Finding Primary Sources
The other boxes on this page offer a few suggestions and possibilities for primary source research but are only the beginning.
To discover primary sources generally, try these approaches:
- Scour the bibliographies and notes of relevant secondary sources such as articles, books, and dissertations on your topic. They are necessarily drawing on relevant primary sources. We may or may not have access then to those primary sources.
- Search in our catalog or in WorldCat and include these subject terms: Personal narratives, Facsimiles, Diaries, Correspondence, Sources. Alternately, try including document? [in our catalog] or document* [in WorldCat] as a key word for mentions of "documents" or "documentary" in the title or description.
Digital Collections
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Discovering American Women's History OnlineProvides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.
Detailed descriptions and links to more than 600 digital collections. Quick access to basic and advanced searches on every page. Options for browsing by subject (300+ entries), place, time period, and primary source type. Options for narrowing search results by subject, time period, place, and primary source type -
The Portal to Texas HistoryDigitized letters, books, archival materials, and newspapers from Texas history. Dozens of collections and thousands of sources.
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Bexar Archives Online-- Briscoe Center for American History at UT AustinDocuments the "military, civil, and political life of the Spanish province of Texas from 1717 to 1792" with "over 5,000 original documents (23,000 pages) that have been digitized from microfilm. Researchers may browse, by year, the originals and translations, or compare an original and its translation side-by-side. Full-text searching of the translations is also supported.
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West Texas Digital ArchivesThis digital repository from the Abilene Library Consortium contains photographs, newspapers, yearbooks, letters, oral histories, periodicals, manuscripts, journals, documents, maps, audio files, and more.
You can browse or search its content. -
Tejano VoicesOral histories presenting the personal recollections of 173 Tejanos and Tejanas and their struggle against racial discrimination in post-World War II Texas
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Texas Slavery ProjectThe Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850." Has a good amount of primary source texts, database, and maps.
Notable Print Items Here
- Women in the Texas populist movement : letters to the Southern mercury
- Women's diaries of the westward journey.
- Mary Austin Holley : the Texas diary, 1835-1838
- Letters of hard times in Texas, 1840-1890 / compiled by David Holman ; with an introduction by Joe B. Frantz.
- Documents of Texas History is a one-volume collection of over 120 primary source documents. Copies of the older edition are on both the Loan Shelves and Reference Shelves. The newer edition is on the Reference Shelves.
- Women's rights in the United States : a documentary history
- The news from Brownsville : Helen Chapman's letters from the Texas military frontier, 1848-1852
- Speaking lives, authoring texts : three African American women's oral slave narratives
For location and availability information, search in our catalog.
Statistics
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Historical Statistics of the United States This link opens in a new window
A compendium of statistics from over 37,000 data series -- three times more than in the previous edition -- and dozens of new topics, among them slavery, American Indians, and poverty. Other topics include migration, health, crime, the Confederate States of America, population demographics, religion, business, and education. There are also many essays by recognized experts to put the topics in context.
Newspaper collections
We have microfilm and digital newspaper collections of many different titles & eras. For detail, please see the Newspapers page of our general primary sources guide.
More on Primary Sources
For more on primary sources from Cornette Library, please see our detailed guide.