duPont Library: History 380: Crimes and Scandals in the Historical Imagination, 18th-20th Centuries: Find Primary Resources

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

Primary Source Collections in History

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.

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 380: Crimes and Scandals in the Historical Imagination, 18th-20th Centuries

Map of Europe, 1690

What Are Primary Resources?

Primary Source Collections in History

Types of Primary Resources