Primary Sources - HIS 250 | Historian's Craft - LibGuides at Lebanon Valley College

What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources offer an eyewitness view of a particular event.

A primary source is a document or other sort of evidence written or created during the time of study.

Primary documents include diaries OR speeches OR letters OR minutes OR interviews OR journals OR narratives OR memoirs OR images OR news film footage OR autobiographies OR official records OR photographs. (You can copy this list and paste it into one of your search box lines...)

Image source: Iron shackles used in slave trade. Chicago Historical Society. #F003 as shown on slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jeromy Handler and Michael Tuite and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

How Do I ...

...find primary sources?

Web Sources

Books, Newspapers, Serials, Pamphlets, Official Documents, Maps, Photographs, Prints
Jamaica Unshackled. Digitized collection of resources from the National Library of Jamaica. Covers the 1831 Sam Sharpe Rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion.
History, Literature, Court and Legal Documents
The Avalon Project, sponsored by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, has compiled a useful online collection of primary documents relating to slavery in the United States
Letters, Diaries, Speeches, Census Data, Newspaper Accounts, and Church Records
“The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War,” a project by University of Virginia Professor of History Edward L. Ayers, “details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. Contains thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, VA and Franklin County, PA."
Letters, Government Documents, Court Records, and Other Primary & Secondary Sources
The PBS site on “Africans in America” contains an extensive collection of primary documents and secondary sources.
Personal Papers
The “Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress . . . contains approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images) relating to Douglass’s life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant. . . with the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895 . . . ”
Primary Sources
Making of America. Digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
Slave Narratives
Includes autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives.
Slave Narratives
Born in Slavery...from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves
Transatlantic Slave Data
"Information on 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries."