Using the UW Libraries Catalog to find Primary Sources.
The UW Libraries has a strong collection of published primary sources dealing with American and British history. Primary sources for other regions and time periods are also available. This link provides strategies for using in the UW Libraries Catalog to find books that can be considered primary sources.
Using primary sources on the Web
Created by the Instruction & Research Services Committee of the Reference and User Service Association History Section in the American Library Association.
African American primary documents collection
This collection of primary sources has slave narratives, Supreme Court cases, text of speeches, and documents written by notable African Americans.
Been Here So Long: Select WPA Slave Narratives
Journalists and other writers employed by the Federal Writers Project, part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), gathered over 2000 interviews with the American Slave Narratives during 1936-1938.
Feminist Speeches
Selected speeches available through UCSB's Black American Feminism: A Multidisciplinary Bibliography, an extensive bibliography of black American Feminist thought from across the disciplines.
The Heroic slave, by Frederick Douglas
This fictionalized account of major events in the life of Madison Washington, a slave from Virginia, is told as a series of episodes in which Madison Washington meets with a fictional narrator "Mr. Listwell," who first becomes converted to the abolitionist cause by hearing Washington speak, later helps him to escape to Canada, and finally meets him again as he is boarding the ship "Creole" as a slave again, and provides him with 3 files to saw off his chains. Little is known of the real Madison Washington except that he managed to escape to Canada but could not rest there with thoughts of his wife as a slave.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digitization project's database, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection North American slave narratives.
In the First Person
is a free in-depth index of more than 3,350 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. You can keyword search more than 650,000 pages of full-text by more than 15,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 3,500 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records.
Japanese American Exhibit & Access Project
The Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project is a multifaceted project to create a permanent Web site which provides enhanced access to the UW Libraries holdings on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Included in the project is a virtual exhibit focusing on the Puyallup assembly center, Camp Harmony, and enhanced access to archival guides and inventories of the UW Libraries Manuscripts and University Archives Division.
North American Slave Narratives
Housed at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, "North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920" documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(Some of the narratives in this collection are available through the UW Libraries Catalog. Search for "slave narratives" as a keyword in the catalog.
