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 1930 and limited preview afterwards.

HathiTrust contains millions of pre-1930 books.
Use Advanced 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

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

Search the full text of hundreds of magazines.
Full view prior to 1930 and limited preview afterwards.

HathiTrust contains hundreds of pre-1930 magazines. Use Advanced 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

"With the support of more than 35 libraries, the TCP keyed, encoded, edited, and released 2,473 ECCO-TCP texts. A further tranche of 628 texts was keyed and encoded but never fully proofed or edited. The texts in this group remain useful for many purposes, however, and bring the total of ECCO-TCP texts to over 3,000. In cooperation with Gale Cengage, these texts have been made freely available to the public." - ECCO-TCP

"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.