COLWRIT 4B: Public History, Personal Story

The texts of primary sources are available online in two different ways:

• freely available on the Internet  (example: American Memory from the Library of Congress, or The David Rumsey Map Collection). It is important to carefully consider how you find and evaluate primary sources on the Internet. 

• available via library databases (example:  Gerritsen Collection of Women's History Online)  that may be used from any computer with access to the campus network.  Off-campus access is limited to UCB faculty, staff and students; see Connecting from Off Campus for instructions for using the proxy server.

Comprehensive list of library databases of primary sources in US History   

Selected list, US History   

Historical newspaper and magazine articles US History   

Selected list of library databases of primary sources in European history 

Historical newspaper and magazine articles, European history   

Primary Sources by country or continent    

Comprehensive list of library databases of primary sources worldwide.    

One of the most powerful ways to find primary sources in the Library is to use the names of people.  An essential part of your background reading should be to note down names of people involved in your topics.

Names can be searched in the catalogs [Oskicat and Melvyl] in specialized ways: as authors or as subjects.  Even people you do not consider authors in the conventional sense may be listed as authors, if:

• their correspondence is available
• their manuscripts are available
• interviews with them are available
• their diaries are available
• published versions of these are available

When searching for primary sources, it's a good idea always to search those names as authors, as well as keywords.  Works where the person is listed as an author will always be primary sources.