Finding Primary Source Materials
Finding Primary Source Materials
"Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons. These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research."
Source: Reference and User Service Association History Section in the American Library Association. Website, Using Primary Sources on the Web
Primary sources may also include reprinted materials or collections of reprinted materials which were originally created at the time the event took place.
Contents:
In searching for materials in the Library catalog, consider using the following
keywords in your subject search in
order to find primary materials:
Correspondence
Diaries
Documents
Documentary
Historiography
Memoirs
Papers
Personal narratives
Sources
Also consider limiting your search by date in ASA's "Advanced Search" form. Type in a year or range of years in the box labeled pub year. Examples of pub year limits:
1996
retrieves items published only in that year
1990-1998 retrieves items published between and including the range of
years
<1990 retrieves items published before that year
>1990 retrieves items published after that year
Below you'll find a selected list of useful subject headings to browse depending on your chosen project topic for this class:
AIDS disease
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
Birth control
Contraception
Family size
Human reproduction social aspects
Sexual ethics
Courtship
Dating Social Customs
Youth
Youth United States
Frontier and pioneer life
Women pioneers
Families
Family
Home Economics
Irish Americans
Irish American families
Jewish families - also try a keyword search Jewish Americans
Jews
Aged United States
Old age pensions
Old age
Prostitution
Retirement
Rape
Sexual Behavior (also search as subject Keyword)
Domestic Relations
Sex Role in literature
Popular literature
United States History (Date ranges) , eg: United States History
1801-1809
United States Social Conditions
United States Social Life and Customs
Depressions 1929 United States
World War 1939-1945
Women United States
What is a secondary source?
Secondary sources are materials such as books and articles that have been written later than the actual historical event and which reflect on those earlier events. Secondary sources utilize and interpret primary source materials. They can include general books, textbooks or popular works as well as scholarly articles.
America History and Life.1964-WorldCat
Not an index to articles in journals, this specialized tool is essentially
a catalog of the books, manuscripts, documents , journal holdings and other
materials in libraries in the U.S. and internationally. Materials
in these collections can date back to 1200 . This database can locate secondary or primary source materials.
Many of our journal article databases allow you to obtain an online full text version of the articles they index. We also have a new technology called SFX, or Lehigh Links that will connect you to online full text where-ever it may reside. This quick guide will explain how it works: "Locating the full-text of articles using SFX. "
To identify articles of this nature from magazines you can use:
American Periodical Series Online
Searchable, full-text, online access to over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Early American Imprints Series I: 1639- 1800
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 is based on Charles Evans’ American Bibliography and the Supplement to Evans’ American Bibliography by Roger Bristol. These bibliographies attempted to gather all American imprints (published works) from the 17th and 18th Centuries.It is an ongoing project of digitizing and making full text searching available for all of the 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images. This resource provides access to primary sources covering nearly every aspect of early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics and every day life.
Early American Imprints Series II: 1800-1819
Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) provides full-text search capabilities and access to an image database of the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century.
Essay and General Literature Index 1900-1993
print edition only. Storage Facility- Use storage request form.
Emphasizing the humanities and social sciences, Essay and General Literature
Index provides easy access to nearly 45,000 English-language essays
in 3,500 book collections, anthologies and in some instances, periodicals..
Subjects covered include history, economics, psychology, religion, political
science, folklore, film, music, drama, and literature.
PAIS Archives the PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) Archive database is a retrospective conversion of the PAIS Annual Cumulated Bulletin, Volumes 1-62, published 1915-1976. It contains reference to monographs, periodical articles, and government publications. The original historical subject headings have been retained in the file. The PAIS Archive provides historical perspective on many of the 20th century's public and social policies including topics such as the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, McCarthyism, the Vietnam Conflict, Watergate, the Women's movement and much more. While not a full-text database, you can effectively use the Lehigh Links (SFX) feature to connect with those articles which the Lehigh library has in electronic full text or which might be available in our retrospective print collection.
Pooles Index to Periodical Literature. 1802-1902.
Print edition in Mini Linderman Collection in FM Library
Indexes scholarly and a handful of more general periodicals of the
time.
Readers Guide Retrospective - Readers' Guide Retrospective is a database containing comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America. It covers 1890- 1982 and replaces the printed editions of the Nineteenth Century Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and the later Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.
In addition to collections of newspapers on microfilm, the library also makes electronic access available to a number of newspaper resources of particular interest to historians. These include:
African American Newspapers: The 19th Century Full text searchable access to seven African-American newspapers. Earliest paper begins in 1827.
Early American Newspapers Series II: 1755-1900
As part of the Readex, America's Historical Newspapers Series, this product offers more than 200 significant 18th and 19th-century newspapers. EAN Series II focuses on the period between 1820 and 1860, when the number of American newspapers rose dramatically. Based primarily on the newspaper collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Series II also includes titles from the holdings of the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society and other organizations. Dates of coverage vary by newspaper. Newspapers are in the process of being digitized and added to this Series II collection. As of July 2006, 125 of the newspapers had been added. The project is expected to be completed in two years or less.
New York Times Historical 1851 - 2003 - A full-image archive that includes the entire historical run of The New York Times, the "definitive voice of American journalism since 1851." The database delivers every page of every issue from cover to cover, with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF.
Pennsylvania Gazette Published in Philadelphia from 1728 through 1800, the Pennsylvania Gazette is considered The New York Times of the 18th century.
Click on the links below to be directed to a guides to the other newspaper collections
and indexing tools available in the Lehigh University Libraries.
Newspaper Resources at Lehigh University: Historical Collections and Runs
Colonial and Early U.S. Newspapers in Microfilm Area
Archives of the Work Projects Administration and predecessors:
1933-1943. (Microfilm 13 reels) Two part printed guide
is on FM reserve under call number 331.137 U5877a.
Includes the final reports of the States programs, and final reports
for the Federal Music, Art, Crafts, Museum, Visual Arts,
Theatre and Writers programs.
Documentary Archives: multicultural America (CD ROM)
Mini Linderman in FM library 973.04 D637 CD Rom
and
Printed guide
Using more than 350 pictures and over 400 primary source documents,
this CD Rom traces the history of many racial and ethnic groups and their
contributions to American culture from prehistory to the present.
A Documentary history of slavery in North America / edited with commentary by Willie Lee Rose
Oxford University Press, 1976
FM-3-North 326.973 D637
A Documentary history of the legal aspects of abortion in the United States : Webster v. Reproductive Health Services / compiled by Roy M. Mersky, Gary R. Hartman
F.B. Rothman, 1990 8 volumes
FM-3-North 344.73041 D637
Gay American history : lesbians and gay men in the U.S.A. : a documentary history / by Jonathan Ned Katz
New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Meridian, c1992.
FM-3-North 306.76609 K19g
Letters of Mrs. Adams, the wife of John Adams. With an introductory memoir by her grandson, Charles Francis Adams
Adams, Abigail, 1744-1818.
Boston, C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1841
STORAGE: Restricted use. Request 973.44 A211L Note: other editions of letters of Abigail Adams are available. Search ASA.
Lehigh University. Brown and White.
1894- Copies in both the Microfilm Collection and the Linderman
Special Collections Department.
The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States.
FM-3-North 353.03 U58p 1929- 1998
Records of Salem witchcraft, copied from the original documents. Compiled by W. Elliot Woodward
New York, Da Capo Press, 1969.
FM-3-North 133.4 R311
Women Writers Online presents searchable full text of all Women Writer's Project titles currently available online, covering works written between 1400 to 1850.
Women's studies manuscript collections from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Series 3, Sexuality, sex education, and reproductive rights [MICROFILM]
The web is increasingly being used by archives, museums, libraries
and organizations as a mechanism for distributing primary source materials
in image and text form. Some of these sites can be useful in your research,
however care must be taken in evaluating the authenticity and validity
of the materials. Some of those factors to look at in evaluating web resources
include:
authorship, publishing body, point of view or bias, and verifiability.
Discussions of criteria that should be used in the evaluation process
can be found at the following web sites:
Evaluating Information Found on the Internet, http://milton.mse.jhu.edu/research/education/net.html
Evaluating Internet Research Sources, http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm
Using Primary Sources on the Web, http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/
Some guides to Websites on women's history and other topics that may provide leads to primary sources for your research :
Serves as a gateway to history materials on the web. Database is searchable by keyword.
Women's Archives and Special Collections on the WWW
A review article highlighting useful primary source sites.
WWW Virtual Library of Women's History
A collection of annotated links to websites focused on women's history
A selected sample of web sites with primary source material follows:
American Memory:
Historical Collections for the National Digital Library
The American Memory Historical Collections, a major component of the
Library's National Digital Library Program, are multi-media collections
of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures,
and text from the Library's Americana collections. There are currently
over 60 collections in the American Memory Historical Collections.
Documenting the American South : North American slave narratives
A collection of 230 English language eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century slave narratives. The collection comprises narratives and many biographies of fugitive and former slaves. The texts were originally published as broadsides, pamphlets, and books, and users can now access the narratives in HTML or SGML format via an alphabetical list. (abstract: Copyright: Internet Scout Project, 2001)
Historic Government Publications from World War II
Project from Southern Methodist University which has digitized U.S. government documents from the WWII era.
"Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints."
United States historical
census data browser
The Instructional Computing Group of Harvard University, in cooperation
with Inter-university Consortium for Political and
Social research at the University of Michigan, has made a subset of historical
data from U.S. decennial censuses from 1790 to 1970 available for forms-based
querying on the web. Data availability varies by year and state.
From 1790 to 1830, most data concerns population breakouts by age, sex,
and free or slave. From 1849 to 1860 much more data is available, including
occupation, education, churches, mortality, and property and wealth, among
others. Data are available at the state and county level, although county
querying is not possible. There is no facility at this time for downloading
data to statistical programs; however, this is a small price to pay for
a virtual treasure house of U.S. historical information. Copyright Internet
Scout Project, 1994-1998.
Women and Social Movements
in the United States, 1820-1940
This website is intended to introduce students, teachers, and
scholars to a collection of primary documents related to women and social
movements in the United States between 1830 and 1930. It is organized around
editorial projects completed by undergraduate and graduate students at
the State University of New York at Binghamton. Each project poses
a question and provides 15-20 documents that address the question. Projects
cover freeman's aid, WCTU, Chicago World's Fair, women's suffrage, labor
strikes, pacifism, birth control movement, racial equality, temperance
and the individuals associated with these movements such as Lucretia
Mott, Margaret Sanger and Ida B. Wells. Includes brief introductory essays
and links to related sites. Site is fully searchable.
Guide updated and revised: February 2007