Definition and Examples
Primary sources “are written or created during the studied time period” and shed light on “the topic being discussed in the paper.” Works of literature and art, as well as historical documents, can be used as primary sources. The Library of Congress defines primary sources as "the raw materials of history — original documents and objects which were created at the time under study. They are different from secondary sources, accounts that retell, analyze, or interpret events, usually at a distance of time or place."
Examples of primary source types you might use in this class include (but are not limited to) plays, poems, novels, paintings, memoirs, letters, diaries, government proclamations, medical texts, and sermons.
Reprinted Primary Sources
Primary sources are frequently most accessible in reprinted editions. As long as the source was written at the time period you're writing about, it is perfectly fine to use a modern edition (e.g., the 2016 Arden edition of Hamlet or the 2001 New York Review of Books edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy).
- Primo This link opens in a new windowPrimo is the library's search engine for books at Watzek Library and at Pacific Northwest Academic Libraries via the Summit delivery system. It also contains audiovisual materials like DVDs and CDs as well as journal articles and ebooks.
Primary Source Collections
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new windowEEBO contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new windowECCO delivers the full-text and page images of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
Librarian for English Literature
Historical Dictionaries
- Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new windowProvides authoritative definitions and traces the usage of words from their first recorded occurrence to the modern period.