Primary Sources: Locating Primary Sources

The American Presidency Project (americanpresidency.org), was established in 1999 as a collaboration between John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California,
Santa Barbara.
Our archives contain 103,900 documents related to the study of the Presidency.

The Avalon Project from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Yale University Law School has several collections of online legal, historical, and political documents from ancient times to the present.

A collection of materials about Campbell's past and present.

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

The Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project has a number of primary source collections regarding key moments in the Cold War. These may be found in the Digital Archive tab and in their e-Dossiers.

The David M. Rubenstein Library holds rare books, manuscripts, audio recordings, moving images, artifacts, digital files, and other materials that together document over 20 centuries of human history.

Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone (1899-1947) rose to infamy as a gangster in Chicago during the 1920s and early 1930s. The Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) joined the Bureau of Prohibition and other agencies in investigating Capone. In 1931, Capone was sentenced to prison for tax evasion. Suffering from a case of syphilis that left him too mentally ill to resume his previous criminal activities, he was paroled in 1939 and settled in Florida, where he lived until his death in 1947.

Paul Halsall, editor of this project, has put together a number of document collections ranging from historical periods to historical topics.

The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.

The Library of Congress hosts, among others, the following collections:
American Memory Collection
Votes for Women: Selections for theNational Women Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers

Collections created by the Library of Congress that discuss various aspects of American history and life.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.

Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.

The National Security Archive is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Important primary sources may be located under the documents tab (especially electronic briefing books) as well as on selected links on the homepage.

Housed in specially designed facilities in the Louis Round Wilson Library, the North Carolina Collection preserves an incomparable assemblage of literary, visual, and artifactual materials illustrating four centuries of the colony and state of North Carolina. Its uniqueness is explained by a distinguished history of missionary zeal, unwavering leadership, and citizen support.

The State Archives of North Carolina collects, preserves, and makes available for public use historical and evidential materials relating to North Carolina. Its holdings consist of official records of state, county, and local governmental units, and copies of federal and foreign government materials. In addition to these official records are private collections, organization records, maps, pamphlets, sound recordings, photographs, motion picture film, and a small reference library. In all, the Archives houses over 50,000 linear feet of permanently valuable materials containing millions of individual items.

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.

The SHAFR Task Force on Freely Available Research Databases has compiled this bibliography of electronic resources to aid research in U.S. foreign relations history.