You can find primary sources in books, so be sure to look carefully at books in your chosen subject. There may be important primary sources embedded inside the book for you to discover.
Other rich places to find primary sources can be found on the web!
American Revolution: The Treaty of Paris - From the Library of Congress
American Rhetoric - Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two.
Atom bombs - Primary sources include The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Atomic Archive), The Decision to Drop the Atom Bomb (Truman Presidential Library), and the Atomic Heritage Foundation. From the Wilson Center.
Cuban Missile Crisis - Documents and reports from the atomicarchive.com. More documents and speeches can be found at the National Security Archive as well.
Diplomacy and Foreign Policy - Archives Library Information Center (ALIC). Links to various collections of sources from the National Archives.
Fifteenth Amendment documents - The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." From the Library of Congress
Galileo - The Trial of Galileo with links to primary sources. From the History Teaching Institute.
Geneva Convention - Find the actual text, plus information on later conventions established.
German Propaganda Archive - Texts of speeches, visual material such as posters and cartoons, excerpts from other writings, all from Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Fascinating and controversial site from Calvin College.
Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 - Information and sources provided by the presidential library of Jimmy Carter.
Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 - The text of the act. Use with images from here. This act was overturned by the Supreme Court, until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was finally passed in the 1940's.
Kennedy-Nixon Debates - Many of the original debates are available online. The John F. Kennedy presidential library has the video of the first debate. The Commission on Presidential Debates has all of the debates here. Transcriptions of the debates can be found here.
Korean War - Primary sources on the war and the creation of the DMZ (Demilitarized zone) on the 38th parallel.
Library of Congress: American Memory
Lincoln-Douglas Debates - The transcriptions of the debates from the National Park Service. Use in coordination with additional information from thet Library of Congress for a special exhibit on Lincoln before he became president.
Louisiana Purchase - A great place to find documents, from the Library of Congress.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute - Documents, speeches, writings of MLK, Jr. from Stanford University.
National Archives - Go directly to search the catalog here. For documents to use for specific topics, try DocsTeach (this site is for teachers, so there are teaching tips too).
Presidential Libraries - An overview from the National Archives. If you have a topic from a specific presidential era of national interest, you can search within that presidential library for online papers and reports.
Sino-Indian Border War - From the Wilson Center.
The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo - Documents from the National Archives.
Treaty of Versailles - From the Library of Congress
United Nations - History, chronology, images... more on its predecessor, the League of Nations.
Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment - From the National Archives. If you want to focus on important leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the best way is to read their biographies, and see what letters they wrote to each other, and about each other.
Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center - Browse databases and archives to find photographs, letters, deportation information, and more. The museum is on the same property as a large, well respected archive of the same name.
Calisphere - "Calisphere is a gateway to digital collections from California's great libraries, archives, and museums. Discover over 1,775,000 images, texts, and recordings—and counting."
Getty Images - Known for their creative images.
Google LIFE Photo Archive - LIFE Magazine has been a standard of American life to the present day. Search the collection from the 1850's to the present.
Library of Congress (LoC) - You can get lost in here, so use the search box at the top, but click on the drop-down option to search for Photos, Prints, and Drawings instead of Everything.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Online Archive of California - Not as extensive as Calisphere, the OAC still has a great collection of digitized images.
If you are looking for a particular image and are having trouble, please send me an email so that I can help you.
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