Guides: HU 3900: Native American History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

On this page, you will find:

Finding Primary Sources

Primary sources are materials that provide firsthand testimony to a subject under investigation. Researchers often use these firsthand accounts of specific events to understand events from the viewpoint of people living during that time period. Primary sources include documents and artifacts from the time period under study, such as letters, diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, pamphlets, government records, songs, poems, and videos. Primary sources also include writings and recordings by witnesses who experienced the events or conditions being documented. For example, oral histories, autobiographies, and memoirs are primary sources.

Library Databases with Primary Sources

New York Times (Historical): 1851-2021 This link opens in a new window
Search full text and images 1851-2021 including news, illustrations, editorials, and advertisements.
Coverage: 1851-2021
Full Text: Yes
Search Tips
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Online archive of eBooks and complete backruns of scholarly journals in a variety of academic fields. Publication dates on JSTOR range from 1665 to the present. Use the date range filter to find documents from the time that you are studying.
Coverage: 1800s-
Full Text: Yes
Titles Included | Search Tips
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) is the definitive online collection of early printed works in English. With over 125,000 titles from before 1700, the EEBO contains virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Examples of Websites with Primary Sources & Digital Collections

Here are some examples of websites that can help you find primary sources for NAIS:

American Indian Digital History Project
The American Indian History Project is a digital cooperative whose purpose is to recover and preserve rare indigenous materials, documents, and records from all over Native North America. The database's goal is to increase access to indigenous and tribal historical content in order to promote accurate and responsible Indigenous research. It seeks to build further partnerships with Tribal governments, Native Nations, Indigenous communities, and archives to build a digital repository for Indigenous Peoples.
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection
We can learn from the images and writings of the time...This site provides an extensive digital collection of original photographs and documents about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures, complemented by essays written by anthropologists, historians, and teachers about both particular tribes and cross-cultural topics.
American Philosophical Society Center for Native American and Indigenous Research
The Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) works with indigenous communities throughout North America and with scholars in many disciplines. The goal of CNAIR is to assist people in discovering and utilizing the American Philosophical Society Library’s extensive archival collections in innovative ways that honor indigenous knowledge, cultivate scholarship, and strengthen languages and cultural traditions.
Dawnland Voices
This site is a companion to Dawnland Voices: Indigenous Writings from New England, edited by Siobhan Senier with 11 tribal editors and published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press. Both the anthology and this website showcase the wide variety of literature produced by Native people from this region. Tribal archives and contemporary authors are contributing individual items from their collections: letters, political petitions, stories, and photographs. You can explore these items on a map of the area, browse them according to the tribal nations represented here, or visit some of our exhibits. You can read new writing in our online magazine, Dawnland Voices 2.0.
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian
Edward Sheriff Curtis published The North American Indian between 1907 and 1930 with the intent to record traditional Indian cultures. The work comprises twenty volumes of narrative text and photogravure images. Each volume is accompanied by a portfolio of large photogravure plates.
Guide to the Indigenous Materials at the American Philosophical Society
This guide provides comprehensive coverage of the Native American and Indigenous archival collections at the Library of the American Philosophical Society. These materials date from 1553 to the present and include manuscript, audio, and visual materials relating to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.
Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band (archives)
We’re a state-recognized Indigenous tribe in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Our people have lived in the region that is now central and western Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut for thousands of years, cultivating deep relationships with the rivers, forests and lands throughout the area.

Over the years, our tribe has been represented under several different names, but today, we are the true, active custodians of culture, governance, and heritage for the Hassanamisco People. We currently operate officially as the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band.
Native Northeast Portal
The Native Northeast Research Collaborative's Native Northeast Portal contains primary source materials by, on, or about Northeast Indians from repositories around the world. Documents are digitized, transcribed, annotated, reviewed by the appropriate contemporary descendant community representatives, and brought together with scholarly annotations and academic/community commentary into one edited interactive digital collection. The Portal currently contains thousands of records associated with scores of Native communities.
Plateau Peoples' Web Portal
The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a collaboration between the Spokane Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes Of The Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and Native Programs at Washington State University. This Portal is a gateway to Plateau peoples' cultural materials held in multiple repositories including WSU's Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, the National Anthropological Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. The materials in the Portal have been chosen and curated by tribal representatives. Each item has one or more records associated with it as well as added traditional knowledge and cultural narratives to enhance and enrich understanding to many audiences.
Photographing the American Indian: Portraits of Native Americans, 1860-1913, from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society
The portraits in this web presentation were collected by four Bostonians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles W. Jenks and Francis Parkman collected carte de visite and tintype portraits of American Indians during the 1860s as historical records of tribal groups and their role in contemporary American politics. After a visit to southern California, Boston collector Kingsmill Marrs brought home platinotypes of southwestern Indians taken by Adam Clark Vroman in the late 1890s.
Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Early Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents
This online exhibition effectively creates a digital archive of several Algonquian-language printed books and pamphlets, or wussukwhonk as they are called in the Nipmuc language, chosen for the value they add to current language reclamation work taking place in Nipmuc country. The manuscript collections featured here include town records, land deeds, and account books from English settlements established on Nipmuc homelands in the southern part of the area now referred to as Worcester County.

Additional websites for finding primary sources (these collections are broader than those listed above but may still have relevant documents for your research):

American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Discover historic programs of publicly funded radio and television across America.
British History Online
British History Online is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles. Because of the UK lockdown, BHO is making all of their transcribed content free until 30 April.
British Library: Digital Collections
Explore digital collections from the British Library, including digitized manuscripts, maps, and sound recordings.
The British Museum: Collection Online
The British Museum's online collection provides access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records.
Colonial North America at Harvard Library
Colonial North America at Harvard Library provides access to remarkable and wide-ranging materials digitized as part of an ongoing, multi-year project. When complete, the project will make available to the world approximately 650,000 digitized pages of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th- and 18th-century North America.
Digital Commonwealth
Explore historical collections from libraries, museums, and archives across Massachusetts.
Digital Public Library of America
Discover 42,424,112 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States
Europeana
Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research. This website gives you access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
European History Primary Sources (EHPS)
The purpose of EHPS is to provide an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe. As the number of digital archives on the internet continues to grow, finding and selecting digital repositories becomes increasingly difficult. EHPS strives to fill that gap by listing the most important collections of digital primary sources for the history of Europe, either as a whole or for single countries.
Fordham University: Internet History Sourcebooks Project
The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts. Browse by time period or geographic region.
Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963.
Library of Congress: Digital Collections
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library preserves and provides access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform, inspire and engage you in your intellectual and creative endeavors.
UK National Archives: Online Collections
Over 5% of The National Archives' records have so far been digitized.
World Digital Library
Search 19,147 items about 193 countries between 8000 BCE and 2000.

WPI Archives

The Gordon Library Archives are a great resource for primary sources. To learn more about the Archives' collections or to schedule a visit to the Archives, please call 508-831-6112 or e-mail archives@wpi.edu.

Primary Sources: Examples of Books at WPI

Sometimes collections of primary source documents are republished in books. Here are some strategies for finding books like these:

Search WPI Library Search for books about your topic and add keywords like journals, papers, letters, documents, photographs, primary sources, documentary history, or sourcebook to your search terms.

Here are some examples of books containing primary sources:

Sourcebook in Shinto: Selected Documents by Stuart D. B. Picken
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780313264320
Publication Date: 2004-10-30
New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook by Hyaeweol Choi
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780415517096
Publication Date: 2012-06-28