HIST 295: The Roaring Twenties: Digital Collections of Primary Sources

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.

• correspondence
• pamphlets
• sources
• diaries
• personal narratives
• speeches
• interviews
• oral history / oral histories / oral narratives
• documents
• archives
• microfilm

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.

• If your topic is geographically specific, do some browsing on the state library websites for in your area to see if they have any digitization projects from their collection.
• If you discover that a particular library is strong in your subject area, check their website as well.
• Browse the subject guides of major research libraries, they will often include helpful weblinks in subject specific guides.
• When searching on the internet, try including words like "digital collection", "digitized", or "primary sources" along with your more general subject
• If you are looking for a specific older published source, type in its specific title; it might come up in a digital collection or Google Books.

Sample web searches for Primary sources:

Chinese exclusion act primary sources

gilded age digital archive

• Library of Congress - Digital Collections

  These digitized collections, and some of them pertain to immigration and American expansion.

• Digital Public Library of America

  Growing searchable portal to digital archival content around the country.

• Making of America - Cornell

  This collection of 19th century primary sources is strong in periodicals.

• Chronicling America

  Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1949 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

• HathiTrust

  HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
  The partners ensure the reliability and efficiency of the digital library by relying on community standards and best practices, developing policies and procedures to manage content and services at scale, and maintaining a modular, open infrastructure.

• Harvard Curated Digital Collections

  Curated views that provide specialized search options and unique content

• Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 by Harvard University

  Documenting voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression.

• Explore the Immigration History Research Center Archives from University of Minnesota

  Digitized immigrant letters and other digitized archival material relating to immigration.

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.