Women's History: Primary Sources

According to the Library of Congress, "Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period." Primary sources are the direct, uninterpreted records of a subject or event, or "the raw materials of history" (LOC, 2017). These may include letters, diaries, first person accounts, memoirs, speeches, interviews, birth/death records, artifacts, historical records, images, photographs, lab books, manuscripts, government publications, and some forms of newspaper articles.

Using primary sources for research allow for personal engagement with events of the past which helped shape the world as it is today, and promote a deeper understanding of these events. Because primary sources are often incomplete and without context, they help promote critical analysis and discovery as they are examined against what is already known about an event or a period in history. Primary sources also enable the researcher to construct knowledge about specific times, places, people, and events.

The Internet is an excellent resource for locating primary source materials, especially materials that have been digitized. Here are a couple of strategies from the American Library Association to locate primary source materials.

Use a Keyword Search

Select keywords related to your research topic and include the phrase primary source as part of the search. For example:

women's history primary source

This will retrieve many authoritative and valid websites containing histories, digitized documents, and primary source collections housed in university special collections, libraries, archives, and organizations. It will also retrieve pathfinders and guides for researching women's history.

Use a Primary Source Title

Identify a title of a primary source by reading a secondary source on the topic (e.g., encyclopedia, book, article, etc.). Search for the specific title online, enclosing the full title in quote marks to narrow the likely results list. Credits, acknowledgements, image captions, and bibliographies are good pointers to primary sources.

For example, The Harlem Renaissance (Steven Watson, NX 512.3.N5 W38 1995) includes a section on Permission Acknowledgements which provides details about the archives, estates, and foundations where original source materials (e.g., letters and manuscripts) were obtained.

Adapted from "Finding Primary Sources on the Web", American Library Association, January 11, 2015. http://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/primarysources/finding (Accessed January 18, 2017) Document ID: 7bd7b564-6106-dec4-b928-899fc3f75548

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more.

National Archives houses the historical documents of the United States. It contains millions of documents, artifacts, records, photographs, and Ephemera. Among its digitized collections is an extensive set of primary source documents on women's suffrage, 19th Amendment, women's rights movement, politics and political parties, women in the military, Native American and African American women.

Discovering American Women's History Online "provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s." It provides detailed descriptions and links to more than 700 digital collections. the database is browsable by subject (300+ entries), place, time period, and primary source type.