Subject Research, Course Guides, Documentation: History: Find Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Primary sources are foundational documents that provide direct, firsthand evidence about a topic or event. These include original records, contemporary accounts, and other authoritative materials created by participants or eyewitnesses. Examples range from personal correspondence and journals to interviews, photographs, films, maps, and official government records.

In arts, history, and humanities fields, authentic primary sources are typically preserved in specialized institutions such as museums, archives, and library collections. Below is a collection of online databases that contain primary sources. This is just a selection, please see this complete list of primary source databases available through the college.

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Presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university level. Collections in Archives Unbound cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Collections are chosen for Archives Unbound based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.
Periodicals Archive Online
Archive of scholarly periodicals that spans the humanities and social sciences, across 37 key subject areas. It is international in scope with the inclusion of more than 150 foreign-language titles. Coverage is from volume 1 issue 1 of each journal and all issues are digitized from cover to cover.
American Civil War Letters & Diaries
Includes diaries, letters and memoirs. The product also includes previously unpublished manuscripts. The collection also includes biographies, an extensive bibliography of the sources in the database, and material licensed from The Civil War Day-by-Day by E.B. Long.
Ancestry Library
Access to census documents; birth, marriage & death records; military records, and more. Invaluable information for research and genealogy searching.
Europeana
Provides access to images, texts, sounds, and videos digitized by a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
History Vault
Researchers can access digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections. This is the main page, with links to individual modules.
Homeland Security Digital Library
Covers a wide range of homeland security topics and are carefully selected and evaluated by a team of librarians and content specialists. Sources include, but are not limited to: Federal, state and local governments; International governments and institutions; Nonprofit organizations and private sector entities; Think tanks, research centers, colleges and universities, and more.
JSTOR
A digital library of back issues of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Core titles from each discipline included.
Women and Social Movements in the United States
Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. The collection currently includes 116 document projects and archives with 4,700 documents and more than 160,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by more than 2,450 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.
Perdita Manuscripts
The manuscripts in this site were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they have been sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA.
Black Abolitionist Papers
Details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the massive, international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings and publications of the activists themselves. The approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of almost 300 Black abolitionists show the full range of their activities.
HathiTrust Digital Library
Offers a collection of titles digitized from libraries around the world covering numerous topics in multiple different languages. Material includes books, magazines, newspapers, sheet music, journals, and government documents. Login by searching for Union College to use the enhanced features.

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Primary Sources