HIST 1230: Monstrous Births, Scheming Midwives: Childbirth in Europe, 1500-1800 (Sprng 2024)

What makes a source primary?

Depends on the topic; it can be complicated. 

Talk specifics with your advisor. Very basic, simplistic definition: What is a primary source?

Browse footnotes and bibliographies of books, encyclopedias, and articles for information about primary sources. 

Search the Library Catalog for primary sources--both unpublished manuscripts and modern editions in print and online, sometimes in translation, of original primary sources. Use the guided keyword search with terms like:

sources
diaries
personal narrative
interview
letters

The Old Bailey Online: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

Britain

• The Times digital archive, 1785-2006 Full-text and full-image articles from the Times of London for the years 1785-2006.
• More international newspapers...

United States

• American Historical Newspapers Online
• ProQuest historical newspapers.  Major US newspapers from about the mid 1800s.
• America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1876.   
• Poole's Plus: Indices to Nineteenth-Century Newspapers, Periodicals, Books and Government Documents
• Accessible archives: primary source material from 18th and 19th century periodicals.
• American Periodical Series/APS online.  1740-1900. Indexes special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children’s and women’s magazines. Useful for historical advertising.
• More American newspapers...

Britain 

• Eighteenth century collections online (ECCO). English-language and foreign-language books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera printed in the UK and the Americas, between 1701 and 1800.
• Early English books online (EEBO) Covers 1450-1661.
• 19th century British Pamphlets Includes seven individual collections held at universities within the UK, many of which are whole collections that belonged to individual politicians or political families. These are: Bristol Selected pamphlets, Cowen Tracts, Earl Grey Pamphlets collection, Foreign and Commonwealth Office collection, Hume Tracts, Knowsley Pamphlet collection, and LSE Selected pamphlets.
• Victorian Popular Culture  Sideshows, sensationalistm, theater, magic, freaks, carnivals.... Mostly UK, but some American material.
• Guide to full text of pre-1800 Imprints, British and American at Cornell 

United States

• Evans digital edition (American Imprints) Books printed in the US during the 17th and 18th centuries.  
• Early encounters in North America: peoples, cultures, and the environment. 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. 
• American journeys eyewitness accounts of early American exploration and settlement.  Eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies. 

Britain

• U.K. parliamentary papers  Full text with detailed subject indexing.
• British Records on the Atlantic World Consists of 12 collections of manuscript material found in England.  Includes materials such as journals, correspondence, official records, personal papers, and printed books from over a two hundred year period, all related to British involvement in the Atlantic region, including both Africa and the Americas.  It has a wealth of information about Britain’s colonization, commercial, missionary and even literary relations with Africa and the Americas. Alongside the records of Liverpool merchants involved in the infamous Triangular Trade, there are those of slave plantation owners, of early Anglican missionaries, and of naval and customs officials.
• British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.  Included are the House of Commons Journal and House of Lords Journal
• The making of modern law: legal treatises 1800-1926.  The Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections and 21,000 Anglo-American legal works including casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches as well as material that isn't narrowly legal.

United States

• ProQuest congressional publications Comprehensive collection of historic and current congressional information. Includes full text of congressional publications, finding aids, a bill tracking service, public laws and other research materials.

• The making of modern law: legal treatises 1800-1926.  The Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections and 21,000 Anglo-American legal works including casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches as well as material that isn't narrowly legal.