Dulaney-Browne Library: History: Primary Sources by Subject

Finding Primary Sources

Try the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Internet Archive for primary source books (memoirs, travelogues, histories, polemics), government reports, conference or meeting records (such as political conventions), and any other published sources.

Try the Library of Congress and the Digital Public Library of America for letters, documents, maps, and photographs, many of which may be downloaded.

Published correspondence is considered a primary source, so if your topic involves a famous historical figure, try our library catalog or WorldCat to see if there are volumes of letters available (go to the "Books" tab of this Guide).

U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy

Century of Lawmaking
U.S. congressional documents and debates, 1774-1875.
Foreign Relations of the United States
The official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication, 1861-1996 (University of Wisconsin).

ProQuest Congressional Publications This link opens in a new window
Index of legislative information, including congressional publications from 1789 to the present, legislative histories for public laws dating back to 1970, testimony from congressional hearings, bill histories, the Congressional Record and Federal Register, Congressional Research Service reports, and information about congressional members and committees.

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States

European History

Europeana
French Revolution Digital Archive
The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française. (Stanford University)

U.S. Civil War

War of the Rebellion: Official Records
The 128 volumes of the Official Records provide the most comprehensive, authoritative, and voluminous reference on Civil War operations. (Ohio State University)
Abraham Lincoln Papers
This Library of Congress collection includes incoming and outgoing correspondence, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material. Most of the 20,000 items are from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, 1860-65.
Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers
A collection of newspapers from the Civil War era dated from February 23,1831 to February 14,1877. (Penn State University)
Richmond Daily Dispatch
1384 issues of the newspaper available online, ranging in date from November 1860 through December 1865 (University of Richmond)

Legal and Diplomatic History (World)

The Avalon Project compiles documents from world history (4,000 BCE to present) on law and diplomacy. (Yale Law School)

Avalon Project

Holocaust

DigiBaeck
Memoirs, correspondence, photographs, recordings, books, and periodicals on the German-Jewish experience (Leo Baeck Institute)
Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain from two oral history projects, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community and the Holocaust Survivors' Centre Testimony Recording Project (British Library)
Military Legal Resources - World War II (LOC)
Four major publications: the official proceedings of the trial of the major war criminals (The Blue Series), documentary evidence and guide materials from that trial (The Red Series), the official condensed record of the subsequent trials (The Green Series), and a final report on all the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949. (Library of Congress)
Nuremberg Trials Project
An on-going project to digitize more than 1 million pages of documents related to the Nuremberg Trials (Harvard Law School)
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem, located in Israel, was established in 1953 as the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust; its website features digitized documents and databases.