Primary sources are produced by participants or direct observers of an issue, event or time period. These sources may be recorded during the event or later on, by a participant reflecting upon the event. In some cases, it will be difficult to obtain the original source, so you may have to rely on copies (photocopies, microfilm, digital copies). Copies or transcriptions of a primary source still count as a primary source.
Some examples of primary sources include:
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Includes more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and the 1990s, including titles from all 50 states. Search by dates/eras, article types (news & opinion, election returns, letters, poetry/songs, legislative, prices, advertisements, matrimony & death notices), region/state, and newspaper name.
Unlimited users.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
3 users.
Updated daily. Provides a full-color and full-page collection of newspapers from around the world,. Includes over 1000 titles from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States. A 60-day archive is also available to browse by country, language, and newspaper title, and to search full text of articles, photograph captions, and headlines.
Once inside the newspaper, click on a headline to read the article or zoom in to read the article as it appears in print.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a username and password prompt will probably be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Provides indexing of many Congressional publications, including Bills, Resolutions, Hearings, Committee Prints, Reports, Documents and Congressional Research Service Reports.
House and Senate Reports and Documents indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1817-1969) are available in full text in the Serial Set database. Our subscription to ProQuest Congressional does not include full text of the Serial Set.
Congressional Hearings after 2013 and House and Senate Documents and Reports indexed in ProQuest Congressional (1995 to present) are available in full text on Govinfo.gov site from the Government Printing Office.
4 users.
Updated monthly. A comprehensive compilation of public opinion surveys, containing the full text of more than 350,000 questions and responses from 14,000 surveys conducted by 700 polling organizations in the United States and more than 80 other countries.
EID login required
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.