Librarian
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Content Note
What is a primary source?
There is no one type of thing that is a primary source. Depending on your particular research a primary source might include...
autobiographies, published scholarly journals, newspapers, archival collections of letters, personal diaries, photographs, videos, interviews, pamphlets, or artwork
Be creative! Ask for help!
Newspapers
- African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998 This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Contains the full text of nearly 300 African-American newspapers from 35 states printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. Covers 1827 - 1998. - America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Contains the full text and images from historical American newspapers, 1690 - 1922. Also includes sub-collections of African American Newspapers, Ethnic American Newspapers, and Hispanic Newspapers. Languages covered include English, Spanish, Yiddish, French, German, and Japanese. - Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Search across fully digitized newspapers, including all articles, advertisements, and illustrations.
- Freedmen's Record (1865-1874)
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Freedmen's Record is a historical journal published in United States by the New England Freedmen's Aid Society. This collection contains issues published between 1865 and 1874.
Digital Collections
- African American Collections at the Library of Congress
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From the Library's Digital Collections. Includes pamphlets, photographs, books, and miscellaneous papers relating to African-American History. - African American History Project
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The African American History Project (AAHP) is an archive of 300+ oral history interviews conducted with African Americans around Alachua County and the American South. - African American Timeline (Library of Congress)
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From the Library of Congress "A timeline chronicling major events and notable people effecting African American History from the years 1852 through 1925." - African American Women (Duke)
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Online Archival Collections, Duke University. - Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South
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The Behind the Veil Oral History Project was undertaken by Duke University's Lyndhurst Center for Documentary Studies in 1990. It seeks to record and preserve the living memory of African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950. - Digital Schomburg
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Online exhibitions, maps, and books from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. - Freedmen and Southern Society Project
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The Freedmen and Southern Society Project was established in 1976 to capture the essence of that revolution by depicting the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners.
- HistoryMakers This link opens in a new window
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Video of oral history interviews highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements.
- Images of Nineteenth Century African-Americans (Schomburg)
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Browse and search images from the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center. - Making of America (Cornell University)
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Ful-text archive of periodicals and books from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The two archives have different contents, so be sure to search both.
- Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
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Primary source documents dating from 1490 to the near present from across the Atlantic world relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition, and social justice.
History Primary Source Databases
- AM Explorer This link opens in a new window
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Primary sources from the 15th-21st centuries, including the social sciences, humanities, global history, popular culture, history of media, gender and sexuality, trade history, borders and migrations, and war and conflict. - America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
Contains information about scholarly articles on the history and culture of the U. S. and Canada. (For World History, use Historical Abstracts) - Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
The primary place to find scholarship on world history. (For U.S. and Canadian History, use America: History and Life). Covers publications from 1955 - present.
