What Is a Primary Source?
A primary source is a "first-hand" information, sources as close as possible to the origin of the information or idea under study. Primary sources are contrasted with secondary sources--works that provide analysis, commentary, or criticism on the primary source. In historical studies, primary sources include written works, recordings, images, oral histories, or other sources of information from people who were participants or direct witnesses to the events in question. Commonly used primary sources include government documents, memoirs, personal correspondence, oral histories, and contemporary newspaper accounts.
Online Texts
The following resources are major tools for finding digitized texts related to the history of women and gender.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new windowA collection of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities.
- Women and Social Movements, International — 1840 to Present This link opens in a new windowContains primary source writing by women activists, including personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made.
- AM Search This link opens in a new window
UCLA subscribes to selected AM (formerly Adam Matthew) databases comprised of digitized archival material and primary sources. You can use AM Search to search across all of them. UCLA has access to licensed AM content published through 2024. Formerly known as Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.
- Empire Online This link opens in a new windowPrimary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion & Empire; and Race, Class & Colonialism, 1783-1969.
- Everyday Life and Women in America Online, c.1820-1900 This link opens in a new window
This digital collection provides access to rare primary source material on American social, cultural, and popular history from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women History, Duke University, and The New York Public Library. It comprises thousands of fully searchable images (alongside transcriptions) of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsides addressing the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs (Women's History) This link opens in a new windowFacsimile scans of monographs, periodicals, and pamphlets in 15 languages, started in the late 1800s by Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen. Focus is on 19th and 20th century feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights but includes books published from 1543 to 1945.
- The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives This link opens in a new window
This searchable database brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. The database covers subjects in arts, music, and leisure, civil rights, counter-culture, law and government, mass media, new left and emerging neo-conservative movement, student activism, Vietnam War, women's movement, etc.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineBrings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
- North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 This link opens in a new windowCollection of letters and diaries of women of varied age groups, ethnicities, and geographical regions, spanning more than 300 years. Includes both published and previously unpublished materials.
- Women Working 1870-1930Includes digitized books, manuscripts, and images from Harvard University Libraries and Museums on women in the U.S. economy from 1870-1930.
- Godey's Lady's Book (via Accessible Archives, 1830-1898)Major historical women's magazine, covering fashion descriptions and plates, biographical sketches, handcrafts, female costume, the dance, equestrienne procedures, health and hygiene, recipes and remedies, and more.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This link opens in a new windowContains full text letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters, centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new windowCitations from early English texts from 1475 to 1700, presented as digital images.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowFull text books and ephemera for significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800.
- Archive of Americana This link opens in a new windowA collection of early American primary source materials, including Broadsides and Ephemera, Early American Imprints, Early American Newspapers, and government publications.
- British History OnlineDigital Library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.
- Calisphere This link opens in a new windowOver one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more from the collections digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.