Pre-19th Century Materials Online

Many of you have probably used The Making of Modern Law database, which provides digital images of more than 21,000 American and British treatises from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But if you’re looking for material from an earlier time period, the library has a number of other online sources that you might find useful. They can all be accessed from the library’s research databases page.

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a collection of almost 150,000 English and foreign language books and pamphlets published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800. The collection includes works in the areas of history, literature, religion, science, and other fields, in addition to law. All of the titles are full text searchable, so you can perform a keyword search on over 26 million pages of text. You can also search by author, title, publisher, and place of publication, or browse a list of titles and authors included in the collection.
  • Early English Books Online is a comprehensive collection of English language books and pamphlets published between 1475 and 1700, providing digital page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America during this time period. Included in the collection are the Thomason Tracts, which represent an almost inexhaustible supply of material for studying constitutional, political, and social life in England from 1640 to 1661. You can search the collection in a number of ways or browse a list authors.

  • Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans and Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker are digitized collections of books and pamphlets printed in America between 1639 and 1819, covering every aspect of early American history. All works are full text searchable and can be browsed and searched by a number of different categories as well. In addition to books and pamphlets, the collection includes many state papers and government materials, presidential messages and letters, and congressional, state, and territorial resolutions.

J. Fusaris