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Primary sources for a historical topic might include speeches, letters, government documents, or periodical articles (for example, newspapers and magazines) from that time as well as autobiographies or memoirs written by people who lived during that time. There are different ways to locate these depending on the type of primary source you need.
Search the below databases for speeches. Be sure to include the author of the speech along with the word speech like this:
Martin Luther King, Jr. AND speech
James Madison AND speech
Search the below databases to find letters from your historical period. Try search terms like letters, personal correspondence, professional correspondence, or just correspondence. If you know the recipient or author, be sure to include that in your search, too, like this:
George Washington AND correspondence
Laws and statutes, congressional hearings, constitutions, federal records, and legal cases/case law from a specific time period would all be considered primary sources. Search the below databases for these types of primary sources:
Search the below databases to find newspaper, magazine, or other periodical articles from your historical period. Be sure to use the Advanced Search or the publication date filter on the left side of your search results to narrow down the date range to your specific historical time period.
Search our online library catalog and ebook databases for autobiographies and memoirs. The two best ebook databases to start with are Ebook Central – ProQuest and eBook Collection – EBSCO.
If you are looking for autobiographies or memoirs that are in the public domain, you may be able to find them using Google Books This link opens in a new window, Internet Archive This link opens in a new window or Project Gutenberg This link opens in a new window. Try searching for the person you are researching followed by memoir or autobiography like this:
Olaudah Equiano autobiography
General William T. Sherman memoir
In the sciences, primary sources refer to original, research articles. To find these, you want to look for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles where the author(s) has conducted an experiment or original research. Most of these articles use APA style formatting and almost always include the term Method or Methodology as a heading. This is the section of the article where they explain how they conducted their research and the methods they used. You can usually find these articles by including that term as a keyword in your search like this:
depression AND (teen* OR adolescent) AND method*
sustain* AND water pollution AND (method OR methodology)
For additional assistance, please chat with us 24/7 (look for the gold button on the top right of the library home page) or email us at ask@snhu.libanswers.com during our library hours (look for Reference Services).
Content authored by: GS
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