GLBL 691H: Honors in Global Studies: Primary Sources
Records, Papers, Archives
The Libraries offer many primary source documents, in a variety of formats.
Many digitized collections can be found on the E-Research by Discipline page.
You can also search the online catalog for primary sources, using words such as: personal narratives, autobiographies, diaries, letters, records, sources, interviews, archives, or archival sources:
- Jimmy Carter (as an Author Search)
- baseball "personal narratives"
- Communist Party United States interviews
- "East India Company" records
Many other research libraries have digitized collections that can be found using Google! A few examples of larger collections:
Government Information (Mostly U.S.)
UNC holds over two million Federal, international, and state documents, but not all of these are in the catalog. Still, the catalog is a great place to start your research, particularly for documents published after 1976.
A few other useful sources for finding government information are below:
- ProQuest CongressionalComprehensive source of current and historical U.S. Congressional material, including bills, testimony, reports, documents, selected prints, the Congressional Record, the U.S. Code, Federal Register, and the Code of Federal Regulations.
- Social ExplorerProvides web-based access to United States Census data from 1790 to the present, and to other U.S. and international data, with the ability to make tables and interactive maps easily or export data for analysis. Data include the most commonly used variables and geographies.
- Digital National Security ArchiveContains a comprehensive set of declassified government documents and is a strong complement to the Declassified Documents Reference System. Includes collections of important primary source materials relative to U.S. foreign policy since 1945, accompanied by reference and secondary material.
- House of Commons Parliamentary PapersWorking documents of the British government for all areas of social, political, economic and foreign policy, showing how issues were explored and legislation was formed. With all collections available, HCPP includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. HCPP delivers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing.
News
To learn more about using newspapers in your research, consult our Finding News Stories guide.
- World Newspaper Archive (19th - 20th centuries)Online database of digitized historical newspapers covering the 19th and 20th centuries. Focus is on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. Covers 19th and 20th centuries, and includes some of these regions’ largest and most important newspapers.
- ProQuest Historical NewspapersSearch hundreds of thousands of pages of full-text and full-image newspaper articles. Includes news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements; historical photos, graphics, and advertisements are also included; display the complete image of any page in any issue or browse the database to scan individual issues page by page.
- Gale NewsVaultAllows you to cross-search a variety of newspaper and periodical databases: 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, British Newspapers, 1780 1950, Times (London) Digital Archive, Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, Financial Times Historical Archive, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, 19th Century UK Periodicals, and Economist Historical Archive.
Guides
This guide provides assistance with research using primary sources, especially those we have available here at UNC Libraries in several formats: paper, republication, microfilm, and electronic. The database below helps identifies primary source repositories around the world.
- ArchiveGridServes 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. Allows discovery of information about primary source materials - both personal papers and corporate records.
