Primary sources are materials or sources of information that offer first hand accounts of the time period or event that you want to study. These include things like letters, photographs, historic newspaper articles, interviews and other sources.
To locate primary sources in Quick search (libraries.rutgers.edu), try one of these strategies:
Quicksearch Basic Search:
Quicksearch Advanced Search:
Empire Online: digitized primary sources on the history of empires and empire building in the modern era. The collection focuses on the British Empire, though it also includes materials on American imperialism, with materials written from a range of perspectives including indigenous peoples in Africa, India, North America and by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Germans. Material types include essays, atlases, monographs, autobiographies, reports of government agencies and voluntary organizations, magazine articles, fiction, sermons, letters, and diaries. Dates: 1492-2007
Archives Unbound: Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s is a collection of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)’s previously classified files on prominent radicals and radical organizations from 1956 to 1971. The files include material such as newspaper clippings, meeting transcripts, internal bureau memoranda, and reports of special agents, which frequently refer to information provided by confidential informants. Subjects of the investigations include Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Organization, the Fire Bombing and Shooting at Kent State University, the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and a number of white supremacist groups. A significant portion of this collection documents COINTELPRO, the bureau's extensive "counterintelligence" program against dissent in the 1960s.This collection can be crossed search with another Archives Unbound collection, Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984.
BOOKS:
HathiTrust Digital Library - Search millions of books, government publications, dissertations, journals, and other published and unpublished materials. Includes hundreds of works in French and Latin, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. (NetID Required)
CAMP is a joint effort by research libraries throughout the world and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to preserve publications and archives concerning the nearly fifty nations of Sub-Saharan Africa. CAMP acquires and preserves materials in microform and digital formats.
Academic Video Online (AVON): includes American History in Video and Ethnographic Video Online. Videos in a broad range of subject areas from over 1,500 leading distributors, producers, and filmmakers. (1894-present)
Kanopy: Kanopy provides access to a broad selection of streaming video titles for educational purposes, including documentaries, independent and foreign films, classics, and feature films. Kanopyincludes films from a wide range of content providers, including New Day Films, PBS, the Criterion Channel, Kino Lorber, and Documentary Educational Resources
Smithsonian Global Sound: Audio recordings of American folk, blues, bluegrass, jazz, spoken word, and world music.
ORAL HISTORY/Ethnography
Ethnographic Sound Archives Online is a digitized collection of previously unpublished historical audio field recordings of music from around the world, accompanied by supporting field notes and ethnographers’ metadata. These recordings allow for the study of music in its cultural context. Includes U.S.A South Negro Folklore collection. The majority of materials in the collection were recorded during the early days of ethnomousicology as a discipline, the 1960s - 1980s.
Use the following catalogs and databases to locate primary sources outside of Rutgers' collections.