Primary Sources - Resource Guide

Documents in law, history and diplomacy from ancient times to the 21st century.

Best of History Web Sites is an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1200 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more.

CIA's Historical Review Program, with the exception of several statutorily mandated requirements, is a voluntary declassification program that focuses on records of historical value.

The Library of Congress has made digitized versions of collection materials available online since 1994, concentrating on its most rare collections and those unavailable anywhere else. The following services are your gateway to a growing treasury of digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, and books, as well as "born digital" materials such as Web sites.

The online tool for teaching with documents, from the National Archives.

Document analysis is the first step in working with primary sources. Think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to extract information to make informed judgments.
Use these worksheets — for photos, written documents, artifacts, posters, maps, cartoons, videos, and sound recordings.

These links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social and cultural history. The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.
These open access sources are readily available to all -- without fees or subscriptions.

Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised items – books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for

The Hanover Historical Texts Collection makes available digital versions of historical texts for use in history and humanities courses. Search by keyword, or browse by subject heading.

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.

The Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.

Full texts of almost 1500 classic works on art, economics, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, science, sociology, war and peace.

The Digital Gateway site hosts projects developed in the libraries and in partnership with faculty outside the libraries, and links to digital projects across the University

Large, well-organized collection of print and visual primary sources from ancient to current times. Material may be browsed by place, time, topic, type of resource, or contributing institution.

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

Primary sources from 1790 to 2000 related to African American history.

The central purpose of the California State University Japanese American History Digitization Project is to improve access to CSU archival collections about the history of Japanese Americans and to develop a functional model for ongoing planning and collaboration among the CSU archival and library community.

provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity.

The FBI has converted many FOIA documents to an electronic format (PDF), and they may be viewed below. In the case of voluminous pages, only summaries or excerpts from the documents are online.

Through this website, you can read and search through thousands of records from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison and see firsthand the growth of democracy and the birth of the Republic.

Primary source documents in American history

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper.

A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The New-York Historical Society, one of America’s pre-eminent cultural institutions, is dedicated to fostering research, presenting history and art exhibitions, and public programs that reveal the dynamism of history and its influence on the world of today. Founded in 1804, New-York Historical is the oldest museum in New York City. New-York Historical has a mission to explore the richly layered political, cultural and social history of New York City and State and the nation, and to serve as a national forum for the discussion of issues surrounding the making and meaning of history.

Access to "100 milestone documents" compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration chronicling United States history from 1776 to 1965.

Library of Congress has several research guides with primary documents including amendments to the U.S. Constitution, acts and treaties.

Digital collections of books, manuscripts, graphic arts, and photographs.

Virginia Memory is part of the online presence of the Library of Virginia, the state archives and reference library. The Library maintains vast and varied collections of print materials, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and ephemera, maps and atlases, rare books, and fine art that tell the history of the commonwealth and its people.

The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program (PEP) produces estimates of the population for the United States, its states, counties, cities, and towns, as well as for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its municipios. Demographic components of population change (births, deaths, and migration) are produced at the national, state, and county levels of geography. Additionally, housing unit estimates are produced for the nation, states, and counties.

Explanation of reports