Research Librarian
Primary Sources
Find primary sources for English in the following collections:
- America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1980) This link opens in a new windowSearchable archive of American newspapers including Early American Newspapers (1690-1922) and Hispanic American Newspapers (1808-1980).
- American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection (1684-1912) This link opens in a new windowComprehensive collection of early American periodicals, with coverage of advertising, health, women's issues, science, the history of slavery, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more.
- American Periodicals (1740-1940) This link opens in a new windowDigitized reproductions of more than 1,100 18th and 19th century newspapers and periodicals.
- AM Explorer This link opens in a new windowSearch across the entire portfolio of Adam Matthew primary-source collections, spanning the social sciences and humanities from the 15th-21st centuries.
- Archives of Sexuality & Gender This link opens in a new windowArchives of Sexuality and Gender covers the sixteenth to twentieth centuries in historical primary-source publications relating to the history and study of sex, sexuality, gender, and gender studies research. Sources include newsletters, organizational papers, government documents, manuscripts, and pamphlets. Our access includes LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940 (Parts 1 and 2), Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, and International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture.
- British Library Newspapers This link opens in a new windowSearchable archive of regional and local British newspapers published between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
- British Periodicals This link opens in a new windowSearchable full text of hundreds of British periodicals from the late 17th century to the early 20th, with high-resolution facsimile page images.
- Caribbean Newspapers (1718-1876) This link opens in a new windowFully searchable digitized collection of 18th- and 19th-century Caribbean newspapers, including 66 titles from 22 islands
- Early American Imprints, Series I, Evans (1639-1800) This link opens in a new windowBooks, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans.
- Early American Imprints. Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) This link opens in a new windowBooks, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.
- EEBO: Early English Books Online (1473-1700) This link opens in a new windowFull text of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661).
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) (1701-1800) This link opens in a new windowPage images and full-text searching for more than 136,000 key English- and foreign-language titles printed in Great Britain during the 18th century, based on the English Short Title Catalogue.
- Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) (1780-1925) This link opens in a new windowFull-text, searchable content from a broad range of 19th-century sources in literature, politics, theater, music, religion, maps, science, and childhood
- North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new windowAutobiographies, biographies, publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files of indigenous people from across North America.
- Romanticism This link opens in a new windowCollection of working notebooks, verse manuscripts, and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey, as well as diaries, travel journals, autograph albums, guide books, fine art and maps.
- Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974 This link opens in a new windowDiaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary from the 1960s.
Tip: What are primary sources?
A primary source is essentially any record or artifact from a given era that provides original documentary evidence of the time—like a snapshot of a given experience, taken by someone who was there. Secondary sources, such as books or articles, often draw heavily from primary sources, such as letters, diaries, or interviews, to make representations or interpretations of a period under study.
A few examples of primary sources include diaries, photographs, letters, government documents, and newspaper and magazine articles (from the period under study).
Want to learn more? Visit the Primary Sources Research Guide.