SEARCHING THE ONLINE CATALOG (ASA) FOR PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIALS

    Diaries
    Memoirs
    Historiography
    Sources
    Personal narratives
    Correspondence

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

DATABASES

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 . 

LOCATING ARTICLES CONTEMPORARY TO YOUR PERIOD OF STUDY

To identify articles of this nature from magazines you can use:

Essay and General Literature Index 1900-1993   print edition only. L-1-Index.
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.

International Index to Periodicals. 1907-1964 print edition only. L-1-Index
Originally published as a supplement to the Readers Guide, this author/subject index covers a selected list of periodicals with a more scholarly focus than those popular magazines covered in the RG.

Nineteeth Century Readers Guide to Periodical Literature. Print edition only.  1890-1899. L-1-Index
Index to 51 periodicals of an academic as well as general nature.

Pooles Index to Periodical Literature.  1802-1902.  Print edition in L-1-Index.
Indexes scholarly and a handful of more general periodicals of the time.

Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.     Print edition in L-1-Index, 1900- 1992
Indexes articles in popular and general magazines.

NEWSPAPER RESOURCES

Newpaper Collections in the Lehigh Library

SELECTED PRIMARY RESOURCES IN THE LEHIGH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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)
L- Reserve,  973.04 D637 CD Rom
L-0-Lower,  973.04 D637 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.

Lehigh University. Brown and White.
1894-   Copies in both the Microfilm Collection and the Linderman Special Collections Department.

The Presidential Papers (CD ROM)
FM-Reserve  353.03 U58pa  CD Rom
FM-1-Ref     353.03 U58pa  Printed guide
Contains public papers of Herbert Hoover through Bill Clinton.

The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
FM-3-North   308 R781p,  vols. 1 - 13

The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States.
FM-3-North  353.03 U58p  1929- 1998

Women's studies manuscript collections from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Series 3, Sexuality, sex education, and reproductive rights [MICROFILM]

WEB SITES AS PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIALS

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. Two 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

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.

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 created 10/01