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.
Key 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.
Access the GALE Primary Sources and Tools self paced tutorial to learn how to search the Gale Primary Sources collections and how to use Gale's digital humanities tools to analyse text.
- Adam Matthew DigitalGriffith University's Adam Matthew Digital holdings including China : Culture and Society, China : Trade, Politics & Culture, 1793-1980, China, America and the Pacific, Eighteenth Century Journals, Empire Online, Foreign Office files for China, 1919-1980, Foreign Office files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980, Gender : Identity and Social Change, Global commodities : trade, exploration, & cultural exchange, India, Raj and Empire, London Low Life, Market Research and American Business 1935-1965, Mass Observation Online, Mass Observation Project, 1981-2009, Migration to new worlds, Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape, Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 and Socialism on film.
- JSTOR Primary Sources
Provides access to a range of primary sources, both multidisciplinary and discipline specific. Includes access to pamphlets, manuscripts, letters, images and more.
- JSTOR Primary Sources
Provides access to a range of primary sources, both multidisciplinary and discipline specific. Includes access to pamphlets, manuscripts, letters, images and more.
- Asia and the West : diplomacy and cultural exchange (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)A collection of manuscript collections consisting of British Foreign Office and United States consular and diplomatic service records relating to Asian countries during the nineteenth century. A selection of Asian missionary correspondence and journals is also included.
- China, America and the Pacific (Adam Matthew Digital)
Archival material relating to the trade and cultural relationships between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th century and early 20th century.
- 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.
- Foreign Office files for China, 1919-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)
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.
- 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
- China, America and the Pacific (Adam Matthew Digital)
Archival material relating to the trade and cultural relationships between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th century and early 20th century.
Public domain primary sources:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Empire Online (Adam Matthew Digital)
Documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. Primarily British Empire.
Public domain primary sources:
- ABS Statistics
Australia's national statistical agency and an official source of independent, reliable information. Access to the full range of the Bureau's statistical and reference information, including census data from 1996 onwards.
- 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.
- Australian War MemorialIncludes photographs, text, art, private records, film, sound and official records.
- 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.
- National Archives of Australia"The National Archives of Australia holds the memory of our nation and keeps vital Australian Government records safe"
- National Library of AustraliaThe National Library has an extensive collection of primary source material relating to the history and culture of Australia. These records give first-hand evidence of historical events or experiences.
- Trove
Digital collection of Australian information including newspapers, governement gazettes, maps, magazines, newsletters, books, pictures, photographs, archived websites, music, diaries, letters, personal archives and inteviews.
- Europe and Africa: commerce, Christianity, civilization, and conquest (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Coverage 1800s. Includes monographs, manuscripts, and newspaper accounts covering key issues of economics, world politics.
- European literature, 1790-1840 : The Corvey Collection (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Collection contains English, French and German titles from the library of Victor Amadeus, Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenberg. Includes archives of the Romantic era, including fiction, short prose, dramatic works and poetry.
- Mapping the world : maps and travel literature (Gale Primary Sources)A collection of English, Canadian and American nineteenth-century maps and travel literature, travel and tourist periodicals and personal reminiscences.
Public domain primary sources:
- 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.
- EuropeanaImages, text, audio and video from European libraries, galleries, museums and archives.
- 19th Century British PamphletsThroughout the 19th century, pamphlets were an important means of public debate, covering the key political, social, technological, and environmental issues of their day. 19th Century British Pamphlets, created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), contains the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in research libraries in the United Kingdom. The digitization of more than 26,000 pamphlets from collections in seven universities in the UK spanning more than one million pages brings together a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.
- British politics and society (Gale Primary Sources)Contains primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The archive is composed of a number of individual collections, drawn together from a variety of sources.
- British theatre, music and literature : high and popular culture (Gale Primary Sources)Features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores.
- London Low Life (Adam Matthew Digital)
Primary sources and essays relating to the life and times of Victorian London. Access to maps, cartoons, street literature, slang dictionaries and ballads. Useful for students of literature, cultural studies, urban studies, geography and built environment, criminology, social history and leisure and tourism.
- Mapping the world : maps and travel literature (Gale Primary Sources)A collection of English, Canadian and American nineteenth-century maps and travel literature, travel and tourist periodicals and personal reminiscences.
- 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.
- Mass Observation Project, 1981-2009 (Adam Matthew Digital)Documents social history in Britain. Volunteers write about their lives and opinions, providing qualitative social data. Current content dates from the 1981 to 2009.
Public domain primary sources:
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- China, America and the Pacific (Adam Matthew Digital)
Archival material relating to the trade and cultural relationships between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th century and early 20th century.
- 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.
- 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.
- Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape (Adam Matthew Digital)
Collects many of the working notebooks, verse manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and personal journals of prominent writers including William Wordsworth and his contemporaries.
Public domain primary sources:
- 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.
- Asia and the West : diplomacy and cultural exchange (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)A collection of manuscript collections consisting of British Foreign Office and United States consular and diplomatic service records relating to Asian countries during the nineteenth century. A selection of Asian missionary correspondence and journals is also included.
- Brazilian and Portuguese history and culture (Gale Primary Sources)A digitized collection of about 4000 pamphlets (of 50 pages or less) held at the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America, published chiefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The pamphlets cover Brazilian and Portuguese history, politics, literature, and other important subject areas in the form of speeches, flyers, official decrees, sermons, poems, plays, concert and theater programs, and more.
- British politics and society (Gale Primary Sources)Contains primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The archive is composed of a number of individual collections, drawn together from a variety of sources.
- British theatre, music and literature : high and popular culture (Gale Primary Sources)Features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores.
- Children's literature and childhood (Gale Primary Sources)Provides a range of primary sources related to the experience of childhood in the long nineteenth century. Included in the archive are books and periodicals for children, primers and other material related to education, pamphlets produced by child welfare groups, documents and photos related to children and crime, newspapers produced by youths, and more.
- China, America and the Pacific (Adam Matthew Digital)
Archival material relating to the trade and cultural relationships between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th century and early 20th century.
- 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.
- Europe and Africa: commerce, Christianity, civilization, and conquest (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Coverage 1800s. Includes monographs, manuscripts, and newspaper accounts covering key issues of economics, world politics.
- European literature, 1790-1840 : The Corvey Collection (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Collection contains English, French and German titles from the library of Victor Amadeus, Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenberg. Includes archives of the Romantic era, including fiction, short prose, dramatic works and poetry.
- London Low Life (Adam Matthew Digital)
Primary sources and essays relating to the life and times of Victorian London. Access to maps, cartoons, street literature, slang dictionaries and ballads. Useful for students of literature, cultural studies, urban studies, geography and built environment, criminology, social history and leisure and tourism.
- Mapping the world : maps and travel literature (Gale Primary Sources)A collection of English, Canadian and American nineteenth-century maps and travel literature, travel and tourist periodicals and personal reminiscences.
- Photography, the world through the lens (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Contains collections of photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography from libraries and archives internationally.
- Religion, society, spirituality, and reform (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Brings together monograph and manuscript collections into a single, searchable environment to help scholars examine religion’s influences on the shaping of politics, law, economics, and social mores.
- Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape (Adam Matthew Digital)
Collects many of the working notebooks, verse manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and personal journals of prominent writers including William Wordsworth and his contemporaries.
- Science, technology, and medicine: 1780-1925, Part II (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Contains scientific material from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Divided into four major areas: science, natural history, public health and entomology.
- Science, technology and medicine: 1780-1925, Part I (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Collects a selection of journal, books, reports, and personal documents that explore the rapid acceleration of scientific, technical, and medical knowledge across the 19th Century.
- Women: transnational networks (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Primary source collection focusing on the 19th century, gender, and class through a transnational perspective.
- Gale Primary Sources
Provides access to a range of primary sources. Can be used with Gale's Digital Scholar Lab for text analysis and more.
- European literature, 1790-1840 : The Corvey Collection (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Collection contains English, French and German titles from the library of Victor Amadeus, Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenberg. Includes archives of the Romantic era, including fiction, short prose, dramatic works and poetry.
- Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape (Adam Matthew Digital)
Collects many of the working notebooks, verse manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and personal journals of prominent writers including William Wordsworth and his contemporaries.
- 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.
- Gale Research Complete
Includes access to journal articles, newspapers, reference material, audio content and ebooks across multiple disciplines. It also includes access to Gale Primary Sources.
- 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.
- Gale Primary Sources
Provides access to a range of primary sources. Can be used with Gale's Digital Scholar Lab for text analysis and more.
- Gale Research Complete
Includes access to journal articles, newspapers, reference material, audio content and ebooks across multiple disciplines. It also includes access to Gale Primary Sources.
- Women: transnational networks (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Primary source collection focusing on the 19th century, gender, and class through a transnational perspective.
Public domain primary sources:
- The Australian's Women's RegisterBiographical information about Australian women and their organisations.
- Empire Online (Adam Matthew Digital)
Documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. Primarily British Empire.
- Global commodities : trade, exploration and cultural exchange (Adam Matthew Digital)
This original will help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.
- Global Plants on JSTOR
Offers access to botanical resources from dozens of herbaria, libraries, museums and other research institutions. Includes plant type specimens, scientific research articles, books and reference works, and correspondence dating back hundreds of years.
- Mapping the world : maps and travel literature (Gale Primary Sources)A collection of English, Canadian and American nineteenth-century maps and travel literature, travel and tourist periodicals and personal reminiscences.
- Photography, the world through the lens (Gale Nineteenth Century Collections Online)Contains collections of photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography from libraries and archives internationally.
- Romanticism : Life, Literature and Landscape (Adam Matthew Digital)
Collects many of the working notebooks, verse manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and personal journals of prominent writers including William Wordsworth and his contemporaries.
Public domain primary sources:
- Harvard Digital CollectionsHarvard University Library has a number of digital collections that cover important historical primary sources from around the world.
Griffith Archive
- 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.
