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, but can also include artefacts compiled later, such as memoirs and oral histories.
Primary Source Databases
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China, America and the Pacific (Adam Matthew Digital)China, America and the Pacific explores the cultural and trading relationships that emerged between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Manuscripts, rare printed sources, visual images, objects and maps from international libraries and archives document this fascinating history.
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China : Culture and Society (Adam Matthew Digital)Spanning three centuries (c1750-1929), this resource makes available for the first time extremely rare pamphlets from Cornell University Library's Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia. The resource is full-text searchable, allowing for the collection to be comprehensively explored and studied. In addition, China: Culture and Society features a host of secondary resources, including scholarly essays, an interactive chronology, mini guides, and editors' choices from the collection.
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Foreign Office files for China, 1919-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)This resource, published in six parts, makes available the complete British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan during the period 1919-1980. The archival materials in the database consist of diplomatic dispatches, letters, newspaper cuttings, maps, reports of court cases, biographies of leading personalities, summaries of events and diverse other materials.
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Foreign Office files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)This collection covers the years from 1947 to 1980, encompassing files on all the countries of South Asia: principally India and Pakistan, but also Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and the Maldives. The collection is split into three, chronologically based parts: Section I: Independence, Partition and the Nehru Era, 1947-64; Section II: South Asian Conflicts and Independence for Bangladesh, 1965-71; Section III: Afghanistan and the Cold War, Emergency Rule in India, and the Resumption of Civilian Rule in Pakistan, 1972-80
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Global commodities : trade, exploration, & cultural exchange (Adam Matthew Digital)This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The commodities featured in this resource have been transported, exchanged and consumed around the world for hundreds of years. They helped transform societies, global trading operations, habits of consumption and social practices.
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Empire OnlineA collection of original documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. Each section features thematic essays by leading scholars relating directly to the source material covered by the online publication with links to documentary evidence. The essays introduce students to the material, suggest possible approaches, and place the documents within a broad historical, literary and cultural context.
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Mass Observation OnlineMass Observation Online offers revolutionary access to one of the most important archives for the study of social history in the modern era.
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Eighteenth Century JournalsPortal to newspapers and periodicals c1685-1835 offers integrated access to the Hope Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Eighteenth Century Journals I), the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center University of Texas (Eighteenth Century Journals II), the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, London and the Cambridge University Library (Eighteenth Century Journals III), Chetham's Library, Manchester and Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (Eighteenth Century Journals IV), and Birmingham Central Library, British Library, Cambridge University Library, and Liverpool John Moores University Library (Eighteenth Century Journals V). It brings together rare journals printed between c1685 and 1835, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Topics include: the writings of Sir Isaac Newton; the French and American Revolutions; colonial life, provincial and rural affairs, reviews of literature, the theater, and fashion throughout Europe; the origins and rise of Romanticism; political debates; gender, religion, influence of the press, and coffee house gossip and discussion.
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China : Trade, Politics & Culture, 1793-1980This collection contains a wide range of materials documenting western interaction with China from the first embassy by Lord Macartney to trade negotiations for military aircraft in the 1970s. It includes papers regarding the Macartney and Amherst Embassies, the Opium War, Arrow War, Boxer Rebellion, Taiping Rebellion, the opening of treaty ports, the creation and running of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the birth of the People's Republic, and strong collections relating to missionaries and their experiences. It contains maps, drawings and photographs, and personal accounts of life and work in China throughout the period.
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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.
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London low life: street culture, social reform and the Victorian underworldFull-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 19th and early 20th century London; designed for both teaching and study, from undergraduate to research students and beyond. Will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, urban studies, social history and the study of leisure and tourism.
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Digital Library on American SlaveryThe University of North Carolina Libraries provide access to digital collections of primary resources concerning slavery. These include metadata and digital copies of the original documents. The Digital Library on American Slavery is well organized, includes several collections such as the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, and offers access to additional collections provided by other institutions. The resource continues to add collections, such as the North Carolina Slave Deeds now in development, and metadata are available for libraries to link to digital artifacts.
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KKK Newspapers / Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920sWhen the re-formed Ku Klux Klan reached its peak of influence in the mid-1920s, more than four million members were exposed to reactionary rhetoric through widely distributed newspapers produced by local, state, and national branches of the KKK, as well as affiliated publishers. Few libraries at the time collected the newspapers, however, making it difficult for later researchers to access these scattered titles. Reveal Digital, using a “crowdfunding” financial model, is digitizing and making available via open access a growing number of Klan newspapers.
Public Domain Primary Sources
"Voynich Manuscript". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabaseThe Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages
that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history. -
Convict transportation registers databaseThe British Convict transportation registers 1787-1867 database has been compiled from the British Home Office (HO) records which are available on microfilm at all Australian State Libraries. You can find details for over 123 000 of the estimated 160 000 convicts transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries - names, term of years, transport ships and more.
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UK Data ArchiveThe UK Data Service provides access to over 6,000 digital data collections for research and teaching purposes covering an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, and spanning many disciplines and themes.
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British Cartoon ArchiveA library, archive, and exhibition gallery, and dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. The BCA holds the artwork for more than 150,000 British editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines. The collection dates back to 1904
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British History OnlineA digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.
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Histpop - The Online Historical Population ReportsA wealth of textual and statistical material which provides an in-depth view of the economy, society (through births, deaths and marriages) and medicine during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Harvard University Library - Digital CollectionsHarvard University Library has a number of digital collections that cover important historical primary sources from around the world.
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London Lives, 1690 to 1800 - Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the MetropolisLondon Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages created by other projects.
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A Vision of Britain Through TimeA vision of Britain through time brings together primary source material from between 1801 and 2001. Includes maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions.
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Australian Digital CollectionsUniversity of Sydney Library's collection of Australian Literary and Historical Texts. The texts are encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines for text encoding and interchange. The collection has been growing since 1997 with funding from a number of national grants and institutional collaborations.
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Documenting the American SouthDocumenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
European History Primary Sources
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European History Primary SourcesThe purpose of European History Primary Sources (EHPS) is to provide an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe. As the number of digital archives on the internet continues to grow, finding and selecting repositories becomes increasingly difficult. EHPS strives to fill that gap by listing the most important collections of digital primary sources for the history of Europe, either as a whole or for single countries.
Griffith Archive
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Griffith ArchiveThe Griffith Archive is a repository for historical artefacts relating to Griffith University since its conception. The Archive records Griffith’s story by collecting and digitally/physically preserving relevant documents, photographs, oral histories, memorabilia and other artefacts. It also details significant aspects of the organisation’s history and changes through the years.
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