HIST 459W: A History of Hunger

What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources are original materials that provide direct evidence or first-hand testimony concerning a topic or event -- firsthand records created by people who actually participated in or remembered an event and reported on the event and their reactions to it.

• Primary sources can be contemporary sources created at the time when the event occurred (e.g., letters and newspaper articles) or later (such as, memoirs and oral history interviews).
• Primary sources may be published or unpublished. Unpublished sources include unique materials (e.g., family papers) often referred to as archives and manuscripts.
• What constitutes a primary source varies by discipline -- see Primary Sources by Discipline below. How the researcher uses the source generally determines whether it is a primary source or not.

*This material is used with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Library's research guide on Primary Sources

Don't know where to start? Try one of the following database portals. They allow researchers to search  across multiple databases produced by the same publisher.

Use Library Search to find published primary sources in Emory's libraries, including:

•  Published books that contain primary source documents
•  Manuscript and archival collections and rare books held by the Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library 
•  U.S. government documents
•  Primary source collections in microfilm or microfiche format (see more about microforms in the box below)

Try adding one or more of the following search terms to your search:

Examples: 

Islam and sources
immigrants and biography
refugees and personal narratives

TIP:  You can also ask the library reference staff for help in refining your search strategy.

Thanks to a number of major digitization initiatives, MANY published sources (books, journals, etc.) are now freely available via digital web repositories. Most of these materials are in the public domain - i.e. not copyright-protected.  For the U.S. this means titles published prior to 1922; copyright "cutoff" dates vary for other countries.  Googling by title or author will likely retrieve materials in these digital repositories, but you can also search their contents individually.  Notable examples: