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Finding and Using Primary Resources

A guide on defining, finding, and using primary resources in your research

Primary Resources

Primary sources are essential for students and faculty in the History department. This guide is specifically intended to provide pathways to digital primary sources, especially online representations of physical documents and objects.

Lesley University Resources: 

Historical Newspaper Collections

  • New York Times 1851 - 2016 This link opens in a new window

    Full-text coverage of the New York Times. Offers superb coverage of both national and international news. Restricted to Lesley University community.

  • Boston Globe 1872-1989 This link opens in a new window

    This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.

  • The British Colonist

    1858-1910

  • Chronicling America

    This website is a joint venture of the Library of Congress & the NEH. "Chronicling America is a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)." The database currently has papers from 25 states and the District of Columbia published between 1836-1922.

  • Civil War Newspapers

    A collection of links to transcripts of Civil War Newspapers (1860-1865) from Vicki Betts at the University of Texas at Tyler.

  • Google News Archive

    Google partnered "with newspaper publishers and aggregators covering a number of time periods, regions and perspectives." This is a closed collection as of 2011. No new images will be added.

  • ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers

  • New York Tribune Cover Pages

    This is a Flickr set of cover pages from the New York Tribune beginning with the year 1909.

  • Stars and Stripes Digital Archives

    "This online database contains over 1 million historical newspaper pages from Stars and Stripes, the independent daily newspaper of the U.S. military. At present the archive includes newspapers published from 1948 through 1999."

  • Trove: Digitized Australian Newspaper Archive

    1808-1982, from the National Library of Australia

Historic Newspapers by State

Outside Resources: 

HathiTrust:

The HathiTrust Digital Library is home to millions of digitized books and publications. Our team works diligently alongside research institutions to preserve and grow this collection while providing lawful access to visitors around the world.

Boston Public Library Archives and Special Collections:

Contains descriptions and inventories of the archival collections held by Boston Public Library and the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center.

National Archives (USA):

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.

The National Archives (UK):

 A non-ministerial department, and the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, and for England and Wales. 

Endangered Archives Project

The Endangered Archives Programme captures forgotten and still not written histories, often suppressed or marginalised. It gives voice to the voiceless: it opens a dialogue with global humanity’s multiple pasts. It is a library of history still waiting to be written.”
Lisbet Rausing, Co-founder of the Endangered Archives Programme

Gallica:BnF: (in French, can translate to English)

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its partners. Online since 1997, it is enriched every week with thousands of new features and now offers access to several million documents.