Primary Sources: Locating Primary Sources

Where should you look for your primary sources?  The Library’s print and digital collections have a wealth of primary sources!  But  sometimes you have to go farther afield to find what you’re looking for.  Luckily, many museums, universities, and archives have made their primary source collections available online.  You can try also searching Google for your time period and the phrase “primary sources,” but here are some great places to start:

→ http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/index.asp (ancient, medieval, & modern sources)

→ https://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page (index of sources on European history, also listed by country)

→ http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ (legal and historical documents from ancient to modern times)

→ perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections (primary & secondary sources; includes Arabic sources)

→ http://eyewitnesstohistory.com/ (only excerpts of primary sources, but well-organized)

→https://epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/ (women’s letters from the 4th to 13th century)

→ loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/PrimDocsHome.html (American; from Library of Congress)

→ http://gilderlehrman.org/collections (American sources from the Institute of American History)

→ smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/search.aspx (from the Smithsonian Institute)

You can also find visual primary sources in the Library's Artstor database (please note that you must initially register for Artstor access from a campus-based computer and login from a campus-based computer at least once every 90 days).  Artstor has millions of high-resolution, downloadable images of fine art (paintings, sculptures, etc.), architecture, photographs, material culture (coins, tools, clothing, weapons etc.), and other decorative objects.

You can view archival films in the Library's Films on Demand database, even dating back as far as 1897!

How do you find primary sources in the Library’s catalog?  It takes some work!  Some tips to get started:

→ Try combining your time period (“Renaissance” or “16th-century”) with a word like “Histories,” “Letters”, “Works”, “Writings”, “Sources” or “Translations.”

→ Sometimes you can find primary sources by using the Source limiter and selecting “Primary Sources.”  But this doesn’t always work, because the robots who give you results don’t always know what they’re doing!

→ If you’re looking for information about a particular event, make sure you know what contemporary sources would have called it.  For example, what we call World War I was called The Great War while it was happening.  If you’re looking for information about what we call “The Black Death” (14th-century epidemic of bubonic plague), you’ll need to know that contemporary writers didn’t call it that.  They wrote about “The Great Mortality,” “The Great Plague,” or just “the pestilence.”  

→ Most scholars writing books on history use primary sources in their research, so you can follow in their footsteps.  Look in the bibliographies or references of their books (usually in the back) to see what primary sources they’re using.  Then try and track down the same sources.

→ You can also look for visual primary sources in the Library’s ArtStor database; here you’ll find paintings, sculptures, maps, drawings, and photographs, as well as material culture like weapons, decorative objects, coins, and more.  You can also find archival films and period newsreels in the Library’s Films on Demand database.