United States History: Letters, Diaries, and Papers
UW Libraries Search
UW Libraries Search
Tips for locating primary sources in book form
To find published letters and diaries, use UW Libraries Search and use the terms diaries or correspondence or personal narratives in conjunction with your topic. For example:
diaries and women and pioneers
correspondence and cherokee
personal narrative and soldiers
Online Collections of Letters, Diaries, and Papers
"General Correspondence" includes both incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, such as reports, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, extracts, and copies of items. It can also include memoranda, notes, drafts of speeches and like matter, created independently of correspondence.
Site from the Massachusetts Historical Society that provides digitized letters and diaries including the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams.
Contains correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell's invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, his family life, his interest in the education of the deaf, etc.
The largest collection of original Washington documents in the world. Documents include correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account books, military records, reports, and notes accumulated by Washington from 1741 through 1799.
Correspondence, personal notes, drafts of letters and legislation, an autobiography, legal and financial documents, and miscellaneous manuscripts of the man known as the "Father of the Constitution."
Collection of original, diaries, letters, reminiscences and political documents drawn from various sources that recount the early settlement of Washington.
Collections of correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, scrapbooks, printed matter, maps, drawings, and other miscellaneous materials from the inventory of the telegraph.
Collection includes correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, as well as the Wrights' collection of glass-plate photographic negatives.