The Civil War in Film: Primary Sources

Bowdoin College Library holds numerous primary sources for the study of American history in print, microform and electronic formats.  For a definition of primary and secondary sources, please see our page on Primary and Secondary Sources.  For government documents, please see our guide on U.S. Government.

Primary sources are firsthand accounts of an event - or original records created during its time period - which do not contain any outside interpretation. Examples include:

• letters, diaries, interviews
• historical news reportage
• original works of fiction, art, or music
• original research or data
• testimony or speeches

Primary sources are usefel because they give researchers a better understanding of an event, written by someone who experienced or witnessed the event in question.

Secondary sources are one step removed from the original event.  They provide criticism or interpretation of a primary source.

For more information, check out this video.

Bowdoin College began collecting both Maine and U.S. government publications in the early 1800s. Some of the major historical series are listed below. For other historical government documents, please consult the Government Documents Librarian.

Writings on American history, 1962-73 : a subject bibliography of articles
Main Ref Z1236 .W69
These annual reports, produced by the Smithsonian, consist of lengthy essays on historical topics. Access is by bibliographies and short indexes.

Congressional Record
Govt Doc X1- X100 1789-present
The title has changed over the years, but the Congressional Record remains a daily record of the debates taking place on the floor of Congress. In the 1st to the 31st Congress, the Government Printing Office published summaries of the debates and proceedings. From the 32nd to the present Congress, the GPO publishes full text of debates and proceedings.

Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970, in print and online
Govt Ref C 3.134/2: H 62/798-970/
A compilation by the Census Bureau of demographic, social, and economic statistics describing the U.S. for nearly three centuries.

Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789
Govt Ref GS 4.20 247/2
Collection of letters, documents, and proceedings of the delegates to the Continental Congress.

A compilation of the messages and papers of the presidents.
Main Ref J81 .B96g

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States
Govt Ref AE 2.114:
Together, these sets publish the public statements of all the presidents except Roosevelt, whose papers were privately published.

United States Congressional Serial Set
Online
Govt Doc Y1.1/2 1789-present
The U.S. Congressional Serial Set is comprised of thousands of sequentially numbered volumes containing congressionally-produced reports and documents. In the 19th century, many executive agency documents were published in the Serial Set as well. A key source of primary source documents for American history.

United States statutes at large
Govt. Docs. AE 2.111:
An annual compilation of laws passed by Congress, arranged chronologically.

Treaties and other international agreements of the United States of America, 1776-1949.
Govt Doc S 9.12/2: 1776-1949
Govt. Docs. S 9.12: 1950-
Chronological compilations of the treaties to which the U.S. is a party.

Below is list of links to sets of primary documents for American history that the Library holds in microform. They are often overlooked, and to facilitate better use of these collections, this guide lists the names of the collections and their corresponding indexes.

Specialized Microform Sets--General American History
Specialized Microform Set--African American History and Civil Rights

Special Collections and Archives, located on the third floor of the Library, has an extensive collection of old and rare published materials, family papers, documents and manuscripts. Many Special Collections materials are recorded in the Library Catalog, but some are not yet cataloged, so consulting the Special Collections staff and their card file is important. The Archives area contains materials relating to the history of the college and its graduates, many of whom have been prominent in U.S. history, such as George J. Mitchell and Thomas Brackett Reid. The manuscript collections are strong in the early history of Massachusetts and Maine, the Civil War and Reconstruction, 19th century American literary life, and Arctic exploration. Please see Manuscript Collections for a description of that part of Special Collections.

For nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers other than those listed below, check the Library’s Newspaper research guide.

Early American Newspapers Series I, 1690-1876

Periodicals on Women and Women's Rights
Main Micro Index Z7964.U49 P4

The individual Microform periodicals are filed alphabetically in the Microform Room or by film or fiche number. See the Library Catalog record for each periodical title to locate the microfilm.

• African-American Odyssey, American Memory, Library of Congress
• African American Perspectives: Pamphlet Collection(free online)
  Spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
• African American Women
  An "on-line archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of African-American women." Provided by Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript,& Special Collections.
• African American Women Writers
  African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a "digital collection of some 52 published works" written by black women writers prior to 1920. Created by the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center.
• Blues, Black Vaudeville and the Silver Screen, 1912-1930s
  A project of the Digital Library of Georgia in association with the Middle Georgia Archives as part of Georgia HomePLACE, the “online collection consists of selected correspondence, financial records, contracts, and advertising materials from the Douglass Theatre's records.”
• Booker T. Washington Papers
  The Booker T. Washington Papers Online is a completely free and searchable web site designed to provide researchers worldwide with full access to the thousands of pages comprising this 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press
• Born in Slavery
  Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938" contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves." Originally published as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery.
• Civil Rights Documentation Project
  Provides full-text access to a wealth of oral history interviews on the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Sponsored by the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage and at the Tougaloo College Archives.
• Digest of Jim Crow Laws Affecting Passengers in Interstate Travel
• History Matters
• Digital DuBois
• Documenting the American South
  A digital collection of over 1,240 books and manuscripts on "Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century." Provided by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
• Duluth Lynchings
  A digital collection of over “2,000 pages of scanned documents, the vast majority originating from Minnesota Historical Society’s recently completed microfilm edition of Duluth lynchings records.”
• Freedom's Journal
  Provides full-text access to all 103 issues of “the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States ” from 1827 to 1829. Presented by Cornell University.
• Friend of Man (N.Y.), 1836-1842
  "One of the most significant and little studied newspapers documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements." Presented by Cornell University Library.
• From Slavery to Freedom
  "The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. Produced by the Library of Congress.
• Gilder Lehrman Center: Study of Slavery
  An "online document collection" that provides full access to "over 200 individual items" concerning "all aspects of the Atlantic slave system and its destruction." Provided by a division of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.
• Historical Publications of the US Commission on Civil Rights
  This online presentation by the University of Maryland's Thurgood Marshall Law Library strives to “create a complete electronic record of United States Commission on Civil Rights publications held in the Library's collection and available on the United States Commission on Civil RightsWeb site.”
• Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs
• Library of Congress American Memory
• Marcus Garvey and the UNIA Papers
  Housed by UCLA’s African Studies Center and“devoted to research on the noted Pan Africanist Marcus Garvey.”
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project
  Allows users to access a selection of primary source material from Dr. King’s papers, autobiography, sermons, and speeches. Created by the collaborative efforts of Stanford University, the King Center, and the King Estate.
• Remembering Jim Crow, American RadioWorks
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
  The May Anti-Slavery Collection consists of “over 10,000 titles” gathered by Reverend Samuel Joseph May and donated to the Cornell Library. “May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels.” Digitalized by the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
• Slave Movement during the 18th & 19th Cent.
  Provides access to the records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica. Produced by the Data and Information Services Centerat University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
  Provides access to over one hundred digitalized pamphlets and books that were originally published between 1772 and 1889 and dealt with the experiences of "African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States ." Produced by the Library of Congress.
• Ten O’clock News, 1974-1991
  The WGBH Media Archives and Preservation Center has preserved and described 523 tapes from The Ten O’clock News relating to Boston's African American community. The Institute of Museum and Library Services funded this project.
• University of Detroit Mercy, The Black Abolitionist Archive (free online)
  The Black Abolitionist Archive is being developed and maintained by the University of Detroit Mercy Libraries/ IDS and was donated to the University of Detroit Mercy by Dr. C. Peter Ripley in 1998.