General Primary Sources
Sources can be found numerous classes of historical record. This page lists a variety of such classes and offers links to resources for exploring them.
- Searching in HOLLIS
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Bibliographies
- Diaries and Other Personal Accounts
- Document Collections
- Images
- Maps
- Newspapers
- Periodicals
See the Catalogs and Bibliographies page.
Guidance on finding archival collections at Harvard and elsewhere.
Trew Letter Collection / Briefsammlung Trew contains the letters of the Nuremberg physician and natural scientist, Christoph Jakob Trew (1695-1769). Emphasis on medicine and science, the database provides access to about 19,000 letters and drafts from 2,200 authors from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Literary Manuscripts: 17th & 18th Century Poetry from The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds offers facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse. Includes biographical information and a section on palaeography, providing transcriptions and alphabets of 17th century texts.
British Literary Manuscripts online, c. 1660-1900 offers full-text of over 400,000 pages of poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence and other manuscripts.
Perdita manuscripts: Women writers, 1500-1700 full text of works by early modern women authors whose writing exists only in manuscript.
Electronic Enlightenment provides access to over 53,000 English, French, German and Italian letters and documents associated with over 6000 prominent thinkers of the 18th century.
Find bibliographies in HOLLIS Library Catalog by searching your keyword plus the word Bibliography (which must be limited to Subject).
Subject exact phrase: Counter-Reformation
AND
Subject contains: Bibliography
Diaries and Other Personal Accounts
Personal Accounts in HOLLIS and WorldCat: In the HOLLIS Library Catalog Advanced Search and WorldCat, several Subject terms refer to personal accounts. Combine topical keywords with the Subject words: Narratives, Diaries, Correspondence, Interviews, Oral history (or Oral histories)
Narratives is short for Personal narratives which refers to accounts of wars and of diseases.
In HOLLIS:
Autobiographies usually bear only the Subject term Biography. Sometimes the terms Autobiographies or Autobiography is present.
In HOLLIS:
Subject contains: Erasmus
AND
Subject contains: biography OR autobiograph*
A guide to finding additional diaries and autobiographies is available in Finding Biographical Information.
To find more collections of primary sources in HOLLIS Library Catalog, search Sources as a Subject keyword.Sources usually refers to published collections of primary sources of several different types.
Subject exact phrase: Publishers and publishing
AND
Subject contains: Sources
Since Sources is a common word, 'Limit to: Subject' eliminates many irrelevant results.
Records for many, but by no means all, individual Harvard University Library images are available in HOLLIS. Limit search with Resource type: Images.
More sources for images in the Library Research Guide for History
NYPL Digital Gallery Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration
History of Europe: The Periodical Historical Atlas, 1 to 2000
ORBIS LATINUS online (Dr. J. G. Th. Graesse (1909)). Latin place names
More map resources in the Library Research Guide for History
See the Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes
For coverage in general periodicals see Library Research Guide for History: General and Popular Periodicals