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Primary Sources: Humanities

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Humanities

-The American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a joint project compiled by the Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston. The Archive consists of 40,000 hours of radio broadcasts. Its mission is to “preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity.” A selection of the Archive’s collection has been digitized and made available online.

-The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

"Contains more than 130,000 books and periodicals published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys."

-The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

"The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is Yale University's principal repository for literary papers and for early manuscripts and rare books in the fields of literature, theology, history, and the natural sciences." The Beinecke Digital Collections offers users access to a number of photographs, textual documents, rare books, illuminated manuscripts, art, and maps.

The Beinecke's Thornton Wilder Papers  should be of particular interest to Lawrentians as Mr. Wilder taught  at the Lawrenceville School from 1921-1928. The Lawrenceville School's Stephan Archives holds a small collection of Wilder's papers (available here). 

-The British Library

The British Library website contains an extensive amount of digital content including newspapers, manuscripts, theses, multimedia, festival books, etc.

-The Harry Ransom Center

The Ransom Center is a humanities research library and museum at the University of Texas, Austin. It offers an extensive collection of materials relating to literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts.

-Library of Congress Celebrates Songs of America

The Songs of America collection provides access to materials relating to American composers, poets, scholars, and performers. The digital collection consists of 80,000 online items. Users can listen to digitized recordings, view sheet music, manuscripts, and historic copyright submissions online.

-Life Magazine

A record of U.S. History and culture from 1936-1972.

-MIT Global Shakespeare Project

The MIT Global Shakespeare Project has constructed an environment for teaching and research based on digital copies of primary documents in all media, including texts, high resolution page images of early editions, digital collections of art, illustration and stage photographs, and film and performance videos.

-The Shelly-Godwin Archive

"The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, aiming to unite online for the first time the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers, and thereby document their works, life, and thought, including the development of many outstanding pieces of English literature and political philosophy."

-The Walt Whitman Archive

"The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers."