What is a Primary Source?
A primary source is a first-hand account of an event, time period, or philosophical era.
A primary source may include:
Primary sources do not include:
AAC presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.
This collection includes several hundred periodicals dating from the early 19th century through the early 20th century, featuring 173 periodicals spanning from 1816-1922. It contains newspapers and magazines as well as reports and annuals from various African American organizations such as churches and educational and service institutions.
A collection of primary documents containing cultural life and history in the 19th century. This database is a repository of first hand reports of various events and important racial issues, written by African-Americans for African-Americans.
This database provides access to a growing list of prison newspapers covering more than 200 years. Most of the titles were written by inmates. JSTOR worked with many research institutions to assemble and fund this collection.
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university level.
This provides a digital image archive of the Dallas Morning News including classifieds and display advertising, photos and graphics starting from October 1, 1885 to December 31,1984).
This full-text database is a collection of primary source material on history, literature, philosophy, religion, agriculture, and other aspects of American life in the 17th and 18th centuries. With thousands of primary documents, it also has supplements from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society that provide hundreds of additional pamphlets, broadsides, and books.
This full-text database provides access to primary source material for the early decades of 19th-century America, including coverage of politics, war, economics, and social and cultural thought. Supplements from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society provide an additional thousand books, pamphlets, and broadsides spanning the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson to the Adams-Onis Treaty.
This collection provides full-text access to digital images of hundreds of thousands of books published during the 18th Century in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.
Everyday Life & Women in America includes primary source material from 1800-1920 related to the study of American social, cultural, and popular history. The collection features texts of rare books, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It covers a variety of themes including popular culture, social history, family life, education, race, class, employment, and advice literature.
Gale Primary Resources is a research tool that allows researchers to cross-search multiple primary source databases using a single search box. It includes the following databases: Archives Unbound, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, and Sabin Americana 1500-1926 as well as the historical archives of several major periodicals (The Economist, Punch, The Times and more). Each database can also be searched individually.
The Gerritsen Collection is an electronic collection of books and periodicals reflecting the evolution of feminist consciousness and women's rights.
HathiTrust is a large digital library bringing together materials from sources including Google Books, the Internet Archive, and other commercial digitization projects. This resource is being expanded daily and provides information on more than 10 million volumes with more than a third of these available for full text access and download (primarily books and journals published before 1923 and U.S. Government publications).
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources, with a broad variety of coverage in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, spanning more than 50 disciplines. Collections on JSTOR include the complete archival records of thousands of journal titles.
Note: As of August 1st, 2024, ARTSTOR is fully incorporated into JSTOR.
Newspaper Source Plus provides full-text access to major news content. It includes millions of articles from newspapers, newswires and news magazines from around the world. It also offers television and radio transcripts and daily updates from popular news sources.
Concentrating on primary sources in philosophy, religion, and literature, Past Masters gathers the books, diaries, letters, and correspondence of major intellects from across the centuries. Titles are typically comprised of the complete collected works of each individual author. Users may conduct searches or browse materials by title, subject (e.g., Women Writers, Religious Studies, or Continental Philosophy), or language (e.g., English, Latin, Greek, or Russian).
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, is based on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography. This collection contains full-text works about the Americas, including Latin America and Canada, published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900s. Also included are books, pamphlets, serials, and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western migration, Native Americans, military history, and more.