Skip to main content

It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

Cline Library Library Home

Get Help
Guides & FAQs
How Do I?
Meet With A
Services
Borrow & Request
Spaces
Computers & Technology
Services For...
Special Collections
About
Visit the Library
Policies & Privileges
News & Events
Our Organization
Unique Collections
- OpenKnowledge@NAU
- Government Information
Directory
My Accounts
- Cline Library Account
- Document Delivery Services Account

HIS 330 - Teaching and Learning History and Geography: Primary Sources

Primary Sources on the Web

Library of Congress: American Memory
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Internet Archive
Cultural artifacts in digital form.
In the First Person
High quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world

Cline Library Databases: Primary Sources

ARTstor Digital Library
Image archive covering art, architecture, history, archaeology, performance, and theatre. Browse by geography, collection, classification, and groupings.
JSTOR
Database of articles from scholarly journals spanning the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Fordham Scholarship Online
Offers military history titles with a focus on Civil War, Reconstruction, World War II, and cultural history.

Locating Primary Sources

Primary sources can be located in:

Collections housed in archives or libraries. Cline Library Special Collections & University Archives has several collections of documents in their original format, including postcards, photographs, newspapers.

Digital format through online databases. For example, we subscribe to America: History and Life and Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries.

Freely available collections on the web.

Published in books and microforms that can be located in our library catalog and WorldCat.

Check out "Making Sense of Evidence" from the History Matters website to help maximize your analysis of primary source documents.

Historic Magazines

Historic Newspapers

U Penn Libraries Guide to Historic Newspapers Online
Links to freely accessible 19th and 20th Century newspapers organized by state.
Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection
"The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) currently includes more than 500,000 digitized pages, representing 163 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. Due to copyright restrictions, CHNC does not generally include newspapers published after 1923."(source: CHNC website)
Chronicling America
Library of Congress site linking to newspapers from 1860-1920.
Google News Archive
"Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee."
New York Times Archive
From 1859 - 1922.