What are Primary Source Documents?

Primary Source Documents are...

• Newspaper articles
• Magazine articles
• Essays
• Photographs
• Diaries
• Interviews
• Books
• Government Documents
• and much, much more

created at a particular point in history.

Today, you can locate primary source documents in many places including museums, libraries and personal collections. But, most importantly, you can also locate them on the web.

Here are few excellent links to primary source documents:

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library http://memory.loc.gov  More than 7,000,000 digital items relating to the history and culture of the United States

HistoryWiz http://historywiz.com/multimedia.htm Multimedia Exhibits and Image Galleries

World HistoryArchives http://hartford-hwp.com/archives Documents for teaching and learning about world history from a working-class and non-eurocentric perspective.

The American Folklife Center http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ndl.html This Library of Congress exhibit presents a variety of historical topics in manuscripts, video recordings, audio recordings, and photographs.

American Life Histories http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html The Library of Congress maintains this collection, which represents the work of the Federal Writers Project 1936-1940.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/alfalist.htm This is a browse-able and searchable database that specializes in legal, historical and diplomatic documents.

Best Information on the Net http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/Majors/history/hisdoc.htm This site from the O’Keefe Library at St. Ambrose University is a major portal for documents relating to U.S., world, and [Catholic] church history. It links to such sites as Civil Rights oral history interviews, Civil War primary documents, Vietnam War primary documents, parchments from medieval Europe, collections of Egyptian papyri, writings of George Washington, digitized Medici archives, and documents from the Nurenmberg Trials.

A Chronology of U.S. Historical Documents http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/ A project of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, this site has documents sorted by date and includes a database of U.S. and state flags and laws regarding them

The Perseus Digital Library http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/  Perseus aims to present a wide (and changing) range of source materials to students of the humanities.

Thomas Legislative Information on the Internet http://thomas.loc.gov/  This site includes a special section titled “100 Milestone Documents 1776-1965” as well as a link to the Library of Congress “Primary Documents in American History.” Items are presented, when possible, in both transcribed form and digital images of the originals.

WW II Resources http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/ This site is "dedicated to combating 'history by soundbites.'" It includes diplomatic documents from American, British and French governmental sources, transcripts from the hearings following Pearl Harbor, U.S. Congressional documents regarding the declaration of war, and other primary sources.