1900 (Cornell University), 1850-1877 (University of Michigan).
Primary source material documenting the cultural history of the American South from the viewpoint of Southerners, including diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, works on slavery, and regional literature.
Facsimile images of literary manuscripts, divided into two collections: British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance and British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900.
This collection can also be searched on Gale Primary Sources, an integrated platform that combines Gale’s digital archives into a single cross-searchable interface.
A unique archive of almost every play submitted for license between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays, including The London Stage, 1660-1800.