Guides @ UF: Tales from the Source: Search Online Resources

Subscription Databases

If you are a current UF student, staff, or faculty member, connect to the proxy server or VPN before searching the databases: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufproxy.html.

Visitors to UF Libraries can use these databases on campus. Also, check if your local library subscribes to any of these databases.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
This digital archive offers full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the 18th Century. Easily search for editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, advertisements, and more.

Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers This link opens in a new window
This database provides access to primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
This database contains every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
This digitized archive contains virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. Items include advertisements, almanacs, bibles, catalogs, cookbooks, elegies, songs, speeches, and more.

Free Web Resources

Library of Congress
Search millions of items, including manuscripts, maps, and historic newspapers, many of which are available online.
American Memory
A multimedia web site of digitized historical documents, photographs, sound recordings, moving pictures, books, pamphlets, maps, and other resources from the Library of Congress’s vast holdings.
Pirates and Privateers
A small selection of digitized items from the Library of Congress.
Piracy Trials (Law Library of Congress)
A small collection of transcripts of piracy trials before 1900.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS)
This independent research library founded in 1812 in Worcester, Massachusetts documents the life of America's people from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The British Library
The national library of the United Kingdom holds over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats.
Bodleian Library
The main research library of the University of Oxford and one of the oldest libraries in Europe.
Digital Collections, Bodleian Libraries
Includes a Digital Image Library and a collection of Early Manuscripts at Oxford University.
The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. Includes 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles.
English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)
A digitized collection of 17th century broadside ballads housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Some of the ballads have recordings performed by EBBA staff.
Text Creation Partnership (TCP)
The university libraries of Michigan and Oxford have teamed up with commercial publishers to convert early English documents into easily-readable text. Search documents from the following collections: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and the Evans Early American Imprints Collection.
The Huntington Library
This is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States for British and American history and literature. Among some of its treasures are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a Gutenberg Bible on vellum.
Internet Archive
This non-profit digital library offers free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.

UF Digital Collections

Below is a selection of pirate-themed items from the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC). Researchers have free, open access to unique and rare digitized materials held at the University of Florida and partner institutions.