Primary sources are original documents and objects created at the time being studied, such as diaries, newspaper accounts, letters, governmental records, or drawings. Any record that documents a past event can be considered a primary source.
You can find primary sources in libraries, museums, and archives, including McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections Library (located on the 4th floor of the McLennan Library building). You can also find digitized primary sources online in library databases, such as those linked below, as well as in digitized collections, such as McGill's Digital Exhibitions & Collections.
You can also find primary sources in print and eBooks through the library. Historians and other scholars often bring together (and, when necessary, translate) primary sources in collections called sourcebooks (sometimes spelled source books), readers, or anthologies. You can systematically search for these in the Library Catalogue by using subject headings. Try combining keywords on your topic with the word sources (which demarcate primary sources) in a subject heading search. For example:
Local newspapers provide insight into the social and cultural life of their communities. Several databases with historic American newspapers and journals are included below.
Parts I–XIV. Original source material—written by African-Americans for African-Americans,containing information about cultural life and history during the 1800s. The collection also provides a great number of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African American experience. Formerly on the Accessible Archives platform.
Link to Series 1. For additional series, click on Choose Databases to select Series 2-5.
Group of databases containing periodicals charting the history of the United States from 1691 to the latter half of the 19th century. Includes content on American society, industrialisation, science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women's fashion and family life, religion, Civil War, abolitionism, and recently-freed African Americans.
A collection of unique manuscript and archival materials Including multiple sub-collections in broad subject areas like Civil Rights; Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War; American Indians and the American West; American Politics and Society; International Relations and Military Conflicts; Women's Studies; and Workers and Labor Unions. Now available on the ProQuest platform.
Coverage: 1636-1998.
Library can facilitate negotiating text-mining rights for this database for McGill faculty and students wishing to acquire the rights with their own research funds. Please contact Digital Scholarship Hub- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
Collection of newspapers published for and by American military camps during World War I. They include both news and entertainment for soldiers in military camps.
Parts I-III, 1916-1923.
Interwar Culture showcases popular and lesser-known periodicals published during the interwar period, 1919-1939. Articles cover culture, entertainment, fashion, home and family life, world current affairs, class, social and welfare issues.
The papers of early pioneer, David Sarnoff, and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), chart the rise of mass media and the impact of broadcasting innovations such as television, advertising and consumer culture, from the dawn of a new era of mass broadcasting, and beyond.
An eclectic and multi-faceted resource compiled from archived zines, newspapers and ephemera, to oral histories, films and photographs, to showcase the key social, cultural, and political concerns of the decade.
For more from Indigenous voices, please see the Indigenous Studies subject guide.
Primary sources in this group focus on Black experiences with slavery, abolition, emancipation, and freedom -- a phrase derived from the Harvard Library project linked below. Many primary sources included here are written about, rather than by, Black people; be sure to keep this in mind when analyzing these sources.
Parts I–XIV. Original source material—written by African-Americans for African-Americans,containing information about cultural life and history during the 1800s. The collection also provides a great number of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African American experience. Formerly on the Accessible Archives platform.
Documents the African American press in the South from Reconstruction through the Jim Crow period, providing a unique journalistic record of the African American experience in segregated southern America. Formerly on Accessible Archives platform.
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