SO320: Political Sociology (Fall 2024)

For finding digital collections for your History of Now paper, we recommend using digital libraries and archives available through BU Libraries. A full list of primary source collections you have access to through BU is also available. 

Have something else in a mind? Try searching Google with your subject terms and the keywords "primary sources" or "digital collections" or "digital library." Or, contact Lucy, BU Librarian, at LFlamm@BU.edu.

You want to develop keywords and search terms for your research question within these primary source collections. A how-to-guide for creating these keywords is available here. Depending on which dataset you choose to work with, try out different versions of your keywords together to find results.

Abortion, Contraception, and Reproductive Health

Sexuality, Sex Education, and Reproductive Rights: Unites records on birth control activists -- both those who can be considered under recognized, and the more well-known.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project: Margaret Sanger's work as a visiting nurse focused her interest in sex education and women's health. 

Committee on Women, Population and the Environment Depo Diaries Records: The collection consists of correspondence, minutes, and printed materials pertaining to the activities of the Depo Diaries, CWPE's national sotorytelling project. Files include participant forms and questionnaires, promotional flyers, meeting minutes, and printed materials pertaining to reproductive justice and other CWPE activities.

Black Experiences

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. Includes letters, speeches, editorials, articles, and sermons.

Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle: Features records of NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and federal records on the Black Freedom Struggle.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive: Consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering slave trade history.

HistoryMakers: 2,700+ historical significant oral history interviews with African Americans and also includes video documentation.

Housing and the Unhoused

Finding Federal Data Sources for Housing Research: An overview and access to various federal data sources for housing advocacy.

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America: Contains more than 150 interactive maps and thousands of "area descriptions" from Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). These materials afford an extraordinary view of the contours of wealth and racial inequality in Depression-era American cities and insights into discriminatory policies and practices that so profoundly shaped cities that we feel their legacy to this day.

Diversity and Disparities: Census information compiled at the portal describes the racial-ethnic diversity of U.S. states, metropolitan and micropolitan areas, counties, and places (e.g., cities, suburbs, small towns) for the 1980-2010 period. This information can be accessed in three ways. A summary measure of diversity (the entropy index), pan-ethnic group counts and proportions, and simple compositional graphics are available on a case-by-case basis via pull-down menus.

Tenants’ Rights and Affordable Housing Movements: Key issues were, and remain: the passage and maintenance of rent control legislation; creating a legal and regulatory structure for tenants’ rights vs. landlords (notably building maintenance and services, and protection against harassment and eviction); and the building of both public housing projects and limited equity cooperative housing projects for low and moderate income New Yorkers.

Civil Rights

Latino Civil Rights during the Carter Administration: Major topics covered in this collection include inflation, bilingual education, police brutality, political unrest in Latin America, Haitian refugees, and immigration.

Making of Modern Law: American Civil Liberties Union Papers (1912 - 1990): This collection of papers spans the majority of the twentieth century, from 1912 to 1990 and includes documents on a wide variety of issues.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa: This digital collection of documents and images relating to the anti-Apartheid movement and liberation struggles of Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. 

Incarceration

Densho Digital Repository: Hear the story of the Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it, and find thousands of historic photographs, documents, newspapers, letters and other primary source materials from immigration to the WWII incarceration and its aftermath.

American Prison Writing Archive: The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts and voices of incarcerated writers.

Texas After Violence Project: Texas After Violence is dedicated to the telling, preserving, and sharing of personal experiences of people harmed by the criminal legal system, while always honoring the agency, dignity, and narrative power of every directly impacted person. Primarily oral history interviews.

Politics

Political Extremism and Radicalism in the 20th Century: Political extremism and radicalism in the twentieth century is a compilation of archival collections covering a wide range of fringe political movements.

Activism in the US, Digital Public Library of America: American sociopolitical activism became especially prominent during the period of societal upheaval which began during the 1950s. Covers civil rights, women's issues, and anti-war activism.

Freedom Archives: Contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings as well as print materials dating primarily from the late-1960s to the mid-90s. These collections chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice.

Law and Society Since the Civil War: Covers American legal manuscripts from the civil war to the present.

American Politics and Society from Kennedy to Watergate: Consists of records from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies plus federal agencies. Topics including women's rights, urban renewal, rural development, tax reform, civil rights, space exploration, international trade, health and ecological effects of pollutions, the American Indian Movement, and Watergate are covered in a variety of document types.

Socialist Party of America Papers: Documents in the collection include correspondence, position papers, memoranda, financial records for the study of the labor movement, civil rights, anti-war activities and the history of the “American left.”

Students for a Democratic Society, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement: This collection contains records of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), in addition to the documents of 10 other anti-Vietnam War organizations.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa: It brings together materials from various archives and libraries throughout the world documenting colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and the worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region.

Indigenous Experiences

Indigenous Peoples of North America: This collection covers the history of American Indian tribes and supporting organizations from the sixteenth century well into the twentieth century. 

The Indigenous Digital Archive: The Indigenous Digital Archive provides digital access to key archival series from the US National Archives and to other important historical documents such as yearbooks from a number of Indian Schools. Documents are searchable by text and browsable by key themes such as by School, by Tribe, Pueblo or Nation, or by archival Series or Roll.

Living Nations, Living Words: This collection—part of Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s “Living Nations, Living Words” signature project—contains audio recordings of 47 contemporary Native American poets reading and discussing an original poem.

Immigration and Immigrant Experiences

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories: Letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories; much material was unpublished.

Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930: Documenting voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression.

Trends and Policy: U.S. Immigration: Documents, from 1790-present, include U.S. immigration laws and other content from the legislative branch, reports and statistics.

Cuban Immigration After the Revolution, 1959-1973: This primary source set explores the experiences of Cuban immigrants motivated by the Revolution—why they fled, how they arrived, and who supported and resisted their resettlement.

Jewish Neighborhood Voices: a series of oral histories about the Jewish immigrant experience  in three areas of Massachusetts—Chelsea, Dorchester and Roxbury (treated together), and Lynn—which had thriving Jewish communities in the first half of the 20^th century.

Labor

Labor and Employment : The American Worker: Contains legislative histories on major legislation, briefs from Supreme Court cases, accounts of labor riots from the recent past, reports on working conditions of today, and more. 

Workers, Labor Unions, and the American Left in the 20th Century: Federal Records: The collection opens with Strike Files of the U.S. Department of Justice, records of the Woodrow Wilson Administration and American Workers and records on U.S. government surveillance of radical workers.

Latino/a/x and Chicana/o Experiences

ASU Chicano/a Research Collection: An archival repository that preserves Latino history in Arizona and the Southwest. Since 1970, they have compiled manuscripts, photographs, books, and newspapers. Includes Franco and French family papers, documentation of lives of Mexican and Mexican-American copper miners, and Chicanos Por La Causa records. 

Latina(o) Cultural Heritage Archives: Funded as part of the Hispanics-Serving Institutions Grant of the State of California, these materials capture the history of Latino and Chicana/o people and culture in Southern California. These collections feature the arts, labor and immigration as important parts of the historical fabric of this community.

Voces Oral History Project (University of Texas): The leading Latino oral history archive in the United States. Beginning in 1999, with a mission of capturing untold stories of Latinos and Latinas who served, in the military or on the home front, during World War II and expanding to include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Political and Civic Engagement, focusing on the continuing fight for Latino civil rights

Centro Library and Archives Digital Collections (CUNY): Provides access to photographs, documents, artifacts, art, maps, oral histories, moving image and audio clips, and other digitized or born digital material pertaining to the history and culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation

Women's Studies: Records of suffrage organizations and other women's rights organizations; personal papers of women's rights advocates, many of whom were involved in the suffrage movement; and records on women at work during World War II. 

Archives of Sexuality & Gender: With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other topical areas.

LGBTQ+ Source: This database provides scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines and newspapers.

LGBTQ+ Rights:  Charts the gay rights movement in America, showing the civil rights codified into law in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the inequalities that still exist today.

Additional Resources

Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints: Opposing Viewpoints covers opposing sides of the most current social issues, from offshore drilling to climate change, health care to immigration.