Finding Primary Source Materials: Websites

You can use Google Advanced Search to limit your search results in various ways, including:
- Searching for a complete phrase
- Omitting irrelevant words
- Choosing a domain, like .edu, to limit to webpages from educational institutions
- Limiting to pages updated during a certain timeframe

Our Finding Credible Web Sources guide has more tips on searching the Internet.

Duke University's Digital Libraries Collection: Includes images of over 7,000 ads printed in the U.S. and Canada between 1911 and 1955.

Yale Law School: Includes documents in law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government from ancient times to the present.

University of California: Includes over 150,000 digitized primary sources.

Contains many documents and images of survivors, perpetrators, Holocaust deniers, liberators, etc.

Brigham Young University: Includes Western European historical documents.

U.S. Government Printing Office: This resource provides free online access to historic and current official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

MIT: Almost 400 English translations of classical Greek and Roman texts.

Fordham University: Includes full texts of medieval sources and much more.

The oldest federal cultural institution includes millions of primary source books, photos, manuscripts, audio recordings, prints, films, maps, etc. On the Library of Congress home page you can browse the full catalog, digital collections, and open source resources.

University of Michigan: This project is a huge digital library of primary sources having to do with nineteenth-century American history.

University of California: The OAC "provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections" and "contains more than 220,000 digital images and documents."

Tufts University: "An Evolving Digital Library on Ancient Greece."

More than 50,000 U.S. and world maps available online, including historical maps and thematic maps on topics such as climate, energy, ethnography, religion, industry, economy, land use, military, and population.

Emory University, and others: Includes both primary and secondary sources on "almost 35,000 slaving voyages."

Includes original documents, photographs, film footage, music, and oral histories, as well as published materials such as books, periodicals, documentaries, and other resources.

Supported by UNESCO: This resource makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.