LibGuides: Guide to Online Primary Sources: Business

Links to collections

Ad Council: Campaigns that Have Made a Difference
Highlights public service advertising campaigns (PSAs) from 1942 to the present. Includes descriptions of campaigns, images of print ads and video clips of TV commercials
AD*Access
An image database of over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Covers five broad categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II. Click "subject" tab to browse/search by narrow topic, including ethnic groups, famous people, and sports.
AdViews
Provides access to thousands of historic commercials created for clients or acquired by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency or its predecessor during the 1950s - 1980s.

Archives Unbound (Business and Economic History)
This collection includes topics such as commercial relations between Japan and the United States, labor equality in household work, Black economic empowerment, support for migrant workers, and the economy of the Third Reich.
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
Booker T. Washington, founder of the National Negro Business League, believed that solutions to the problem of racial discrimination were primarily economic, and that bringing African Americans into the middle class was the key. In 1900 he established the League "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro" and headed it until his death

Columbia Historical Corporate Reports Online Collection
Reports of companies doing business or headquartered in New York City and environs 1849 to the early 1960s. Comprising 36 companies & 770 individual reports in financial, utilities, and transportation sectors.
Dr. Seuss Advertising Artwork
Advertising artwork created by Theodor Seuss Geisel in the 1920s-1950s.
Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
Presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States.
Fish Catch Statistics. California Department of Fish and Game
Amounts and values of marine resources caught/landed by California's commercial fisheries. 1916-1986
Harper's weekly
Harpweek includes and can be searched by full text, illustration, photographs, maps, advertisement; full page images are displayed. It can also be browsed by date and other categories. Covers the period 1857-1912.
Industry Documents Library
Documents on the tobacco, drug, chemical, and food industries.
The Making of the Modern World: the Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature
Provides full-text and full-page-image access to books from the 1460-1850 period, and pre-1906 serials. It focuses on economics interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, history, sociology, and special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing.
Medicine and Madison Avenue
Presents images and database information for approximately 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines. These ads illustrate the variety and evolution of marketing images from the 1910s through the 1950s.
Nineteenth-Century American Trade Cards
Images of 100 trade cards, advertising a wide range of businesses and products.
Patent Medicine Trade Cards Collection
"A collection of small, colorfully illustrated advertising cards touting a particular medicine and its many cures. The illustrations often have little to do with any of the ailments purported to be cured. They were pure advertising and very collectible."
Philip Morris Advertising Archive
Tobacco print ads, outdoor ads, point-of-sale and direct marketing materials dating back to the early 1900s, including some materials which may not have been published or publicly displayed.
Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD)
More than 30000 images related to outdoor advertising from the twentieth century. Browse or search by company, product, date, place, subject, placement company, tone or medium.
San Diego Technology Archive
Documents the history, formation, and evolution of the companies that formed the San Diego region's high-tech cluster, beginning in 1965.
Vintage Ad Browser
Vintage ads from comic books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, user submissions, book/ magazine/comic book scans, and more.