duPont Library: History 384: Sex and the City: Find Primary Resources

Searching for Primary Sources

Searching for primary sources related to your topic can be both exciting and difficult. This is because you are not only looking for a variety of media types but in specific locations, related to specific people, and these types of sources are archived and made available in many different ways. Some primary sources exist but can only be accessed in the physical archive. Many sources have been lost to time.

When you begin searching for primary sources, consider how traces of the past might have been left behind depending on the time period.

Journals, diaries, letters, correspondence, travelogues
Furniture, building structures, environmental features
Archeological evidence, artifacts, remains
Newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, zines, other short form periodicals
Advertisements, posters, propaganda, flyers
Art pieces, paintings, comics, visual media
Court documents, government documents, wills, marriage licenses, obituaries
Video footage, photographs, giphs, social media posts

When you're reading other secondary sources (books, articles, etc.), keep track of what primary sources are being analyzed and mentioned. You can use their bibliography to follow up on those sources.

You can also search for primary sources in several ways.

Digital Archives - Either through an online, publicly accessible archive or through a library-subscription archive. You can search on the open web for public digital archives by searching your key words and adding the words: archive or "digital collection" or "special collection"
1. Example of public archive: Library of Congress Digital Collections: https://www.loc.gov/collections/
2. Example of library-subscription: American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
Print Archives - Many, many more primary sources reside in physical archives or collections. You may need to either reach out to the archive to see if they will make a digital reproduction or travel to the archive itself to access the material.

Primary Source Collections in History

Contemporary Women's Issues (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women's Issues offers comprehensive coverage of issues that influence women’s lives across the globe. The database provides access to current full text and pertinent backfile content covering topics including civil rights, health, education, professional development, and entrepreneurship.
Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1450-1920
Location: Europe
Defining Gender is a collection of digitized original documents relating to Gender Studies. The sources come from libraries and archives throughout the world, including many from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.Contains ephemera, pamphlets, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, manuscript journals, poetry, receipt books and conduct and advice literature.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1600-2000
Location: North America
A collection of digitized primary sources that document women's activism in United States public life. The collection includes books, images, pamphlets, advice literature, training guides, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, bibliographies, publications of state and local commissions on women, and ephemera.
There are multiple ways to identify relevant documents within the database. The database contains over 130 Document Projects, each of which consists of an interpretive question and a series of primary source documents that address that question. The database also includes an index of people, an index and dictionary of social movements, a chronology of U.S. women’s history, indexing by organization, and indexing by subject. Additional features include reflections by present-day scholars of women’s history, book reviews, teaching strategies, the biographical dictionary Notable American Women, and the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States.
Women and Social Movements, International -- 1840 to present This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1840-2011
Location: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania
Online archive of published and manuscript primary sources focusing on women's international activism since the mid-nineteenth century. The archive includes proceedings of women's international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, as well as correspondence, diary entries, and memoirs. It is also rich in online publications of contemporary Non-Governmental Organizations. Covered topics include war and peace, poverty, child labor, literacy, disease prevention, women's rights and gender inequality.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1715-1950
Location: North America
Searchable text of 150,000 pages of diaries and letters from 1,325 American and Canadian women from colonial times to 1950.
Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
Allows cross-searching of all of our Gale primary source databases. Currently includes: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, 19th Century British Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Times Digital Archive.
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Independent Voices is a digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1492-2007
Location: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania
Brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of "Empire" and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology. It is organized into the following five thematic sections:I) Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; II) Empire Writing & the Literature of Empire; III) The Visible Empire; IV) Religion & Empire; and V) Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, c1607-2007. Each section features essays by leading scholars in the field. The essays relate directly to the source material covered by the resource, with 30-50 links per essay to documentary evidence.

World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

Jessie Ball duPont Library

History 384: Sex and the City

Map of Europe, 1690

Searching for Primary Sources

Primary Source Collections in History