Use any of the below to search for digitized books about historical topics (secondary sources) or created during a historical time period (primary sources).
Use basic keywords to search rather than complex phrases or questions.
Drawn from the collections of several major research libraries, this web site contains complete scanned copies of millions of books in their collections. Those that are out of copyright (i.e., published before 1928) are freely available to be read online.
Project Gutenberg is an online full-text database of books that are in the public domain. If your travel writer produced work that is no longer under copyright (common for 19th-century authors), their work may be available for free online!
The Internet Archive is a non-profit web site that provides permanent access to many of the world's publications in digital format. It covers all time periods and is useful for finding digitized versions of books and other publications that are no longer under copyright.
Books, photographs, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents and more -- all free and immediately available in digital format.
The ACLS Humanities Ebook Collection (ACLS HEB) presents thousands of foundational books in the humanities and social sciences from hundreds of publishers.