Primary Sources on the Web
- Library of Congress: American MemoryAmerican 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 ArchiveCultural artifacts in digital form.
- In the First PersonHigh 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
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowDatabase of articles from scholarly journals spanning the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
- Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new windowProvides access to thousands of pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, displayed as high-quality images of the original manuscripts.
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 Newspapers
- U Penn Libraries Guide to Historic Newspapers OnlineLinks 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 AmericaLibrary 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 ArchiveFrom 1859 - 1922.