LibGuides: Liberal Studies: Primary Sources

Primary Source Overview

A primary source is a record of a person, event, or occurrence created by an eyewitness or a participant's version of an event. Primary sources allow researchers to gain better insight into historical figures and events.
Primary sources emphasize the lack of intermediaries between the things or events being studied and reports of those things or events based on the belief that firsthand accounts are more accurate.
Examples of primary sources include diaries, letters, notes from lab experiments, research data, photographs, blogs, e-mails, maps, scrapbooks, Facebook pages, poetry, artwork, birthday cards, office records, and artifacts.

Recommended Primary Source Databases

Access World News Research Collection
Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of international, national, and local news sources. Also available remotely 24/7 on any device.
African American Experience - American Mosaic
Organized by time period, this database contains timelines, photos, videos, speeches, letters other primary documents on African American history, plus well-written summaries called reference articles.
Age of Exploration
Explore five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration.

Create an account to save searches, slideshows, and documents to refer to later with the "My Archive" feature.
AM Research Skills
What are primary sources? How can you use them in your research? Why are some historical documents archived and why did others disappear? Why does it matter today? This modular tool designed to support students of the humanities and social sciences, AM Research Skills Foundations introduces the key approaches to working with source materials and historical evidence.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Historical Archive 1902-1990
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is an American daily newspaper serving Fort Worth and Tarrant County, the western half of the North Texas area known as the Metroplex. This collection contains material published in the newspaper from 1902-1990.
JSTOR
JSTOR offers journals, ebooks, and primary source collections, allowing researchers to retrieve high-resolution scanned images as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The resources archived in JSTOR span many disciplines.
Latino American Experience
A full-text database focusing on the history and culture of Latinos living in the United States. Features over 150 titles,1500 images, hundreds of primary documents, Spanish-language content, a timeline, and 225 vetted Web sites.
National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent agency of the United States government within the executive branch, charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records.
Women and Social Movements 1600-2000: Scholar's Edition
This database contains 130 document projects and document archives that present and interpret primary source documents. In addition, there are many other publications, including a biographical dictionary and an encyclopedia included.

Recommended Primary Source Collections for Liberal Studies

Danish Royal Library: Digital Collections
The Royal Library in Copenhagen publishes selected parts of its collections as part of its digital collections. There are 15 different collections available online.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection
News photographs, negatives, clippings, and printed materials created by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, chronicling the history of Fort Worth and West Texas. The collection consists of approximately 179,500 photographs, ca. 1849-1986, and nearly three million film negatives, 1915-1990.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, the site is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library. LC's Digital Collections provides free and open access to manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Explore 894,276 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
Contains more than twenty-five thousand digitized maps at the Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Although there is an emphasis on Texas, maps from around the world also are available.
Portal to Texas History
The Portal is a gateway to Texas history materials. Contains articles from newspapers, journals, magazines and newsletters, books and book chapters, images, legal and legislative documents, letters, TV news scripts, maps and much more.
Texas Digital Sanborn Maps
These digitized maps provide detailed property and land-use records that depicts the architecture of Texas towns and cities throughout the past one hundred years.

What is a Primary Source?

Video Description
UCSD Social Sciences & Humanities Library defines primary versus secondary sources of information in the humanities.

Primary & Secondary Sources in Sciences

Video Description
Colorado Mountain College discusses primary versus secondary sources of information in the sciences.

Liberal Studies

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Primary Source Overview

Recommended Primary Source Databases

Recommended Primary Source Collections for Liberal Studies

What is a Primary Source?

Primary & Secondary Sources in Sciences