Primary Sources for the Humanities: Themes

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See Primary sources: SFU Library Databases for a list of primary sources in alphabetical order.

If you need help, please contact Baharak Yousefi, Librarian for History, International Studies, Graduate Liberal Studies, Political Science at or byousefi@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian

Immigration

The 1956 Hungarian Memorial Oral History Project celebrates the refugees of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 by digitizing 400 hours of oral testimonies collected by second and third generation Hungarian-Canadians.
 
American Memory provides free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
 
A collection of 1,500 photographs depicting the contributions of immigrants and First Nations people to British Columbia.
 
A collection of records dating from 1867-1956 that focus on the activities of the Chinese Freemasons of Canada, particularly in Victoria and Vancouver.

The Chung Collection - UBC Library
The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection contains more than 25,000 rare and unique items (documents, books, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, silver, glass, ceramic ware and other artifacts), grouped by various themes, including Early British Columbia History, Immigration and Settlement (with particular focus on the Chinese immigrant population in Vancouver) and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

A collection of digitized images, print materials, and ephemera relating to the settlement of the Doukhobors in Canada, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century.
 
A selection of interviews conducted with early Indian immigrants to Canada, almost all of them British Columbians, in 53 audio files.
 
A collection of archival images dating from 1950-1975 celebrating the contributions of Italian women immigrants to Canadian history and culture.
 
A comprehensive portal for understanding the Komagata Maru incident through primary documents, oral histories, private archives, artistic endeavors, and interviews.
 
The Manitoba.ca Project
A collection of digital resources on Manitoba history that features newspapers, letters, memoirs and diaries, drawings, maps and photos - all of which record the early development of the province.
 
Multicultural Canada
Included in this web site are an extensive range of Collections, the majority in a language other than English. Material types include audio files, published text such as books and newspapers, unpublished text such as manuscript documents, photographs, and ephemeral items such as identity cards.
 
Full-text of over 100,000 pages of personal narratives by immigrants to North America, between 1840 and the present.
 
North American Slave Narratives
A collection of books and articles that documents the story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.
 
A collection of hundreds of Canadian local histories about places, ethnic groups, cultural phenomena, and organizations.
 
South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
A collection of primary historical materials that document the history of South Asian diaspora in the United States.

War and Military History

Canadian Letters & Images Project
An online archive of the Canadian war experience, as told through the letters and images of Canadians themselves. The collection includes correspondence, diaries, photographs, postcards, and other miscellaneous items.

Canadian War Poster Collection - McGill Library
A digitized collection of some 250 Canadian posters from the two World Wars. The website features descriptions and images each poster, an artist index, and a search facility.

Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War
This collection of more than 144,000 Canadian newspaper articles includes news stories and editorials that document every aspect of the war.

History: Military - Primary Sources
A research guide to primary and secondary sources for military history from the University of Washington Libraries. The site includes links to primary sources for both World Wars, The American Civil War, and the Vietnam War.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring The French Revolution
A collection of some of the most important documentary evidence from the French Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs.
 
Women, War and Society, 1914-1918
Documents and interpretive essays on women's involvement in World War I, primarily in Britain.
 
World War I Document Archive
An online archive of primary documents from World War I with an international focus.
 

Women's History

This collection of British and Irish women's diaries and correspondence includes approximately 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from the 1500 to 1900, plus several thousand pages of previously unpublished materials.
 
A searchable digital collection covering advice literature to women, 1450-1910. Includes ephemeral material such as ballads, cartoons and pamphlets along with diaries, advice literature, medical journals, conduct books and periodicals.
 
Primary documents. Over 400 digital collections about the history of women in the United States.
 
A selection of approximately 100 hours of interviews collected in the 1970s and 1980s documenting the experiences of Italian women who immigrated to Canada throughout the first three quarters of the twentieth century.
 
North American Women's Drama
1,500 plays by women from the United States and Canada written from colonial times to the present.
 
Full-text of letters and diaries written by North American women from Colonial times to 1950.
 
A collection of manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Perdita Project is based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University.
 
Books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies that document the different facets of women’s activism in public life.
 
Documents and interpretive essays on women's involvement in World War I, primarily in Britain.
 

Religion

Bible in English
A collection of 20 different versions of the English Bible from the tenth to the twentieth century, including 12 full Bibles, 5 New Testament texts, 2 versions of the Gospels only, and William Tyndale's translations of the Pentateuch, Jonah and the New Testament.

This collection includes over 1,200 works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, including the theological writings of more than 300 Protestant authors, as well as confessional documents, biblical commentaries, polemical treatises, and Bible translations.
 
This collection contains over 450,000 pages of primary-source material from the 16th and 17th Centuries, including all the key catechisms, scholarly treatises, papal documents, devotional works, and theological volumes.
 
Internet Islamic History Sourcebook
An Islamic history portal with links to both primary and secondary sources.

Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) - Harvard University Library
Harvard University has cataloged, conserved, and digitized hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections.

The Patrologia Latina Database is an electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1855, and the four volumes of indexes published between 1862 and 1865. The Patrologia Latina comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.
 
The electronic version of Migne's Patrologiae Graecae. PG contains more than 160 volumes of Greek material (with Latin translations) relevant to the study of the history of the Christian Church from its beginnings through the Council of Florence in 1439.
 

Government Information

A digital collection of core records of the British Cabinet from 1915-1980, including Conclusions of cabinet meetings, Cabinet memoranda, Cabinet Secretary's notebooks, and Cabinet Office precedent books.
 
The Digital National Security Archive contains a comprehensive set of declassified government documents central to U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945.
 
A collection of publicly available XML files generated from information from Hansard, the Official Report of debates in the British Parliament.
 
All of the papers issued by the British House of Commons between 1801-1900 in all formats. More than 184,000 searchable full text documents.
 
The National Archives
The National Archives is the UK government's official archive, containing over 1,000 years of history. The collection of over 11 million historical government and public records is one of the largest in the world. From Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, the collection includes paper and parchment, electronic records and websites, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.
 
NARA - National Archives and Records Administration
United States government agency that preserves and documents US government and historical records.
 
Contains the texts of over 158,000 records of bilateral and multilateral treaties and subsequent treaty actions.
 

Explorers and Early Encounters

American Journeys
A collection containing more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration.

Original manuscripts, maps, ephemeral material and rare printed sources on the American and Canadian West.
 
Early Canadiana Online
Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a full text, searchable, online collection of more than 3,000 books and pamphlets documenting Canadian history from the first European contact to the late 19th century.
 
Prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, and photographs documenting the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534-1850.
 
Empire Online
A collection of over 70,000 images of original manuscripts and printed material, 1492-1969, taken from libraries and archives around the world, including Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Oceania, and South Asia.

Medieval Travel Writing
A collection of medieval manuscripts from libraries around the world and dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The main focus is accounts of journeys to the Holy Land, India and China.

Music and Film

American Film Scripts
One thousand film scripts are indexed and organized to allow searching by scene, by character, by director, and more.

Classical Music Library
A fully searchable, comprehensive database of distinguished classical recordings. It includes tens of thousands of licensed recordings that users can listen to over the Internet. This resource includes music from Medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas, and the avant-garde.

DRAM
DRAM (Database of Recorded American Music) provides CD quality audio, complete liner notes and essays from New World Records, Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI) and other important labels, such as Albany, innova, Cedille, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening and Mutable Music. DRAM offers the educational community on-demand, high-quality streaming access to complete works.

Ethnographic Video Online
The largest, most comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior – more than 750 hours and 1,000 films. The collection covers every region of the world and features the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, including interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more.

Smithsonian Global Sound
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is an online encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection includes over 35,000 recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels.

Naxos Music Library [NML] is the world's largest online classical music library. NML offers the catalogs of more than 50 classical, jazz and world music labels, including independent classical labels, world music, jazz, film music, nostalgia, classic and contemporary rock content.
 
Video Active
A collection of television programmes and stills from audiovisual archives across Europe.