If you are using a database with an Advanced Search form, try using the Advanced Search features to refine your search.
Think about what terms that might have been used to describe your topic during the time period. For example: the name of a specific person or organization or even a term that wouldn't be used today.
In addition to searching, try browsing these collections to learn about sources that you wouldn't have necessarily thought of searching for.
Examine how revolutions, protests, resistance, and social movements have shaped and transformed the human experience globally from the 18th to 21st century through primary sources such as video, journals, speeches and more.
Database available through at least May 31, 2028, as part of ProQuest's Evidence-Based Acquisition Program.
Focuses on women’s activism across the world, from 1840 to the present. Includes primary sources on topics related to peace, human trafficking, poverty, child labor, literacy, global inequality, and more.
Database available through at least May 31, 2028, as part of ProQuest's Evidence-Based Acquisition Program.
Explores prominent themes related to conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. This archival database includes documents related to the Habsburg, Ottoman, British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States empires, and to settler societies in the United States and South Africa.
Database available through at least May 31, 2028, as part of ProQuest's Evidence-Based Acquisition Program.
The nature of a research project will determine what can serve as a primary text. Literary critics will use literary works as primary texts, in order to find passages that will support their arguments about the meaning of literary works and their place in literary history. Historians will use documents like diaries, newspaper articles, letters, and personal narratives as primary texts, in order to create a fresh interpretation of an historical event.
When you are looking for primary sources, you can use Library Catalog. Search by author for the name of a writer from the time period or enter a subject in combination with any of the subject headings used to define primary sources:
Autobiographies
Correspondence
Diaries
Documents
Early works to…
Government documents
Interviews
Legal documents
Letters
Manuscripts
Memoirs
Narratives
Pamphlets
Photographs
Reminiscences
Sources
Speeches