LibGuides: ENGL 2630 Keri Holt: Primary Sources

General Resources

When researching primary sources, you may encounter offensive or harmful language, images, assumptions, and/or arguments. Although this material may be offensive and problematic, such material can provide useful information about the cultural attitudes, beliefs, and conditions that contributed to its creation. It is important to study these works, but it is also important to recognize the problematic and offensive dimensions and implications of these materials. If you are working with primary sources that contain offensive language, images, assumptions, or arguments, you must provide appropriate contexts and framing when introducing this material to the class. Students who are presenting a work that contains offensive language, imagery, assumptions, or arguments must meet with Dr. Holt to discuss how to present this material to the class in ways that are responsible and appropriate.

Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America's heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation's record keeper.

Anti-War

Kent State May 4th Collection
Collection of primary sources documenting the shootings at Kent State on May 4th, 1970.

U.S. Declassified Documents Online (Gale Primary Sources)
Digital collection providing access to a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The collection brings together the most sensitive documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single, easily searchable database.

LGBTQ+

Archives of Sexuality and Gender
This archival collection allows users to search approximately 1.5 million pages of primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world, and to explore subjects such as LGBTQ history and activism, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, health, political science, policy studies, human rights, gender studies, and more.
Selection of materials for this milestone digital collection is guided by an advisory board consisting of leading scholars and librarians in sexuality and gender studies. Rare and unique content from newsletters, papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of primary sources sheds light on the gay rights movement, activism, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and more. Truly global in scope, Part I: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940 features historical documents published in more than 35 countries, with over 15 languages represented.

LGBTQ History in Government Documents
A timeline of government documents related to LGBTQ history. Many items are available electronically and others could be potentially be found in our Government Information collection.

Women's Rights

Accessible Archives
The Women's Suffrage collections within this resource could be of use for finding primary sources in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Black Women's Suffrage Digital Collection

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Primary-source material documenting women's experience in the United States.
When complete the collection will include approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from women writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. All age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous are all represented. More than 1,500 biographies will enhance the use of the database.
Women's Magazine Archives
ProQuest's archive of women's magazines.

Native American

Adam Matthew: Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America
Manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books from the earliest contact with European settlers to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century, with a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, and historic maps and travel journals.
American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism (Gale Archives Unbound)
FBI files illustrate the evolution of AIM as an organization of social protest and the development of Native American radicalism. Contains informant reports and materials collected by the Extremist Intelligence Section of the FBI, providing insight into the motives, actions, and leadership of AIM after the Civil Rights Movement.
Indigenous Peoples of North America (Gale Primary Sources)
A collection that covers the history of American Indian tribes and supporting organizations.
Meriam Report on Indian Administration and the Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the U.S (Gale Archives Unbound)
Primary-document collection of two major responses to 40 years of failed Native American policies. The Meriam Report and a 41-part report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs both provide insights into tribal conditions of the time, including among the Sioux, Navaho (Navajo), Quapaw, Chickasaw, Apache, Pueblo, Ute, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kickapoo, Klamath, and other tribes.
Territorial Papers of the United States Series I and II
A collection of Native American negotiations and treaties, official correspondence with the federal government, military records, judicial proceedings, population data, financial statistics, land records, and more.

Labor

U.S. Declassified Documents Online (Gale Primary Sources)
Digital collection providing access to a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The collection brings together the most sensitive documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single, easily searchable database.

Labor Archives of Washington
From the University of Washington - materials focus on labor history of the Pacific Northwest.