A primary source is an original document or account of an event, usually written or created during the time under study by firsthand observers or participants.
Examples include:
Published sources (in print or online) such as novels, poems, plays, data from a research study, autobiographies, speeches, eyewitness accounts found in newspapers, magazines or blogs, advertisements, maps, pamphlets, posters, laws, court decisions.
Unpublished sources, such as personal letters, diaries, journals, wills, deeds, family histories, and many other sources.
Interviews and recordings from people with firsthand knowledge of events.
Visual documents and artifacts, such as photographs, films, paintings and other types of artwork.
Offers an online collection of specialized reference eBooks for multidisciplinary research. Provides context through superb content for deep background reading.
Contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountaineers in the Rockies 800 years later. Funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum & Library Services and by private donors.
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1756-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
This digital collection from the Library of Congress includes primary source manuscripts, images (photographs, architectural drawings, images of homes and buildings), maps, historic newspapers, and more.
Gale In Context: High SchoolThis link opens in a new windowGale In Context: High School simplifies your search for information by bringing together hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and audio selections into one easy-to-use database. While online browsers can serve up unreliable or incomplete results, this database lets you explore vetted primary sources, biographies, critical essays, and other materials in many formats — giving you deeper context to high-interest topics.
Gale In Context: High School brings together the authoritative content and tools needed to give students context for the high-interest topics they’re studying:
• Helps to develop critical thinking by offering content from a range of sources, such as the New York Times and Newsweek, along with hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and audio files.
• Promotes discovery by enabling students to easily bookmark, print, download, email, and share information online through G Suite for Education and Microsoft Office 365 tools.
• Accommodates diverse backgrounds with ReadSpeaker text-to-speech technology and on-demand article translation in over 20 languages.
Through letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories; accounts from official, radical, and alternative organizations; posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare materials —125,000 pages of text and 50 hours of video—the collection tells the story of the 60s.
