Primary sources
What are Primary Sources?
Created by witnesses or recorders who experience first-hand the events or conditions being documented, primary sources are first-hand testimonies that provide direct evidence from a particular period of history. Primary sources may be everyday items produced whilst an event or phase is occurring, such as photographs, letters, periodicals and manuscripts. In the context of the study of literature, the literary texts themselves are core primary sources.
Primary Source Databases
- Gale Primary SourcesAn interface that allows searching across any combination, or all, of Griffith University's Gale Primary Sources holdings. These 27 primary source databases can be searched individually or using this interface: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of Modern Law, Archives of Sexuality and Gender, British Library Newspapers, Women's Studies Archive, Refugees, Relief and Resettlement, American Civil Liberties Union Papers, The Times Digital Archive, Archives Unbound, China and the Modern World, Financial Times Historical Archive, Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals, Slavery and Anti-slavery, The Times Literary Supplement, Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture, Crime Punishment and Popular Culture, Indigenous Peoples of North America, Political Extremism and Radicalism, The Economist Historical Archive and the Making of the Modern World.
- Romanticism: Life, Literature and LandscapeThis powerful resource offers unparalleled access to the single largest collection of working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers anywhere in the world, all digitized in full colour. With access to the annotated full manuscripts of such notable works as The Prelude and Michael, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode this project is unrivalled in its content and scope.
- China : Culture and Society (Adam Matthew Digital)Digitisation of Cornell University Library's Charles W. Wason Collection (c1750-1929), including additional secondary resources, including academic essays, an interactive chronology and guides.
- China : Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)Contains the Macartney and Amherst Embassies, the Opium War, Arrow War, Boxer Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, the opening of treaty ports, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the birth of the People's Republic. Includes maps, drawings and photographs, and personal accounts.
- Eighteenth Century Journals (Adam Matthew Digital)Contains newspapers and periodicals 1685-1835. Includes rare journals, covering all aspects of social, political and literary life in this time period.
- Empire Online (Adam Matthew Digital)Documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. Primarily British Empire.
- Mass Observation Online (Adam Matthew Digital)Access to primary sources in social history with material related to British life dating from 1937-1967. Includes diaries, day surveys, topic collections, and file reports, an interactive chronology with key social, politial and cultural moments, an interactive map, photos and posters.
Primary Sources in the Public Domain
- Blue Mountain Project
Drawing on Princeton University’s collections and curatorial and academic expertise, the Blue Mountain Project is a digital thematic research collection of art, music and literary periodicals published between 1848, the year of the European Revolutions, and 1923 – a functional boundary for works presumed to be in the public domain. - Digital Image Collection (Folger Shakespeare Library)
This database offers access to tens of thousands of high resolution images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art. Users can show multiple images side-by-side, zoom in and out, view cataloging information when available, export thumbnails, and construct persistent URLs linking back to items or searches. - Digital Texts (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Digital texts of Shakespeare’s plays, taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. The texts contain a synopsis, a list of characters, and notes. Search options include the ability to search for a phrase or word in one play at a time, or in all plays. - First World War Poetry Digital Archive
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 4000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon. - Internet Library of Early Journals (archived version)
The Internet Library of Early Journals was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. It digitised substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and made these images available in a digital library of 18th and 19th Century journals, together with their associated bibliographic data. - The Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with digitising periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922, and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. - Shakespeare Quartos Archive (archived version)
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration that has produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet. - Australian Literary and Historical Texts
A collection of more than 300 Australian literary and historical texts.
Public Domain eBooks
- Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg offers over 70,000 out-of-copyright ebooks, including most classic literature up until the early 20th Century. All of Project Gutenberg's ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers and are downloadable in a variety of formats. Ebooks are digitised and diligently proofread with the help of thousands of volunteers.
