Primary sources are the original evidence produced by participants in a specific event or time period, witnesses to an event or period in history, or simply people who lived in the distant or recent past
Some examples of primary sources are letters, diaries, official government records, artifacts, contemporary newspaper articles, interviews, original photographs, statistical data, memoirs and autobiographies and material objects in physical or digital form
Primary source collections currently available on JSTOR are multidisciplinary and discipline-specific and include select monographs, pamphlets, manuscripts, letters, oral histories, government documents, images, 3D models, spatial data, type specimens, drawings, paintings, and more.
Access millions of pages of primary source collections across the entire portfolio of Adam Matthew Digital, spanning content from the 15th-21st centuries.
New genealogy research tool that provides instant access to a wide range of unique resources for genealogical and historical research. With more than 1.5 billion names in over 4,000 databases, Ancestry Library Edition includes records from the United States Census; military records; court, land and probate records; vital and church records; directories; passenger lists and more. These collections are continuously expanding, with new content added every business day.
Nearly 500,000 art images of art, architecture and other forms of visual and material culture. Represents all time periods and cultures. Includes online and offline tools for faculty and students. Note: Artstor is now part of JSTOR. The Artstor website will be retired on August 1, 2024.
From the first commercial trade through modern times, people of Asian heritage have shaped the geography, arts, culture, and civil discourse of the United States in immeasurable ways. This primary source collection offers an expansive window into centuries of Asian American history and daily life – as well as the ways popular culture has portrayed and perceived people of Asian descent.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a digital collection of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a digitized collection of all English- and foreign-language titles printed in the U.K., plus thousands printed in the Americas. Includes many types of materials: books, broadsides, ephemera, etc. Covers 1701-1800.
Comprehensive coverage of the Hispanic American experience from the early 18th century to the present day. Sourced from more than 17,000 publications, including 700 Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals. Updated daily with new material, illuminating centuries of Hispanic history, culture, and daily life.
A collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression. Concentrating heavily on the 19th century, Immigration to the US includes over 400,000 pages from more than 2,200 books, pamphlets, and serials, over 9,600 pages from manuscript and archival collections, and more than 7,800 photographs.
The Making of the Modern World covers the history of Western trade, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It also covers the rise of the modern labor movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories that championed and challenged capitalism in the nineteenth century.
Several institutions that have significant New England Indian collections have organized into a cooperative endeavor called The Yale Indian Papers Project to address these problems by publishing an electronic database known as The Native Northeast Portal. The Portal represents a scholarly critical edition of New England Native American primary source materials gathered presently from the partner institutions into one robust virtual collection, where the items are digitized, transcribed, annotated, and edited to the highest academic standards and then made freely available over the Internet, using open-source software.
Primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture. The database uses “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense, to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT. Each of the document collections will include a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources in historical terms and in relationship to previous scholarship.
Features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Slavery and the Law also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.
Focuses on women’s public activism globally, from 1600 to the present. Created through collaboration with leading historians, the collection contains nearly 400,000 pages of primary source documents and more than 200 related scholarly essays interpreting these sources.
This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.
Women Working is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University.
Constructed and maintained by the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program, the Digital Archive contains declassified historical materials from archives around the world, much of it in English translation.