Primary Sources
Primary sources are original documents or first hand accounts from a given historical period, as opposed to secondary sources, such as journal articles or biographies, which offer in depth analysis and interpretation 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 much more.
Start your search for primary sources by doing some background reading to find key events, people, dates, laws, and especially terminology used during the time period you are researching.
Primary Sources, United States
- Avalon Project (Yale University)Contains digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government.
- Brown v. Board of Education Digital ArchiveThis archive, developed by the University of Michigan Library, contains documents and images concerning Supreme Court cases; busing and school integration efforts in northern urban areas; school integration in the Ann Arbor Public School District; and recent resegregation trends in American schools
- Famous Trials of the 20th CenturyCompiled by Douglas O. Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, this resource provides primary source and other materials concerning some of the 20th Century's key trials.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowProvides centralized access to 20+ Gale's primary source collections including 6 Making of the Modern Law collections
- Legal History on the WebA compilation of links to primary source documents freely available online. The site is arranged chronologically by time period and geographical location. Topics covered include: Before 1600; Post-1600 for regions including Britain and British Empire; British North America, the United States, and Canada; Continental Europe; Asia Africa, and Islamic World; and Post-1945 International Law.
- O SAY CAN YOU SEE: Early Washington D.C., Law & FamilyExplores multigenerational black, white, and mixed family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing thousands of case files from the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court
- The Oyez ProjectA multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States, its justices, and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955.
- ProQuest History Vault: Law and Society Since the Civil War: American Legal Manuscripts from the Harvard Law School Library This link opens in a new windowConsists of 11 collections, including the papers of Albert Levitt, Felix Frankfurter, Livingston Hall, Louis D. Brandeis, Richard H. Field, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Roscoe Pound, the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, Sheldon Glueck, William H. Hastie, and Zechariah Chafee. Frankfurter's and Brandeis's papers provide a behind-the-scenes view of the Supreme Court between 1919 and 1961.
- ProQuest History Vault: Slavery and the Law This link opens in a new windowDocuments in Series I: Petitions to State Legislatures, 1777-1867 include primary source materials digitized from the state archives of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
- Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new windowIncludes local court records relating to slavery from Georgia and North Carolina and state Supreme Court records from Georgia and North Carolina
- Slaves & the Courts, 1740-1860Library of Congress, American Memory Project.
Contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.
- U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978 This link opens in a new windowApproximately 150,000 Supreme Court cases are featured, the majority consisting of those for which the Court did not give a full opinion.
- United States Supreme Court CasesSearchable database of Supreme Court decisions since 1893
Large newspaper collections:
- 19th Century U.S. Newspapers This link opens in a new windowIncludes over 500 newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.
- Access World News (NewsBank) This link opens in a new windowDates covered: Varies by publication, 1980s - present
Provides access to over 6500 newspapers from all over the world, 70% of which are from North America - Alternative Press Index This link opens in a new windowIncludes journal, newspaper and magazine articles from hundreds of international alternative, radical and left periodicals. Born of the New Left, this resource was launched in 1969 to provide access to the emerging theories and practices of radical social change.
- America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1998 This link opens in a new windowPart of Readex's Archive of Americana. Provides access to over 3,200 newspapers.
Collections include: Early American Newspapers Series 1-13 (1690-1922),; African American Newspapers, Series 1 & 2 1827-1998; and Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. - Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers This link opens in a new windowThis site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1836-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).
- Early American Newspapers, 1690-1900 This link opens in a new windowIncludes access to Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876, Series 2, 1758-1900, and 12 ERA collections covering 1690-1815 and 1866-1889. Overall, this collection includes over 1,100 newspapers.
- Nexis Uni (formerly LEXIS/NEXIS Academic) This link opens in a new windowDates covered: 1980s-present
Full text of articles from more than 2,500 newspapers, including top-tier news publications and local, national, and international sources. - NewspaperARCHIVE.com This link opens in a new windowProvides full-text access to over 6,000 American, British, Canadian and several other international newspapers with coverage between 1607-present.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Magazines This link opens in a new windowThis database provides access to 45 major national and international newspapers (1812-2012) including 9 African American Newspapers and 4 Jewish American newspapers. ProQuest's American Periodicals database is also included, providing access to 1,800+ popular magazines published between 1740-1940.
State and regional newspaper collections:
- Arizona Digital Newspaper ProgramDates covered: 1859-1978
- California Courier Historical Archive This link opens in a new windowDates available: 8/20/1958-12/31/2000
- California Digital Newspaper Collection This link opens in a new windowDates available: 1846-1922 (dates vary by title)
Provides access to 32 CA newspapers including: Amador Ledger (1852-1911), Imperial Valley Press (1901-1911, Los Angeles Herald (1873-1910), Pacific Rural Press (1871-1922), Sacramento Daily Union (1851-1899), San Francisco Call (1890-1913)
- California EagleSpotty coverage.
The West's oldest African-American newspaper, published from 1879-1964.
John James Neimore established it in Los Angeles as The California Owl in 1879, to ease black settlers' transition to the West. The paper evolved into one of the leading papers of the day while under the control of Charlotta A. Bass and her husband, Joe Bass. Charlotta Bass assumed control of The Owl following the death of Neimore in 1912, and renamed it The California Eagle.
- California Newspaper Project (CNP) This link opens in a new windowThis is a catalog that contains records for over 14,400 U.S. newspaper titles held in California repositories (libraries, museums, historical societies and publishers' offices) and close to 9,000 of these newspapers were or are published in California.
- El Clamor Publico(USC Digital Library)
Dates available: 1855-1859
The first Spanish-language newspaper in California after the American occupation - Historic Kentucky NewspapersDates covered: 1860-1922
Digitized content from 49 titles - La Opinionavailable on microfilm, 1929-1993
current issues (1992-present) available in ProQuest - New York State Historic NewspapersDates covered: 1795-2011
- North Carolina Newspaper Digitization ProjectDates covered: 1751-3, 1757-59, 1764-66, 1768-70, 1773-75,1777-78, 1784-1898
- Pennsylvania Gazette This link opens in a new windowDates covered: 1728-1800 (from Accessible Archives) This was one of the most prominent and successful newspapers in the American colonies and Early Republic. Published in Philadelphia, the newspaper was purchased by Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith in 1729. Franklin not only printed the paper but also contributed pieces under aliases. This newspaper was the first to print a political cartoon in America, "Join, or Die," authored by Franklin himself. This digital version of The Pennsylvania Gazette provides a first-hand view of colonial America, the American Revolution and the New Republic, and offers important social, political and cultural perspectives of each of these periods. Also included is the full-text of such important writings as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Letters from a Farmer, Thomas Payne’s Common Sense, The Federalist Papers and much more.
- Utah Digital NewspapersDates covered: 1850-1969
Access to over 50 digitized Utah titles. Added to monthly - Washington State Historic NewspapersDates covered: 1852-2010
- Wyoming Newspaper ProjectDates covered: 1849-1922
All of the newspapers printed in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922 are available in this this searchable and browsable collection.
- Women's Legal History (WLH)A searchable database of articles and papers on pioneering women lawyers in the United States.
Also includes the Indexes and Bibliographic Notes for Barbara Babcock, “Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz.” (Stanford University Press, 2011).
Primary Sources related to women's history:
- American Memory - Women's History (5 Collections)This Library of Congress collection provides free and open access to a wide range of primary source material documenting American history and culture, including text, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineProvides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. Collections range from Abigail Franks' letters to her son from the 1730s and 1740s (Center for Jewish History) to Katrina Thomas' photographs of ethnic weddings from the late 20th century.
- Documents from the Women's Liberation MovementThis Duke University collection documents various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States, focusing specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humorous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group
- Everyday Life and Women in America Online, c.1820-1920 This link opens in a new windowLogin required
This collection documents in compelling detail the social and cultural forces that shaped the everyday lives of men and women in America from 1800 to 1920, addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home life, health and popular pastimes - Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs This link opens in a new windowContains more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. The anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; the broad scope of the collection allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others.
- Hearth Home Economics ArchiveDates covered: 1850-1950
This Cornell University site is a core collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines, published between 1850 and 1950 and selected by scholars for their historical importance.
- LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new windowLGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting the key works and archival documentation of LGBT political and social movements throughout the 20th century and into the present day. The collection contains 150,000 pages of rare archival content, including seminal texts, letters, periodicals, speeches, interviews, and ephemera.
- North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new windowThis database includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters written from Colonial times to 1950
- ProQuest History Vault: Struggle for Women's Rights This link opens in a new windowThis collection of primary sources provides access to The National Woman's Party Papers, The League of Women Voters, and The papers of the Women's Action Alliance (WAA).
- Sophia Smith Collection Women's History ArchivesDigital collections of interest include oral history collections; The Power of Women's Voices; exhibits on the history of the YWCA; exploring women's history through family papers; and Agents of Social Change: New Resources on 20th-Century Women's Activism
- Women and Social Movements Library This link opens in a new windowIncludes books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life
- Women's History SourcebookThis Fordham University site provides access to key primary source documents related to women's history
- Women Working, 1800-1930This Harvard University Open Collections Program collection explores women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented
- African American Historical Serials Collection This link opens in a new windowThis collection was developed in conjunction with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) as part of an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture documenting the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1829 and 1922. Collection content includes more than 170 unique titles related to African American life and culture and approximately 60,000 pages of searchable primary source content.
- Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African DiasporaThis website is a digital archive for hundreds of historical images, paintings, lithographs, and photographs illustrating enslaved Africans and their descendants before c. 1900. (Formerly known as The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas : a Visual Record)
- The Avalon Project, Documents Concerning SlaveryPrimary sources compiled by Yale Law School
- Black Abolitionist Archive1820-1865
Contrary to the popular belief that the abolitionist crusade was driven by wealthy whites, from the 1820s to the Civil War, some 300 black abolitionists were regularly involved in the antislavery movement. This University of Detroit Mercy collection provides access to over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. - Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
- Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery & JusticeDigitized documents from a report on Brown University's historical relationship to slavery and the slave trade
- Documenting the American South: North American Slave NarrativesThis digital initiative, by the University Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, provides access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.
- The Dred Scott Case CollectionThe records displayed in this exhibit document the Scotts' early struggle to gain their freedom through litigation and are the only extant records of this significant case as it was heard in the St. Louis Circuit Court. This collection was expanded from 85 - 111 documents, over 400 pages of text. (Click on the last link on the page "The Revised Dred Scott Case Collection").
- Freedom on the Move: A database of Fugitives from North American SlaveryThe goal is to compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis.
- Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown PastThis collection of 25,000 digitized items are from the Historical Center at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, The Historic New Orleans Collection, and Tulane University’s Louisiana Research Collection.
- Georgetown Slavery ArchiveA repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery.
- In Motion: The African-American Migration ExperienceThis Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture site provides timelines and primary and secondary source materials on topics ranging from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Western Migration to Caribbean and Haitian Immigration
- ProQuest History Vault: Slavery and the Law This link opens in a new windowDocuments in Series I: Petitions to State Legislatures, 1777-1867 include primary source materials digitized from the state archives of Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
- ProQuest History Vault: Southern Life and African American History, 1775-1915, Plantations Records, Parts 1 & 2 This link opens in a new windowPrimary sources included are from the papers (business and financial records, diaries, letterbooks, correspondence, etc.) of dozens (both prominent and average) slaveholding families from plantations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.
- Records of Slave Ship Movement Between Africa and the Americas, 1817-1843This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas from 1817-1843. Specifically, the data file contains information on the ship's port of arrival, date of arrival, type of vessel, tonnage, master's name, number of guns, number of crew, national flag, number of slaves, port of departure, number of days of voyage, and mortality.
- Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth CenturyThe sources for this project are advertisements placed in eighteenth-century English and Scottish. newspapers by slave-owners. The project will also locate and make available related newspaper, legal and other materials.
- The Slave NarrativePart of Washington State University's Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events site, this collection features informational resources as well as primary source material
- Slaves & the Courts, 1740-1860Contains over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.
- Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new windowIncludes primary source documents and collections from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. The resource is provided by Adam Matthew.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new windowWe have access to Part II-IV: (2) Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, (3)The Institution of Slavery (1492-1888), (4) The Age of Emancipation. Provided by Gale-Cengage.
- Texas Slavery ProjectExamines the expansion of slavery in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the years between 1837 and 1845. Based at the Virginia Center for Digital History, the project provides dynamic maps that plot the flows of slavery throughout Texas and a population search engine. Also includes primary sources such as personal letters, newspaper articles, constitutions and legal documents
- The Understanding Slavery initiative (USI)A national learning project which supports the teaching and learning of transatlantic slavery and its legacies using museum and heritage collections. Six museums across the UK have worked in partnership to share expertise, develop resources, training opportunities and school sessions.
- Voices from Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their StoriesFrom the Library of Congress, American Memory Project. Almost 7 hours of recorded interviews took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. 23 interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.
- United States Commission on Civil Rights This link opens in a new windowHistorical Publications of the USCCR from its inception in 1957 A partnership of the United States Government Printing Office, The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland.
- ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century This link opens in a new windowProvides access to 4 primary source modules: (1) Federal Government Records – Includes FBI Files on Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, records from from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, detailing the interaction between civil rights leaders and organizations and the federal government; (2) Federal Government Records, Supplement - includes civil rights records from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during the Ford presidency and from the Ronald Reagan White House Office Records related to civil rights. (3) Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1 - Includes papers and records of various individuals and civil rights organizations, including: Claude A. Barnett's Associated Negro Press, Mary McLeod Bethune's National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. (4) Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2 - Includes the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, the Robert F. Williams Papers, the papers of Chicago Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and records pertaining to the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
- U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978 This link opens in a new windowU.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978 is a fully searchable database of approximately 11 million pages and more than 350,000 separate documents related to the Supreme Court from 1832-1978.