Finding Primary Resources

• Combine your topic keywords with keywords that mean primary source, e.g. letters, diaries, correspondence, autobiography, etc.
• Limit by date

Primary source databases available via IUS Library:

• American Civil War: Letters and Diaries: Contains 2,009 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and memoirs.
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online:  Nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800, it captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain during this period.
• Historical New York Times:  Full content of The New York Times from 1851-2001.
• JSTOR (limit by date):  Searchable full-text backfiles of 117 scholarly journals in the fields of African-American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, History, Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Sociology, and Statistics.
• Nineteenth-Century Newspapers:  Provides access to hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers.
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories:  Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives.
• Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000:   Publications and documents pertaining to Women and Social Movements.
• OCLC WORLDCAT (limit by date, or limit by "archival material"):  World-wide catalog of library holdings.

 
Primary source tools online:

Library of Congress: American Memory:  a digital collection of documents, images, and sound recordings related to the American experience.

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections:  searches for manuscript collections held by museums, libraries, and historical societies.

OAIster:  union catalog of digital resources


In the First Person:  an index to oral histories, diaries, and personal narratives; freely searchable, but some content may be subscription only.

Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College:  primary sources related to women's history.

Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College:  primary sources related to women's history.    
                                        

Duke University:  archival collections of images, advertisements, sheet music, and primary sources.

Harvard Open Collections Program:  digitized collections on historical topics

University of North Carolina:  Documenting the American South.  Primary sources for the study of Southern history, literature, and culture.

Cornell University: Making of America   Primary sources related to American history from antebellum to reconstruction period.

Cornell University:  HEARTH.  This Home Economics archive "is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines."  Contains titles published between 1850 and 1950.

Early Americas Digital Archive:  A collection of electronic texts written in or about the Americas from 1492-1820.