Is this Primary?! Is this Secondary?!
Look through these two tutorials to help you figure it out!
Use these terms as keywords in your search to help you find primary sources related to your subject. Try to think about in what format/genre the information might have been recorded in.
Another option is to search for your topic, then look at the refining options via "Genre," and then look for some primary source term, as mentioned above.
At Hope Libraries, we subscribe to several full text databases of published primary sources. They are searchable by keyword, so you can do very precise searches on your topic in newspapers, magazines and journals. Because these databases are so large t is helpful to narrow by date range to the time period in which you are interested.
There are many fantastic digitization projects that are going on right now that make primary source materials much more easily accessible to you. Here are a couple of tips for looking for these as well as some portals to get you started on your research.
Sample web searches for Primary sources:
Chinese exclusion act primary sources