World History

A primary source is generally defined as document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Depending on your research topic and perspective, primary sources can include:

• Original Documents (autobiographies, personal correspondence and diaries, speeches and oral histories, newspapers, government documents, audio and video recordings, photographs, and maps)
   
• Creative Works (Art, drama, poetry, music, novels) 
   
• Relics or Artifacts

["Pelagius of Cordoba" Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons] 

• Avalon Project (Yale Law School)
  Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy from 4000 BCE to Present

• British History Online
  Digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles

• Internet Ancient History Sourcebook (Fordham University)
  Links to visual and aural material with emphasis on access to primary source texts for educational purposes.
  
  
• Early Modern Resources
  Research portal for the early modern period (c.1500-1800 CE). It only lists websites that are free to access and focuses on high-quality resources that are suitable for advanced research, study and teaching.
  
  
• EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History
  Links to sites with primary historical documents for European countries and regions. Includes prehistoric and ancient Europe.
  
  
• Europeana
  Portal to digital libraries all over Europe, but also to archives, museums and audiovisual collection

• Labryinth: Resources for Medieval Studies (Georgetown University)
  The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to electronic resources in medieval studies through a World Wide Web server at Georgetown University. The Labyrinth's easy-to-use menus and links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images on other servers around the world.
  
  
• Library of Congress (LOC)
  
  
• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

American Memory
Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library. The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand.

Ancestry (Library Edition)
Offers unparalleled coverage of the United States and the United Kingdom, including census, vital, church, court, and immigration records, as well as record collections from Canada, Europe, Australia and other areas of the world! Video tutorials available here.

Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL)
The CRDL links to primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of more than 30 hours of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. These moving images - about 450 clips - cover a broad range of key civil rights events, including the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957); the Atlanta Temple bombing (1958); Atlanta sit-ins (1960); Freedom Rides (1961); desegregation of the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech (1961); the Albany Movement (1961-1962); desegregation of Ole Miss (1962) and University of Alabama (1963); and Americus Movement (1963, 1965); Birmingham demonstrations (1963); among many other topics.

Digital Library of Georgia
The Digital Library of Georgia is a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.

Georgia Historic Newspapers
Since the early 1950s the UGA Libraries have made a systematic effort to identify and obtain copies of every newspaper ever published in Georgia and to preserve these valuable historical resources on microfilm. The goal of the Georgia Historic Newspapers database is to convert every Georgia newspaper to digital format and to make this resource available free of charge as a searchable text database.

• How to Read a Primary Source (Bowdoin)
• The 6 C's of Primary Source Analysis (UCI)
• Document Analysis Worksheets (NARA)
• Primary Source Analysis Tool (LOC)

WORLD

• Rechtshistorie Digital Collections
  Offers links and descriptions of digital libraries across the globe.
  
  
• World Digital Library
  The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
  
  
• Internet Global History Sourcebook 
  The Global History Sourcebook is dedicated to exploration of interaction between world cultures. It does not, then, look "world history" as the history of the various separate cultures (for that see the linked pages, which do take that approach), but at ways in which the "world" has a history in its own right.
  
  
• Perseus Digital Library 
  An evolving collection of resources for the study of the ancient world, including archaeology, atlas, texts and translations, text tools and lexica.

AFRICA

• Africa Online Digital LIbrary
  A portal to multimedia collections about Africa. MATRIX, working in cooperation with the African Studies Center at Michigan State University, is partnering with universities and cultural heritage organizations in Africa to build this resource.
  
  
• Internet African History Sourcebook (Fordham University)
  On this site historical sources on the history of human societies in the continent of Africa are presented, when available, without making prejudgements about what is "African".

ASIA

• International Dunhaung Project
  IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.
  
  
• Oceana Digital Library
  A collaborative project begun in late 2007 to digitise, preserve and provide searchable access to a range of cultural & heritage resources from research collections of partner institutions. The geographic scope of the resources includes the subregions of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.
  
  
• Pacific Rim Digital Alliance
  Twenty-eight academic libraries surrounding the Pacific have joined together to improve access to scholarly resources. Metadata from member's digital collections have been harvested and archived to increase discovery and provide one point of access across all data.
  
  
• Southeast Asia Digital Library (Northern Illinois University)
  Drawn largely from the collections of universities and individual scholars in this region, the SEADL contains digital facsimiles of books and manuscripts, as well as multimedia materials and searchable indexes of additional Southeast Asian resources. Nations represented in the collection include Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
  
  
• Internet East Asian History Sourcebook
  Subject listing of documents from East Asian history. Includes cultural origins; religious traditions; imperial China; western intrusion; Japan as a world power; and others.

LATIN AMERICA

• Latin American and Iberian Literary Manuscripts in the Northeast
  Listing of collections held by the members of the Latin America Northeast Libraries Consortium
  
  
• LANIC Archives
  Links to the web pages of numerous archives based throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe.
  
  

Try searching the GIL-Find Catalog with a term related to your topic with one of the terms descrbed below. 

• Sources
• Letters
• Diaries
• Speeches