Primary Sources

This brief guide is designed to help students and researchers find and evaluate primary sources available online. Contains links to numerous websites that contain primary sources.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after 2.5 years of development

New York Public Library's digital collections
is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more

Database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color

Transcribed court records, sermons, letters and diaries dealing with the 1692 accusations and trials

This Plymouth Colony Archive presents a collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies

The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. This is a collection of documents primarily from the United States that were created during the 17th century.

Provided by the Avalon Project, this resource contains a chronological list of primary source documents related to the American Revoluitonary War.

The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. This is a collection of documents primarily from the United States that were created during the 18th century.

Images and documents from the civil war or related to the memory of the civil war

Central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by research libraries in the southeast

Collection includes over four hundred Civil War era maps, broadsides, photographs, printed works, Confederate currency, and manuscript letters and diaries" that document all aspects of Southern life during the Civil War

University of Pennsylvania archive of pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings and more documenting the causes, conduct and consequences of the war

This guide gathers in one place links to World War II related resources throughout the Library of Congress Web site

During World War II, the US Army administered more than 200 surveys to over half a million American troops to discover what they thought and how they felt about the conflict and their military service. The surviving collection of studies is now accessible to the public for the first time at The American Soldier in World War II. Browse and search over 65,000 pages of uncensored, open-ended responses handwritten by servicemembers, view and download survey data and original analyses, read topical essays by leading historians, and access additional learning resources.

In 1946, Dr. David P. Boder, a psychology professor from Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe to record the stories of Holocaust survivors in their own words. This site contains transcripts and audio recordings of these interviews

Museum site includes a number of exhibits with primary documents including images and oral histories

Major collection: documents, video, oral histories and more documenting the civil rights movement

Digital collection includes newspaper clippings, oral histories, correspondence and more from the summer of 1964

Documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present