Historical E-Book/Digital Collections at the OSU Library: Other Collections (Books, Manuscripts, Newspapers. Documents, etc.)

Below are various other digital collections of historical books (as well as other publications and manuscripts) from the United States and other countries.  These are database collections provided by the OSU Library.

You will need to log in with your OSU email address and O-Key password to access these databases off-campus.  Click HERE to log in.

• American Indians Histories and Culture which contains manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers right up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century.

• American Periodical Series from ProQuest contains over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children’s and women’s magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.

• American West  which includes rare and original documents including printed books, journals, historic maps, broadsides, periodicals, advertisements, photographs, artwork and more on the American West from the Everett D. Graff collection at the Newberry Library, Chicago.

• Archives of Sex and Gender contains material drawn from hundreds of institutions and organizations, including both major international activist organizations and local, grassroots groups, the documents in the Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 present important aspects of LGBTQ life in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

• Black Abolitionist Papers This collection searches a unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865.

• Black Drama, Second Ed. contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

• Center for Research Libraries (CRL) holds over 4 million newspapers, journals and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching, with an emphasis outside the United States.  In addition to their digital collections, CRL lists print materials and manuscripts in their repositories users can request through our OSU-based Interlibrary Services and may be kept for extended periods of time. See their topic guides for resources at CRL in topic areas such as literature, United States history, world history and culture, etc.

• Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994.  The bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives constitute a rich collection of primary source material on all aspects of American history. Upon completion, the digital version of the Serial Set will consist of approximately 369,000 publications published in 14,500 volumes and over 11 million pages.

• Congressional Serial Set Maps, 1817-1980 from  Readex (Newsbank) includes images of maps in the publications in the Congressional Serial Set.  You can search by location, subject, personal name, issuing bodies, and dates.

• Hathi Trust is a partnership of major academic libraries and research institutions to create an open access collection of digital texts from different periods and covering many fields of knowledge.  Currently over 9 million volumes have been digitized for the Hathi Trust initiative.  NOTE: Be sure to log in (selecting Oklahoma State University from the drop-down list of universities); logging in will ensure you can access all the full-text content in the collection.

• North American Indian Drama contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others.

• North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database. is a digital collection with hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery—defending it, attacking it or simply analyzing it, including an expansive slavery collection of mostly pre-Civil War materials. It has also gathered every English-language legal commentary on slavery published before 1920, which includes many essays and articles in obscure, hard-to-find journals in the United States and elsewhere. It provides more than 1,000 books and pamphlets on slavery from the 18th and 19th centuries, and many modern histories of slavery.

• Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law  is a digital collection with hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery—defending it, attacking it or simply analyzing it, including an expansive slavery collection of mostly pre-Civil War materials. It has also gathered every English-language legal commentary on slavery published before 1920, which includes many essays and articles in obscure, hard-to-find journals in the United States and elsewhere. It provides more than 1,000 books and pamphlets on slavery from the 18th and 19th centuries, and many modern histories of slavery.

The OSU Library provides several historical databases with complete runs of major newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries to the 20th and 21st centuries.

• New York Times Historical (1851-2007) contains the full text of the New York Times in searchable PDF format.

• Times (London) Digital Archive, 1785-1985 is the full text of The Times newspaper from London.  may be searched by keyword and date, pictures and advertisements may also be searched and displayed.  Pages are displayed in PDF format.

• Illustrated London News Historical Archives (1842-2003) is the full run of the most iconic illustrated newspaper with over 260,000 pages.

For Oklahoma historical newspapers, consult

• The Oklahoman Archive contains images of the Daily Oklahoman newspaper from 1901 to the present.

The following are specialized and world historical newspaper collection databases.

• African-American Newspapers, 1827-1998 from Readex (Newsbank) provides online access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers covering more than 150 years of the African American experience. The newspapers may be searched by date, place of publication, or basic keyword. Articles, photos and cartoons may be printed or downloaded.

• African Newspapers provides more than 40 fully searchable African newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Featuring English- and foreign-language titles, African Newspapers offers unparalleled coverage of the issues and events that shaped the continent and its peoples between 1800 and 1922.

• Latin American Newspapers is a groundbreaking online collection that provides more than 35 fully searchable Latin American newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Latin American Newspapers offers unprecedented coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped this vital region between 1805 and 1922.

• South Asian Newspapers contains searchable 19th and 20th century newspapers, mostly in English, from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka during the British colonial period.

Below is a selection of other online digital collections of early books and other texts that are freely accessible on the World Wide Web and do not require an OSU ID for access. 

• Google Books includes over 150,000 scanned e-books from the 16th and 17th centuries from European national libraries and other libraries worldwide.  It also has another 450,000 titles from the 18th century, and is adding more historical public domain titles.  Use the date range limit on Advanced Search find books published in a particular period.

These are other digital collections on the Web:

• American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

• American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity from the Library of Congress.

  • Library of Congress Digital Collections offers a complete list of their online collections.

• British Library Digital Collections links to book/text, images, maps, and other digitized content from the British Library collection.

• Chronicling America:  American Historical Newspapers provides online access to America's historic newspapers. This site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

• Digital Public Library of America is a discovery portal to digital collections in institutions throughout the United States.

• Documenting the American South is s a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

• Europeana.eu is a search portal for digital collections in European national libraries.

• McCasland Map Collection includes early maps produced by the United States Government covering the geographic area of the United States as it expanded its boundaries to the west.

• National Archives Online Research Tools links to the digital materials available through NARA and its partners.

• NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is an organization that provides a peer-reviewed list of over 900,000 digital texts and objects from over 105 digital collections in ninteenth-century British and American studies.

  • 18thConnect is a companion site of digital texts and objects from collections in eighteenth-century British and American studies.

• Royal Society Journal Archive offers PDFs of the main scientific journals of the British Royal Society, including the Philosophical Transactions, the world's first peer-reviewed journal, from 1665.

• Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays.

• Women's Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern, pre-Victorian women's writing and electronic text encoding. Individuals can request free trial access.