HISTORY 201: The Historian's Craft: American Revolutions (Fall 2023) : Welcome

This guide focuses on helping you find digital primary sources relevant to your research needs.

The guide includes information about how to find 

• Newspapers
• Books (and other publications)
• Archives
• Maps

Note that often several kinds of sources are contained within the digital collections recommended throughout this guide. While the guide is divided by type of material, during your research you should make full use of all materials available on each platform.

Primary sources are materials from the time period that report on what is happening.  Examples include books (e.g., personal narratives, memoirs, and autobiographies, collected works, and collections of documents); journal and magazine articles, newspaper articles, government documents, archival sources (.e.g, diaries, interviews, memos, manuscripts, and other papers and records of organizations); and multimedia sources (e.g., photographs, audio recordings, and motion pictures or video recordings). 

This page provides access to selected databases for primary sources that related to the topics of this course.

Memorial Library and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library are the two main libraries on the UW-Madison campus for library resources about history and historical documents.  Wisconsin Historical Society Library has materials related to North American history including the United States and Canada.  Memorial Library has materials about the rest of the world.  Another location with primary source materials is the Special Collections Department on the 9th floor of Memorial Library.