What is a primary source?
There's no one thing, but for historians, it's generally something that was created at the time of the event. Try searching using terms like: biography [also use for autobiographies], newspapers, "personal papers" [use for archival material], correspondence [use for letters], personal diaries, photographs, videos, interviews, pamphlets, artwork, sources [a common one!], and many other types of things!
Digitized Collections (Documents, Books, Periodicals, and More)
- Making of the Modern World This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Search across primary documents in economic history from major British and American libraries. Covers 1450 - 1914. - British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
Search through hundreds of British periodicals from the late 17th century to the early 20th century, all available in full text. Also allows searching for cartoons, photographs, illustrations, and other images. Covers 1680 - 1930.
- Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics [Harvard University]Historical scholarship about disease and epidemics. Over 500,000 pages of plates, engravings, maps, charts, and broadsides from the 15th - 20th centuries.
- Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new window
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Search all of Carleton's Readex collections at once, including America's Historical Imprints (Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker) and America's Historical Newspapers. - Europeana This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and subject indexing)
A large collections with artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe. Has filters for Open Licenses.
National Library of Medicine Online Collections
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has a large and extensive history of medicine collection. As part of the library's mission to provide access and preserve its collection of books, ephemera, pamphlets, posters, etc, the library has created several digitized collections. Below are four particularly relevant and rich collections for the work in your course.
More information about the History of Medicine divisions is found here.
- National Library of Medicine (NLM) Digital CollectionsImages, videos, books, manuscripts, declassified government documents about the history of medicine, all public domain. Includes curated exhibits.
- Turning the PagesFeatures nine works important to our understanding of the history of medicine, including Hanaoka Seishu’s Surgical Casebook, Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arte Distilland, and Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) **Note that this will no longer fully load; only the images will be able to load.
- Profiles in ScienceDigital archive of papers from prominent 20th scientists, physicians, and other leaders in medical and scientific fields who have contributed to the development of medical science.
Carleton Special Collections
- Carleton Special Collections - MARS Facsimile CollectionContact the Special Collections staff to view these items.
