Date(s): 1473-1700
Historical ebooks published in English in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America.
Date(s): 1701-1800
British and American books, pamphlets and broadsides from the 18th century.
Date(s): 1789-1914
British and American books, pamphlets and broadsides from the "long" 19th century.
Date(s): 1740-1940
Historic magazine and journal articles, including professional, childrens' and womens' magazines.
Date(s): 1800s
Citations for 19th-century books, periodicals, newspapers, and archival sources. Searching Guide
Date(s): 1859-2022
Articles from the Irish Times and Weekly Irish Times, including all pictures and advertisements.
Date(s):1785-2019
Articles from the London Times, including all pictures and advertisements.
Date(s): 1803-1906.
Citations for articles published in British and American magazines. Part of the C19 database.
Primary Sources are firsthand accounts of an event -- or original records created during that time period -- which do not contain any outside interpretation. Primary sources can include letters, diaries, or interviews; historical news reportage; original works of fiction, art, or music; testimony or speeches. Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period.
When looking for primary historical sources to compliment your research, it can be difficult to know where to start. Although there are similarities to searching for critical secondary sources - using keywords in a database for example - your mindset and methods need to be quite different.
When thinking of keywords to find historical documents, you need to anticipate what words might have been used in the era that you are searching for resources in. For example, if you're wanting to find examples of essays on conduct for gentlemen and women in the 17th century, you need to think about what words may have been used in that kind of literature. Here is a list of keywords you might use for that kind of search:
Gentlewoman, gentlemen, nobility, gentry, modesty, virtues, manners, conduct, compliments, morality, piety.
Combine these terms and others you might think of related to preferred 18th century conduct in ECCO and see what kinds of results you get.
Another way consulting primary sources can be different from secondary source research is that there are often not a lot of context clues for what a search result might actually contain. There are no abstracts or journal titles to help give you an idea of what the source is about, and often the titles are not even good indicators of the content matter. To continue the conduct literature example, a treatise containing the type of work you want to use in your paper might be titled "Thoughts and collected essays of a gentlemen upon his retirement." Not very helpful, is it? With primary sources, you need to go into the materials themselves to really discover if they will be useful to you. Below are some tricks for delving deeper into primary sources: