"Primary sources are materials produced by people or groups directly involved in the event or topic under consideration, either as participants or witnesses." Secondary sources, on the other hand, "comment on and interpret primary sources".*
*Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 4th ed. (Boston: Bedford, 2004), pp. 5-6.
See Primary Sources in American History for details on primary sources and how to find them.
America's Historical Newspapers ♦
Database of cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, 1690-1922.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress
Information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers ♦
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
American Periodicals Series Online
New York Times [1851-2010] [website]
Washington Post [1877-1996] [1996-present] [website]
Nexis Uni, late 20th century to present
More News
HathiTrust ♦
HathiTrust contains the digitized collections of some of the nation's great research libraries. Over 2.5 million works in the public domain in HathiTrust are open to all researchers ("full view"), including over 850,000 federal documents. Many works in the collection are protected by copyright law, so large portions of those protected works cannot ordinarily be publicly displayed unless permission from the copyright holder is obtained. Dates of Coverage: 1500-present.
American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection ♦
American Periodicals Series Online ♦
"...Digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century."
Readers' Guide Retrospective, 1890-1982 (online) ♦
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1983- (online) ♦
Main Per Index, 1900-2012 (print)
Index to a broad range of U.S. general interest magazines and journals.
Poole's Index To Periodical Literature (print)
Main Per Index
Online via HathiTrust.
Subject index to British and American periodicals of the nineteenth century. Bowdoin Library owns many of these nineteenth century periodicals in its collections.
Nineteenth century readers' guide to periodical literature, 1890-1899, with supplementary indexing
Main Per Index
Primarily American
Digital Collections, Library of Congress (formerly American Memory)
Digitized photographs and texts from the Library of Congress collections.
The Nineteenth Century in Print
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html
Making of America: Digital Library of Primary Sources
A collection of full-text documents from the 19th century from sources at the University of Michigan.
Making of America: Digital Library of Primary Sources
A collection of full-text documents from the 19th century from sources at Cornell.
