HIST 103: Sex, Gender, and Legal Spectacle in Modern American Culture

Locating Primary Sources

There are many access points to the vast collections of primary sources available to you.

Certain words and phrases (part of the Library of Congress Subject Headings classification system) will find primary sources in library catalogs.  You can use these in OskiCat or Melvyl:

advanced keyword search -correspondence
-sources
-diaries
-personal narratives
-interviews
-speeches
-documents
-archives
-early works to 1800
-newspapers

For specific search strategies, see the Library's Guide to Finding Historical Primary Sources.

Your searches will be more successful if, in your preliminary research, you identify specific:

  • names of relevant individuals and organizations
  • dates of events
  • places
  • what terminology was used at the time by participants and observers? (ex:  negro or colored instead of african american)

Organizations with manuscript collections make their collections accessible with finding aids. The tools below allow you to search the finding aids by topic, helping you identify collections available around the world that may inform your research. The Online Archive of California includes finding aids from historical societies, government agencies, libraries in California, including Bancroft Library, and is your best choice for locating archival collections in California.

  • ArchiveGrid
    Searchable descriptions of nearly a million historical documents, personal papers, and family histories kept in libraries, museums, and archives worldwide. Includes information on how to examine and order copies.
  • Archive Finder (including ArchivesUSA and NIDS UK/Ireland)
    Directory which describes over 206,200 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Primary Sources: Newspapers

A more extensive list of online newspaper resources are available from the Library's Electronic Resources Finder. Some of these are only aggregated collections of links to U.S. and international newspapers, not all of them contain searchable, full-text articles.

An extensive collection of newspapers on microfilm is located in the Newspapers & Microforms department in Doe Library. Using OskiCat, you can locate newspapers by title, or if you don't have titles, by doing subject or keyword searches.

SUBJECT SEARCHING: Select "Subject Heading" as the search type and enter your search using one of the structures suggested below:

African American newspapers
Mexican Americans--Illinois--Chicago--Newspapers
Warsaw (Poland)--Newspapers
Paris (France)--Newspapers

KEYWORD SEARCHING: Combine search terms with AND and OR. Use * (truncation symbol) to search for multiple word endings. For example:

newspaper* and (poland or polish)
newspaper* and mexic*
(soviet or russia*) and newspaper*

NOTE: the above Boolean searches will produce results including both newspapers and books about newspapers, unless you limit your search to Newspapers/Microforms.

Primary Sources: Women's History

  • Discovering American Women's History Online
    A gateway of digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.
  • Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
    Online archival collection documenting various aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States. Focuses specifically on the radical origins of the movement.
  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (WASM)
    Contains 110 document projects and archives with almost 4,200 documents, more than 1,000 images, with more than 2,200 primary authors. Collects and analyzes documents and almost images on the history of women and social movements in the United States between 1600 and 2000. Also includes links to other websites and a dictionary of social movements and organizations.
  • Working Women, 1800 -1930
    Provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image collections. Explores women's roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Documents working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygeine, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues. When completed, the collections will contain more than 2200 books and pamphlets, 1000 photographs and 10,000 pages from manuscript collections.
  • Internet Archive: Text Archive
    Searches and displays the full text of books and other texts on many subjects, mostly published before 1923. This archive was created in part by the Open Content Alliance, which includes the University of California. All materials are in the public domain. Close to 10,000 volumes from UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library book and serials collection is available through the Internet Archive: The Bancroft Library portal.
Last Update: March 06, 2013 15:32