duPont Library: History 322: Southern Lives: Find Primary Resources

Primary Source Collections: United States

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Time period: 1700s-present
Location: North America
Primary sources and archival materials relating to American culture and history, mostly from the collections of the Library of Congress. Includes written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music.
Organized into more than 100 collections, each accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections. Comprises more than 9 million items including written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music. Freely accessible.
American Periodicals
Time period: 1740-1940
Location: North America
Contains digitized images of the pages of special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Search interface: ProQuest.
ARTstor now on JSTOR
Access to collections of high-quality images, curated from leading museums and archives around the world. Collections are rights-cleared for education and research. Users may create an account with their iu.edu email to save and organize sources and notes. Please note that content from the original Artstor platform has migrated to this resource. The old Artstor platform is set to be retired and will no longer available after August 1, 2024. Existing individual Artstor user accounts will carry over to this new platform.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Time Period: 1777-1963
Location: North America
A collection of digitized pages of newspapers from many states in the U.S. published between 1836 and 1922. Also includes directory information about American newspapers published between 1690 and the present.
Sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).
Civil War Primary Source Documents
Time Period: 1860-1900 (a few collections after 1900)
Location: North America
Civil War Primary Source Documents from The New-York Historical Society presents unique manuscript material chronicling all aspects of the American Civil War from warfare on land, at sea, in hospitals and prison camps, and reactions and impressions of the War from the home front. The collection, comprised of over 110,000 pages, focuses on the War as it was fought from 1861 to 1865 and represents both Northern and Southern perspectives. It also contains important contextual documents leading up to War and after its conclusion.
The collection provides researchers with access to letters; diaries; administrative records; photographs; illustrations; artifacts such as reading glasses, wooden boxes, and pocketbooks; various scrapbook journals; family portraits; and maps featuring hand-colored details of troop movements and local landmarks. Highlights from the collection include the papers of David Cronin, a famous soldier and artist; the letters of three soldier-brothers to their family back home in the Lyon family papers, soldiers' diaries chronicling daily life and experiences as prisoners of war; women's diaries discussing life on the home front; accounts from famous people, such as Ulysses S. Grant’s letters regarding the fall of Richmond; collections of records from Confederate and Union regiments; Union Defense Committee records; Confederate Army records; and records of the Provost Marshal of the 7th congressional district.
Literature, culture and society in Depression era America: archives of the Federal Writers' Project
Time Period: 1933-1943
Location: North America
The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was the most controversial and contentious program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "New Deal." This collection presents the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) publications of all 47 states involved in the project, which ran from 1933 to 1943. Forming the most complete collection of publications from all participating states, this archive contains more than 450 individual items, many of which are typed or mimeographed and received only limited circulation. This unique collection of the publications of the FWP provides scholars with an extremely lively and detailed picture of life in America during the Great Depression. Almost every aspect of life is covered from industry and labor relations, through welfare and government, to sports and hobbies.
The contents of this collection constitutes the Harvester Microfilm product entitled Archives of the Federal Writers Project, Series One: Printed and Mimeograph Publications in the Surviving FWP Files, 1933-1943, excluding State Guides.

What Are Primary Resources?

Original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. May include letters, diaries, manuscripts, journals, speeches, newspapers, interviews, memoirs, government documents, photographs, audio recordings, film or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, and tools.

Example:

Letter written by George Mason to John Mason

Credit: George Mason Primary Resources Guide

Jessie Ball duPont Library

History 322: Southern Lives

Primary Source Collections: United States

What Are Primary Resources?