Primary Sources - Advanced Methods

UNI search engine for books and articles. For books change the "Material Type" option from "All items" to "Books" to turn OneSearch into the library catalog and look for books owned by Rod Library. To find primary materials set your search or results ("Publication Date") to the specific years of your study. Recently published books may also contain primary source material in the form of quotes, diaries, and letters.

Search the full text of over 30 million books.
Full view prior to 1929 and limited preview afterwards.

HathiTrust contains millions pre-1929 books.
Use Advanced full-text search and Advanced catalog search.

Over 10 million digitized texts (e.g. books, magazines).
One of the few archives to offer very high quality color images of older publications.

(Books, Manuscripts, Magazines, and Newspapers)
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender program provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other interesting topical areas. This growing archival program offers rich research opportunities across a wide span of human history.

Archives in this library include:

      LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part II

      Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century

      International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture

Consider using "Advanced Search"

(Note - this is NOT the London Times)
Use "Advanced Search" dropdown-menu search options such as: Document Title (article titles), Subject, and for particularly hard-to-find topics "Entire Document"

Search for primary sources from 1684 to 1850.
British and American newspaper and magazine articles.

Some coverage of British newspapers. Use the "Advanced Search" option beneath the search blanks. Advanced Search will allow you to limit by date and location.

Good coverage of international events.
Searches can be limited by date.
Results can be limited to articles, editorials, cartoons, advertisements.

Create a New York Times All Access Academic Pass and then browse the New York Times by date using the TimesMachine.

Business and extensive world news coverage.
Use "Advanced Search"

Major news magazine of the 20th century with good coverage of international events.

British Magazine
Use "Advanced Search"
Advanced Search dropdown-menu search options include:
Document Title (article titles), Subject, and for particularly hard-to-find topics "Entire Document"

Search the full text of hundreds of magazines.
Full view prior to 1928 and limited preview afterwards.

HathiTrust contains hundreds of pre-1928 magazines. Use Advanced full-text search and then limit results using the "Serial" option on the bottom left-hand side of the results page.

"British History Online is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world." - BHO

"CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, is Ireland's longest running Humanities Computing project. It brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to you on the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of over 19 million words, in 1638 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature, medicine, and the other arts." - CELT

"The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a research performing organisation and national trustworthy digital repository (TDR) for Ireland’s humanities, cultural heritage, and social sciences data." --- DRI

"Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised items – books, music, artworks and more ... thematic collections on art, fashion, music, photography and World War I" --- europeana

There are thousands of publicly available digital archives that could contain useful primary source material for your project. Focused searches using powerful Google commands can locate digital collections based on the descriptions of archives.