duPont Library: History 200: First on the Mountain: Native Environmental Histories: 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

Native American Indians, 1645-1819 This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1645-1819 Location: North America Every major book about Native Peoples from this period is included, along with treaties, transcribed letters from Native American leaders, the minutes of tribal meetings, histories of numerous tribes, missionary reports, captivity narratives, firsthand accounts of battles, trading records, military rosters, expedition logs and maps, trial records, legislative bills, books on Native American languages and grammar, military rosters, governors' and legislators' reports, ballads, songs, plays and more. Offers text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested search paths for easy browsing and discovery.
Native American Tribal Histories, 1813-1880 This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1813-1880 Location: North America Complete digitized collection of records from Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) superintendents, from 1813 to 1880. BIA superintendents recorded their interactions with Native American tribes, detailing encounters between Indigenous people and the U.S. government. It includes documents related to dozens of Native tribes from every region of the contiguous United States, including Apache, Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cherokee, Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Klamath, Lummi, Mandan, Mojave, Navajo, Nez Perce, Osage, Potawatomi, Pueblo, Seminole, Sioux, Ute and others. Detailed historical background notes created by the curators of the National Archives are included.
Territorial Papers of the United States, 1764-1953 This link opens in a new window
Time period: 1764-1953 Location: North America More than half of America’s states began as territories. From the 1760s to the 1950s the United States of America expanded southward and westward, acquiring territories that spanned from Florida to California to Alaska. Before they evolved into twenty-seven American states, these territories were managed by the U.S. State and Interior departments. Providing many of the earliest known records of Native American life and of encounters between settlers and Native Americans dating back to the mid-18th century, this collection covers the expansion of the United States and involves numerous encroachments on Native lands – along with reactions among Native tribes and in Washington D.C. Features eyewitness descriptions of Native customs and practices; daily life; strategic interests; Native leaders; resistance to settlement; relationships between and among tribes; commerce and trade; and much more.
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.

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.
Making of the modern world, Part I: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1450-1945
Location: North America, South America, Europe, Africa
Provides digital facsimile images of books, serials, pamphlets, essays and other unique primary sources that track the development of the modern western world through the lens of trade and wealth. Has full-text searching across millions of pages of works from the period 1450-1850. Provides material for research in the areas of history, political science, social conditions, technology and industry, economics, area studies and more.
Part I is based on Gale's microfilm collection: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature. It combines the strengths of two pre-eminent collections--the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration--along with supplementary materials from the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University and from the libraries of Yale University.

Primary Sources - from books

American Eras: Primary Sources by Sara Constantakis, et al.
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9781414498409
Publication Date: 2014

Types of Primary Resources

This is a list of the most common types of primary resources in history. When searching for sources, you might watch for these terms to help you figures out if you have found a primary resource. You might also use these terms in your searches to help focus on a particular type of source or narrow down a large list of results.

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autobiography/autobiographies
correspondence
description and travel
diary/diaries
documents
early works to 1800
interview/interviews
journal
letters
pamphlets
personal narratives
trials
sources
speeches

Jessie Ball duPont Library

History 200: First on the Mountain: Native Environmental Histories

Map of Europe, 1690

Searching for Primary Sources

Primary Source Collections in History

Primary Sources - from books

Types of Primary Resources