Research Guides: Comparative Literature Research Guide: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources provide direct evidence of an event, attitude, community, or phenomenon. Documents such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, transcripts, and so on are often considered primary sources. They are distinguished from secondary sources, which are analytical or scholarly sources written about the event in question. Secondary sources often use primary sources as evidence.

From a literary perspective, primary sources are the literary texts you are analyzing. From a historical perspective, primary sources are documents from the time period in question. In the social sciences, primary source may include documents created by the communities in question.

Primary sources are not always completely reliable; they are created by people with a stake in what they describe and may have all sorts of inaccuracies or biases. However, they are a very good way to gain a better understanding of attitudes in a particular time period, or to see how norm were established.

Some Tips for Primary Source Searching

Dates

When working with primary sources, especially in historical research, is important to pay attention to the dates they were originally published. Materials published after a date probably didn't influence anything that happened before that date, after all! In general, limiting your search by date is very helpful, but keep in mind that materials are sometimes republished.

The collections listed below emphasize older works. For more current primary sources, you might consider searching by source type. (For instance: are you interested in human rights discourse? The text of human rights laws constitute primary sources, but you'd be more likely to find them in a collection of legal documents rather than what are usually considered "primary source collections.")

Search Terms

The English language changes over time and from community to community. When you are searching for primary sources, keep in mind that most of the resources I'll list below rely on full-text searching; thus, you need to find the words that are likely used in the documents themselves. If you're starting from a work of literature, you might consider some of the words that are used in the work.

If you know the name of a specific person, place, or event, those make very good search terms.

It's also important to think about what kinds of words may actually be used in these texts. For instance, you may be writing about patriarchy, but that word is used primarily in feminist discourse, or in specific historical contexts. However, you might find plenty of evidence of patriarchy by searching words like "marriage" or by finding manuals for women.

Gaps

There are systematic biases in the kinds of documents that are created, preserved, collected, and made available. Some of them are easy to identify:

Language. While the collections do include some items that are not in English, the majority are English-language; other languages represented are mostly European.
Colonialism. The colonial powers relied heavily on literacy and had access to the means to publish and preserve their work. Thus, the colonial perspective is well represented; that of the colonized, not as much.
Official vs Informal. Official documents -- published books, acts of Parliament, etc -- are more likely to be included than informal documents like diaries or letters.

Collections

Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
A collection of works by Black American writers. You can browse by historical events, subjects, people, and more. It also includes some other interesting collections, including the Black Panther newspaper.
Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
This platform combines several other Gale primary source collections, including Nineteenth Century Collections Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, as well as several others.
This is the largest primary source collection the library has.
Gale Primary Sources: Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
A collection of documents related to the history of slavery from the 17th century to the late 19th century.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window
This collection presents legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world.
South Asia Open Archives This link opens in a new window
A collection of historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
This is a series of thematic collections related to women's history in the United states from 1600-2000. You can search, or you can browse by collection, which often will lead you to relevant documents you wouldn't have found otherwise.

Books

OneSearch
As always, if you need books, you should search OneSearch

Books can be useful because in many cases, scholars may compile collections of primary sources ("sourcebooks") related to a specific theme.

To find these collections, you can search with the word "Sources," which is a subject term in OneSearch used to describe them (and, unfortunately, a few other things).