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HIST 089.002: Global Food History: Primary Sources

What are primary sources?

Primary sources are materials directly related to a topic by time or participation. These materials include letters, speeches, diaries, newspaper articles from the time, oral history interviews, documents, photographs, artifacts, cookbooks or anything else that provides firsthand accounts about a person or event.

General Primary Sources Guides

Finding Primary Sources

This local guide provides assistance in pursuing research using primary sources, especially those we have available here in several formats: paper, republication, microfilm, and electronic. The database below helps identifies primary source repositories around the world

ArchiveGrid

ArchiveGrid serves as a single point of entry that provides online access to descriptions of archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives worldwide.

Gale Primary Sources

Gale Primary Sources is a search engine for Gale's historical digital collections of primary materials. You can search all at once or choose selectively. Consult the database to see the full-text collections available.

Digital Primary Sources

Hathi Trust - Food Studies Collection

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project This link opens in a new windowhttps://d.lib.msu.edu/fa

The Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum presents this online collection of the most important and influential 19th and early 20th century American cookbooks.

The Indian Community Cookbook Project : "A space that aims to feature underrepresented Recipes, Recipe Books of all kinds and formats (digital, printed, handwritten, oral, audio, visual) from communities located across India and Food Memories, a series of interviews on how community food traditions & memories are retained in the modern-day context."

Feast Afrique is a resource on the West African culinary heritage, curated by Ozoz Sokoh, author of The Kitchen Butterfly blog, and dedicated to exploring sociopolitical, economic, and culinary pathways and practices related to the production and consumption of food, particularly the legacy of West African culinary excellence from the 15th century through the Transatlantic slave trade, its contribution to the Industrial Revolution, and global development. The site includes links to digitized books, data visualizations, videos of talks and events, essays, recipes, and a “Reading Challenge” feature on West African & Diasporic culinary history, literature, language and other aspects of food.

Food Timeline  provides a wealth of historic information, primary documents, and original research on the history of food including recipes.

Food-related Primary Source Database