Research Guides: History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Primary Sources in history are slightly different than in any other field. Researchers in History often use a combination of primary and secondary sources like the Moseley Map directly below.

This page features:

A video explaining the differences between primary and secondary sources in the discipline of History
Links to places to find primary source material both through ECU Libraries and externally

Primary v. Secondary Sources

Primary Source Documents

The American Presidency
The American Presidency Project (APP), non-profit and non-partisan, is the leading source of presidential documents on the internet. Our archives contain 118,769 documents and are growing rapidly.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography includes the life histories of former American slaves and the transcripts of actual slave interviews. From the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives and the Comprehensive Name Index for The American Slave on the Web.
Avalon Project
Impressive database of treaties, legal codes, and other historical documents created by Yale University Law School. Can be browsed by author, chronological period, or subject area. Searchable as well.
Civil War in the American South
Civil War in the American South provides a central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL).
Digital Commons Network
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Digitization Projects Registry
A listing of publicly accessible collections of digitized U.S. Government publications.
EHPS: European History Primary Sources
EHPS provides an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe.
Eurodocs
Links to sites with primary historical documents for European countries and regions. Includes prehistoric and ancient Europe.
Founders Online: Home
From the National Archives, Founders Online contains over 176,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.
Internet History Sourcebooks
Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented for educational use. The three main sourcebooks are in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern history, as well as a number of more specialized collections
The Medical Heritage Library
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine.
Southern Historical Collection
The Southern Historical Collection (SHC) encourages the study and appreciation of the history and culture of the American South by collecting, preserving and promoting the use of unique documentary materials of enduring historical value. The SHC does this to enable users to derive meanings from the southern past and to support the University’s mission of teaching, research and service.
UNC Digital Collections

History

ECU Digital Collections

Manuscripts and Rare Books

Chat with a Librarian

Primary Sources

Primary v. Secondary Sources

Primary Source Documents