Research & Subject Guides: Latin American History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied.

In historiography, a primary source (also called original source) is a document, recording, artifact, or other source of information that was created at the time under study, usually by a source with direct personal knowledge of the events being described. It serves as an original source of information about the topic.

Primary sources are distinguished from secondary sources, which cite, comment on, or build upon primary sources, though the distinction is not a sharp one. "Primary" and "secondary" are relative terms, with sources judged primary or secondary according to specific historical contexts and what is being studied. [From Wikipedia]

Finding Primary Sources

To find primary sources at Stony Brook, use STARS, the Library Catalog.

You can include various words in your search that will help you locate primary source material. A good general word to include would be sources.

For example, if you are looking for primary sources on slavery, you can do a KEYWORD ANYWHERE search in STARS for salvery and sources.

Also try these Library of Congress subject headings that are often used for primary sources:

Correspondence
Diaries
Interviews
Personal narratives

More Primary Sources

For information on additional Primary Sources see the following:

Guide to Primary Sources

Digital Collections at Stony Brook

Early English Books Online (EEBO)
1473-1700. Fulltext. Virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Contains more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions. Subject areas include English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.
Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
1700-1799. Fulltext. Major digital collection consisting of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Includes over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) - books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. Based on the English Short Title Catalogue.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
1600-2000. Fulltext primary sources. Women's reform activities in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Includes books, pamphlets, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies.
Digital National Security Archive
1942-present. Fulltext. Over 63,000 of the most important declassified documents central to U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945. Includes presidential directives, memos, diplomatic dispatches, meeting notes, White House communications, email, confidential letters and other secret material.
Empire Online
Fulltext. Primary source material linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. Includes exploration journals & logs, letters, diaries, government papers, missionary papers, slave papers, travel writing, memoirs, maps, etc.
Oral History Online
Fulltext and citations. Indexes more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. Contains almost 281,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life. Also has pointers to 4,100 audio and video files.

Historic Newspapers Online

See Also: Historic Latin American Newspapers on Microfilm in the Microforms section.

Latin American Historical Newspapers
1805-1922. Full-text. Over 300 Latin American newspapers published in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Combining Latin American Newspapers Series I & II, the collection features papers in English, Spanish and Portuguese from 20 countries, including key titles such as La Nacion, La Prensa and Vanguardia (Buenos Aires), Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), O Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo), Mercurio (Santiago), La Prensa (Havana), La Patria, Mexican Herald and El Monitor Republicano (Mexico City) , El Peruano and West Coast Leader (Lima) and Venezuelan Herald (Caracas).

Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press (Arizona)
Historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s. The collection covers important periods in Mexican-American history, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bracero Program to the Chicano Movement.

New York Times (Historical)
Coverage: 1851-3 years ago.

Online access to page images and fulltext articles from the New York Times as far back as the first issue.
Washington Post (Historical)
1877-1997. Fulltext. Digitized historical archive of The Washington Post. Complete issues, cover to cover, from its beginning in 1877 until 1997, including news articles, photos, advertisements, marriage announcements, obituaries, cartoons, and more. In searchable pdf format.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
America's historic newspaper pages from 1789 to 1963.

Historic Magazines & Journals

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

To find magazine and journal articles between 1880 and 1980. Readers' Guide is located in the Central Reading Room (CRR). When you enter the CRR, it will be on the wall to your immediate left, at call number AI3 .R483.

Each volume of Readers' Guide is indexed by Subject. Under each subject, there will be a list of article titles, with abbreviations for the magazine or journal in which the article is located, the date of the issue, and the volume and page number(s).

When you find an article, you need to then check in STARS to see if the library has the magazine/journal for the date of the article. (I receommend using the JOURNAL CATALOG part of STARS. Once you find the magazine, check the "Summary Holdings" to see if we have the date you need.

For example, if you find an article from Time magazine from April 1957, search the JOURNAL CATALOG for Time. When you click on the link for Time, you will various Summary Holdings for Microfiche (1965-1974,1982-); Microfilm (1923-1956,1960-1964,1975-1981) and Print (1957-March 1975,Oct. 1975-1980,1982-). April 1957 would be available, then, in the Print version, which is located in the Main Stacks at call number AP2 .T37 OVERSIZE x.

You will also see a link for online versions. You can check this to see if the magazine/journal is available for your date. Please keep in mind, however, that most magazines and journals online will only go back to about 1980.

JSTOR

While JSTOR is often used for secondary sources, keep in mind that each journal in JSTOR goes back to its first issue. Many journals go back into the 19th century, and a few go back as far as the 17th and 18th centuries. So, it can also be used as a primary source.

Special Collections & University Archives

Special Collections and University Archives select, acquire, preserve and provide access to rare, valuable, and scarce primary and secondary materials in a variety of formats in support of the educational and research endeavors of Stony Brook University's students, faculty, and staff.

The department also extends its services to researchers in the wider geographic region, nationally, and internationally.

The collection includes: books, manuscripts, and maps dating from the 15th century; the University Archives; audio/visual materials; and a digital repository. All are welcome to explore the library's unique collections.

Primary Sources on the Web

Bexar Archives Online (Texas)
Bexar Archives is "one of the great historical treasures of the American continent," according to Historian Lester Gladstone Bugbee. The Bexar Archives preserve the military, civil, and political life of the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas, and constitute the principle resource for the Spanish and Mexican history of Texas from 1717–1836.

Bexar Archives Online features over 5,000 original documents (23,000 pages) that have been digitized from microfilm. Researchers may browse, by year, the originals and translations, or compare an original and its translation side-by-side. Full-text searching of the translations is also supported.
Latin American Pamphlet Digital Collection (Harvard)
Latin American pamphlets published during the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico are the countries most heavily represented in this collection. These pamphlets document the emergence of the Latin American colonies as independent states, and illuminate many aspects of their populations' social and cultural life. Many pamphlets are devoted to boundary disputes, territorial expansion, the description of unexplored territories and the relationship between Church and State.

Search for keywords, or browse the collection by Title, Name/Creator, Subject, or Form/Genre.
Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press (Arizona)
Historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s. The collection covers important periods in Mexican-American history, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bracero Program to the Chicano Movement.
Latin American Travelogues (Brown)
Digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries. The works selected are linked to critical essays.

Audio and Visual Resources

There are an increasing number of excelent web sites that have audio-visual proimary source material.

Internet Archive - Probably the best overall collection of audio-visual material that could be used for primary sources. The Archive currently contains almost 400,000 moving images and nearly 700,000 audio items, along with software and other material.

YouTube - Great resource for finding speeches and hidtoric news items, as well as musical and cinematic trasures.

Latin American History