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HIS430 U.S. History, Late 20th/Early 21st Century, 1975-: Primary Sources

Types of Primary Sources

  • Autobiography
  • Diaries/Journals
  • Letters
  • Speeches
  • Government Documents
  • Magazines/Newspaper Articles
  • Manuscripts
  • Treaties

Primary Sources in the Catalog

1.  Choose KEYWORD search for your topic and the type of primary source.
     For example: Winthrop, John and letters

2.  Choose AUTHOR search for items written by your topic.
     For example: Winthrop, John

Primary Sources in Library Databases

Primary Sources in Reference Books

Internet Primary Sources

The Avalon Project: September 11, 2001 - Attack on America – Yale Law School – An extensive collection of primary sources and government documents on terrorism, 9/11, and more.

Digital Public Library - "DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States." The DPLA portal allows you to search digital collections from institutions and organizations such as Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, Boston Public Library and more.

The Gulf War – PBS (Frontline) – An in-depth examination of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis; includes oral histories and first-hand war stories.

HathiTrust - HathiTrust is a partnership of academic libraries and research institutions that have come together to build and share a digital repository of print works. The HathiTrust Digital Library has "more than 10 million volumes, making it one of the largest research library collections in the world.  Over 3 miillion of these volumes are in the public domain and fully viewable online."

Internet Archive - The Internet Archive hosts one of the largest collections of freely available digital content on the Web and includes digitized print books, audio files, moving images and, by means of the Wayback Machine, cached copies of websites.

The September 11 Digital Archive – George Mason University & City University of New York – An archive of more than 150,000 digital items, including first-hand stories, images, and emails.