LibGuides: INST 2001: The Making of Global Society: Primary Sources

What are Primary Sources?

University of Michigan Guide
Nice definition and more examples of primary sources.

Primary sources provide a way of interacting directly with the past by connecting us with the original record of social, political, cultural and scientific works from a specific time period created by those working in that time period. Primary sources can provide unique perspectives, as well as enable a scholar/student to interact with and interpret the source material.

Digitized Materials

American Periodical Series 1740-1900
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.

These databases consist, for the most part, of documents that are considered primary.

African-American Poetry 1760-1900
full text of 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The database includes allegories, broadsides, children's poems, elegiac poems, epics, hymns, odes, patriotic poems, and sonnets. The poets are among those included in the William French et al. bibliography, Afro-American Poetry and Drama, 1760-1975.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
he collection currently includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors.
Historical Statistics of the United States
more than 37,000 annual time series of quantitative historical information covering virtually every quantifiable dimension of American history: population, work and welfare, economic structure and performance, governance, and international relations, all from the earliest times to the present

Online Sites

Eurodocs
Links to sites with primary historical documents for European countries and regions. Includes prehistoric and ancient Europe.
American Memory Project
Digital Public Library of America
World Digital Library
a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO)
Digital Vault