History Department Research Guide  Tags: history reference databases primary_sources  

Don't miss the primary-source databases described on the other pages of this guide:

• Primary Sources - Europe
• Primary Sources - United States

Book-length guides to locating and evaluating primary sources. Click the book jacket to view record on Amazon. These titles are not available full-text online.

What Are Primary Sources?

"Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons. These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research." (Source: Using Primary Sources on the Web, a website created by the History Section of the American Library Association designed to help researchers locate, evaluate, and properly cite primary sources.)

Scholars analyze and interpret primary sources in secondary works, particularly scholarly monographs (books) and peer-reviewed journal articles. Secondary sources need not be scholarly, however, and can include popular magazine and newspaper articles, non-academic biographies, textbooks, or websites. Please contact your professor or me if you are having difficulty differentiating between primary and secondary sources. Occasionally you might come across a reference to a "tertiary" source. Tertiary sources are essentially reference works; they list, index, summarize, or in some other way facilitate access to both primary and secondary sources. Examples of tertiary sources in history include Historical Abstracts, American National Biography, etc.

• Digital reproductions of primary documents in European and American history are now relatively abundant online. Link to some of the best free portals -- EuroDocs, American Memory, etc. -- from the Primary Sources - Europe and Primary Sources - United States sub-tabs.

• An excellent online collection of primary sources has been assembled by Paul Halsall of Fordham University. 

Search CastleCat to find primary sources in books and other printed works. Begin by taking just a few minutes to understand Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH for short. Subject headings are "tags" applied by professional librarians to records in library catalogs. They are similar to but more specialized than the tags used in blogs and other Web 2.0 applications.

Such tags offer researchers accurate descriptions of books and other library resources. Critically, subject headings provide information about the type of work described: primary source, biography, bibliography, etc. Remember that the term Sources is used as a subheading in LCSH to identify primary-source material. Other primary-source subheadings include Personal Narratives, Correspondence, and Diaries.

Example: A researcher needs to find primary sources on the U.S. Civil War. The most relevant subject heading is United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Sources. A long and complicated tag, granted, and not very intuitive! Fortunately, the researcher effectively needs to know only that Sources is used as a subheading to identify primary works. The following keyword searche reveal citations to books that contain relevant U.S. Civil War primary documents.

1. "Civil War" AND "United States" AND Sources
2. "Civil War" AND "United States" AND Diaries
3. Reconstruction AND Sources
4. Gettysburg AND "Personal Narratives"
5. Confederate AND Correspondence

More help locating historical documents online and in libraries and archives throughout the country and world...