LibGuides: Literature &amp; Language: Primary Sources

Primary Source or Secondary Source?

Primary Source	Secondary Source
Firsthand account (created by someone who was there or lived during the time period)	Secondhand account (usually about an event in the past)
Created at the time of the event/ during that time period	Usually created after an event has taken place, may include primary sources, but also includes other sources and commentary
Does not interpret the event, time period, or subject	Provides an extra layer of commentary about the event, time period, or person that the work describes
Examples: court proceedings, newspaper articles, letters, diaries, photographs, art, eyewitness accounts, research where an experiment was performed or direct observations were made, interviews, videos, online communication (emails, listservs, blogs, social media comments, FacebookLive, Boomerang),* data and statistics *Please check with your professor before you choose to use social media publications as a source. You will probably be better off using newspaper articles, letters, diaries, etc.	Examples: most books about a topic that are NOT published diaries, letters, or autobiographies; most scholarly articles about a topic, data analysis/interpretation, documentaries

Literature Primary Source Databases

African-American Poetry
Poems from 1750-1900 including Lucy Terry Prince, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and more.
American Poetry
Find poems written from 1650-1920. Includes Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville.
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States
ProQuest invites you to explore the freely available Black Freedom Struggle website, featuring expertly selected primary source documents. Visitors will find historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more from specific time periods in history marked by the opposition African Americans have faced on the road to freedom.
Ebook Central Academic and Public Library Complete
Scholarly titles supporting student and faculty research, and general nonfiction on topics such as school & studying, career development, arts & leisure, and practical life skills. Also includes fiction, how-to, and study aids.
eBooks on EBSCOhost
Over 26,000 fiction, reference, scholarly, and professional books online.
English Poetry
Find poems written from 600 to 1900 including Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, Robert Dodsley, Francis Turner Palgrave, and more.
Twentieth-Century English Poetry
Modernist poems (1900-1999): W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, D.H. Lawrence, Carol Ann Duffy, and more.
Twentieth Century African-American Poetry
62 of the most important African-American poets of the last century: Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
Twentieth Century American Poetry
A database of modern and contemporary American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. Presently includes 36,000 poems drawn from 460 volumes by 217 poets.

History Related Primary Source Databases

Documenting the American South
(created by UNC)
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Historic North Carolina Digital Newspaper Collection
Newspapers.com North Carolina Collection. 3.5 million pages of digitized content from over 1,000 NC county newspapers.