Research Guides: Primary and Secondary Sources: Primary Sources on the Web

Primary Sources on the Web

These websites are great resources for finding primary sources online. Mouse over a title for more detail:

Library of Congress Digital Collections A Library Collection that contains the former American Memories Collection along with digital histories on an array of topics.
America's Historical Documents
The Constitute Project
Civics Renewal Network The Civics Renewal Network is an alliance of 37 nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations that provide free online classroom resources for civics education.
Digital History A project of the University of Houston, try using the timeline feature on this site to zero in on primary source media and documents from a specific historic era.
Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America is an amazing digital collection of over 7 million items like photographs, maps, newspapers, and other primary sources, from archives and museums around the country.
Federalist Papers
Internet Archive This non-profit online archive holds text, audio, moving images, archived webpages, and more.
The Portal to Texas History Search books, maps, photos, newspapers, and more. This is an amazing resource for newspaper articles from Texas newspapers going back to the 19th century.
Primary Source Collections This Library of Congress site lists even more primary source collections online.
Portal to Texas History You'll find a wide variety of Texas History Resources on this site, including web resources and images.

The Internet is a fantastic resource for finding primary sources, but you have to be careful to make sure the site you use is reliable. Here are some ways you can tell:

Discover who publishes the website, and if it is a reputable association or individual. You can usually tell by reading an "About Us" or "Our Mission" link. Find out if the website is published for educational, non-profit, or scholarly purposes, or if it is published for commercial reasons.

Make sure to look at the latest copyright date or last update to the website - you can usually find this if you scroll all the way to bottom of a web page. If a lot of links are broken, and the content has not been updated in several years, you may want to think twice about using it as a source.

Pay very careful attention to any biases or political affiliations. You want to make sure the information you use is from an objective source, or one where you can identify the particular viewpoint.

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