Research Guides: California History: Primary Sources

Selected Print Book Primary Sources

Lands of Promise and Despair : chronicles of early California, 1535-1846 by Rose Marie Beebe; Robert M. Senkewicz

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks F864 .L26

The California gold discovery : sources, documents, accounts, and memoirs relating to the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill by Rodman W. Paul (Editor)

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks F865 .P26

So Far from Home : Russians in Early California

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks F864 .S6425

The Beats by Harvey Pekar; Paul Buhle (Editor); Ed Piskor (Illustrator)

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks PS228.B6 P45 2009

Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1773-2000 by Thomas Dublin (General Editor)

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks JV6450 .I553 2014

West of the West : imagining California : an anthology

Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks F861.5.W4

Selected eBook Primary Sources

Schliemann and the California Gold Rush by Wout Arentzen; Christo Thanos

California in The 1930s by Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration

They Saved the Crops by Don Mitchell

Newspapers and Magazines

New York Times: Historical Index (1851 - 2013) (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time. The Historical New York Times with Index (1851-2013) provides search capability using subject terms and topics for focused and targeted results in combination with searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the Historical New York Times.

Contra Costa Historical Society
The Contra Costa County Historical Society's History Center collection consists of records and artifacts concerning the history of Contra Costa County, California. A large part of the collection includes early county court and probate records, naturalization records, supervisor records, tax assessor records; maps, photographs, newspapers and newspaper clippings, and special collections of some prominent local government officials and historians.
Oakland Museum of California
The Oakland Museum of California or OMCA is an interdisciplinary museum dedicated to the art, history, and natural science of California, located in Oakland, California.
San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library
The Daniel E. Koshland San Francisco History Center contains a research collection of books, newspapers and magazines, photographs, maps, posters, archives and manuscript collections, and ephemera, documenting all aspects of San Francisco life and history. The Center is also the archives for the City and County of San Francisco.
Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco
This collection consists of twenty-six films of San Francisco from before and after the Great Earthquake and Fire, 1897-1916.

California Historical Society
The California Historical Society, founded in 1871, is a nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire and empower people to make California's richly diverse past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives.
Online Archive of California
The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
Calisphere
Welcome to Calisphere: your gateway to California’s remarkable digital collections. Calisphere provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more. The collections on Calisphere have been digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.
California Digital Newspaper Collection
This collection contains 557,488 issues comprising 5,947,862 pages and 41,488,763 articles.
California Heritage Project
The California Heritage Collection is an online archive of more than 30,000 images illustrating California's history and culture, from the collections of the Bancroft Library.
Chinese in California
The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials.
California: First Person Narratives
Covers years 1849-1900. Site consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts.
The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive
The digitization and presentation of the materials in The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Digital Archive was generously supported by a grant award from the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program.
The Multicultural West
The Multicultural American West is a resource site for the interactive exchange of ideas, information, and educational tools related to the US West in multicultural and intercultural perspective and pages of primary source materials.