Primary Sources Overview
Primary sources are original documents or first hand accounts from a given historical period, as opposed to secondary sources, such as journal articles, which provide information about and analysis of events and primary sources.
Primary sources can take many forms, including: newspaper articles from the period, diaries, letters, photographs, autobiographies, posters, advertisements, original manuscripts, speeches, poems, oral histories, interviews, laws, transcripts, congressional hearings, pamphlets, and more.
More info:
- Primary sources defined in more detail
- 6 C's of Primary Source Analysis
Tips for finding primary sources:
Start by doing some background reading: The more you know about key events, people, laws, and especially common terminology used during the time period you are researching the more successful your research will be.
Search for primary sources in USC's Library catalog:
Use search terms that reflect the types of material you’re looking for, such as: sources, diaries, pamphlets, correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, personal narratives, interviews, firsthand, eyewitness, etc.
Examples: suffrage and pamphlets; slaves and interviews; united states and race relations and sources
Primary Sources Table of Contents
Large primary source collections covering a range of topics and time periods
These mega-sites are good places to start your search for primary sources
- Alexander Street Press Oral Histories Online This link opens in a new windowOral History Online provides in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. The collection also provides keyword searching of more than 329,400 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to over 4,200 audio and video files and almost 19,000 bibliographic records.
- American History in Video This link opens in a new windowIncludes the complete series of United Newsreel and Universal Newsreel, available in their entirety in this database, capturing history as it was made and reported to viewers of the time. Also includes 750 documentaries from PBS, California Newsreel, A&E, Bullfrog Films, Documentary Educational Resources, The History Channel, and others.
- American Music This link opens in a new windowAudio recordings of country, folk, jazz, bluegrass, western, old-time, American Indian, blues, gospel, R&B, and shape-note singing. (Alexander Street / ProQuest)
- American Periodicals 1740-1940 This link opens in a new windowIncludes digitized images of over 1,800 American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the 20th century.
- Ancestry This link opens in a new windowProQuest has partnered with Ancestry.com to create Ancestry® Library Edition. It has coverage of the United States and the United Kingdom, including census, vital, church, court, and immigration records, as well as record collections from Canada, Europe, Australia and other areas of the world.
- Archives Explorer This link opens in a new windowAdam Matthew publishes unique primary source collections from archives around the world. USC has access to all Adam Matthew collections and search here across all collections.
- C19: Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new windowDraws on indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers. C19 Index now provides integrated access to 10 bibliographic indexes, including over 300,000 records from the ongoing digitization of British Periodicals Collection.
- Digital History OnlineAn American history site developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges and is supported by the College of Education at the University of Houston.
- Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)Digitized collections from libraries, archives, and museums including art, books, manuscripts, etc.
- Eight Centuries (formerly 19th Century Masterfile) This link opens in a new windowIndexes to journals, newspapers, books, documents, artwork, and images primarily from the 12th century through 1960. Includes multidisciplinary coverage of primary materials in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, History of Science, Law, Economics, Religion, Psychology, Government Documents, Visual Arts, Music, and the Physical Sciences.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowProvides centralized access to 48 Gale Primary source collections
- History MattersA gateway to online primary source collections. Click the link on the website to enter the database.
- North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new windowNorth American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. With more than 100,000 pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, the collection provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Much of the material is previously unpublished. Several thousand pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews, indexed and searchable for the first time, are included, along with thousands of political cartoons. Never before have scholars been able to search these documents easily and find answers to complex questions with just a few clicks.
- ProQuest History Vault This link opens in a new windowThese digitized primary source materials are from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.
- Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new windowSearch all of the libraries’ Readex databases from one search box.
- Smithsonian Collections Online This link opens in a new windowA result of Gale's partnership with the Smithsonian Institution to create searchable archives of the Smithsonian's vast collections, this resource combines rare nineteenth and twentieth century archival materials on such topics as World's Fairs and trade literature and is paired with modern Smithsonian Magazine and Air & Space Magazine backfiles to present unique and comprehensive insight into history, science, nature, the arts, innovation, technology, and world culture.
- U.S. History In Context This link opens in a new windowProvides access to over nearly 5,000 primary documents, as well as 185,000+ reference articles, over 613,000 periodical articles, and more than 73,000 images. This database covers themes, events, individuals and periods in U.S. history from pre-Colonial times to the present. The material also includes citations from the Institute for Scientific Information's Arts and Humanities Citation Index, as well as the entire "American Journey Online" series.