HISTORY 201: The Historian's Craft: Religion and the Enlightenment (Fall 2024) : Find Primary Sources
What are Primary Sources?
Primary sources are materials originating from the time period in which historians examine the events or people of interest. 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.
Finding Primary Sources in Books (in the Library Catalog)
Use the tips below to search the Library Catalog for books that contain primary sources.
- Words in catalog records can identify an item as a primary source. Search for format related words like: autobiographies, correspondence, diaries, documents, journal, letters, manuscripts, memoirs, personal narratives, sources, speeches, etc. You can combine a primary-source format word with words describing your topic (e.g., letters and Burke or diaries and French Revolution).
- To find diaries, letters, autobiographies, personal papers, etc., by a particular person, search for the person's name as an author.
- For more information about finding primary sources, see the Research Guides on this page.
Selected Primary Source Databases
-
Early English Books Online (EEBO)Provides digitized images of almost all the books printed in England and its colonies from the beginning of printing to 1700 (about 125,000 titles).
-
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)consists of English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the UK during the 18th century, along with important works from the Americas.
-
Electronic EnlightenmentA project of the University of Oxford and other universities and organizations, Electronic Enlightenment is a web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the18th century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers.Currently experiencing some technical issues which are being addressed.
-
Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert: Collaborative Translation ProjectBrowse or search for English-translated articles in this collaborative translation project website. Links to the original French articles are included.
-
EuroDocs: Online Sources for European HistoryA collection of links to open access facsimiles, translations and transcriptions of primary source texts that document political, economic, social and cultural history across Europe from the 1st century AD to the present. Documents are organized by country and when possible, ordered chronologically.
-
Google Bookssearch the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books, including English translations of writers during the French Revolution.
-
HathiTrustaccess a collection of millions of titles digitized from academic and research library collections from around the world, including the UW-Madison Libraries.
-
Internet Archive Digital LibraryA non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It includes some scanned texts from the Enlightenment period.
-
Making of the Modern Worldresearch collection documenting history of the dynamics of Western trade, 1500 to the early 20th century.
-
Sabin Americanacontains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1476 to the early 1900's.
-
State Papers OnlineA collection of English government documents originating from the 16th and 17th centuries when the King or Queen acted as Prime Minister as well as Monarch. Key themes covered by the collection are the establishment of the British Empire as a dominant colonial power, the development of agriculture and industrialization, and the European Enlightenment.
Research Guides
See the Research Guides below for more information about primary sources. The Research Guides include many more online resources including ones with historical journals, magazines and newspapers and documents.
Finding Newspapers
You can search for historical newspapers that could also be used as primary sources.
This newspaper research guide has an entire page dedicated to finding Historical Newspapers.
-
Gale NewsVaultHistorical newspapers of Great Britain