Primary Sources
This page lists a variety of kinds of sources and offers links to resources for exploring them.
- HOLLIS
- Digital Libraries
- British Colonial
- French Colonial
- Films
- Government Documents
- Law
- Literature
- Maps
- Newspapers/Government Gazettes
- Public Opinion
- Statistics
To find books, periodicals, manuscripts, videos, etc., on a topic in HOLLIS, put in likely keywords and choose Library Catalog. Look at pertinent records and find the terms under Subject. For example, searching for the keywords mental hospitals Nigeria yields:
Imperial bedlam: institutions of madness in colonial southwest Nigeria, by Jonathan Sadowsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 169 p.
Subjects
Psychiatric hospitals -- Nigeria -- History.
Mentally ill -- Care -- Nigeria -- History.
Mental illness -- Treatment -- Nigeria -- History.
Psychiatry -- Nigeria -- History.
Imperialism -- Health aspects -- Nigeria -- History.
Nigeria -- Colonial influence -- Health aspects -- History.
Nigeria -- Colonization -- Health aspects -- History.
Med. subject
Hospitals, Psychiatric
Colonialism
Hospitals, Psychiatric - history
Nigeria
HOLLIS Record
Under Refine my results: Subject on the right of the results list there are more main terms (Commitment of Mentally Ill, Imperialism) to try. NOTE: If you hit one of the terms in this Subject list, HOLLIS will find records with the term, say Commitment of Mentally Ill, only on records in the set originally formed by searching mental hospitals Nigeria.
Redo your search using the terms that HOLLIS uses. Also, go to Starts with.../Browse (top black band) and put in Imperialism Health aspects adjusting to Browse by Subject. This is very useful in breaking down a large subject and in giving you more subdivisions, which can be applied to other Subject terms, to search. Thus:
Whenever you have a reference to a useful book, look it up in HOLLIS and see what the Subject terms are.
Any pertinent book published during your era may be a primary source, but certain kinds of primary sources, including originally unpublished sources such as letters and diaries published later, have particular terms attached to their Subject terms in a HOLLIS record. Change Any field to Subject for cleanest results.
- --Archives
- --Correspondence
- --Description and travel
- --Diaries
- --Manuscripts
- --Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
- --Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
- --Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)
Example:
Uganda AND (Archives OR Correspondence OR Diaries OR Manuscripts OR Sources OR Narratives) (as Subject)
Regional Subject Terms
- Africa, Central
- Africa, Southern
- Africa, English-speaking
- Africa, English-speaking West
- Africa, East
- Africa, Sub-Saharan
- Africa, Eastern
- Africa, North
- Africa, French-speaking
- Africa, French-speaking Equatorial
- Africa, French-speaking West
- Africa, Northwest
- Africa, Spanish-speaking
- Africa, West
When you find a pertinent book, go to Starts With.../Browse and put in the call number, adjusting the menu to Library of Congress (Wid-LC) or Other. This shows you other books on the same subject, even though they may be in storage or checked out.
Keep in mind that if you are researching a country that has changed names, you should try searching for both the current name and the former name. Example for Ghana/Gold Coast
Material published in a country
You can do a HOLLIS search for material published in a particular country. In HOLLIS Advanced Search Adjust Any Field to Code: MARC place of pub and enter nr (for Nigeria), Country code list. You can do the same thing in WorldCat Advanced Search. Put cp:Kenya in the 'Search for:' field. Cp: is country of publication.
See the Library Research Guide for History and the HOLLIS user guide for more information on searching HOLLIS.
Resources on Health and Diseases in Africa (African Studies Center, U, Penn)
HathiTrust Digital Library is a huge collection of digitized books and periodicals. Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. Most items pre-1925 will be full text viewable. After 1925, a much smaller number will be full text viewable. You can search within non-full text viewable works and obtain the pages numbers where your search terms occur. Most US, and some state, government documents will be full text viewable.
Advanced Full Text Search
In the first (Full Text) Advanced Full Text Search field, you can put terms for a full text search. Phrases and proper names work best (exact phrase). If you search two or more separate keywords, when you search within particular volumes, those pages containing all the keywords will sort first.
In the second search field, you can limit your full text search by:
- Title, searching the contents of a particular work, including periodical titles
- Author, searching the works of a particular author, including names of organizations and government entities.
- Subject, searching the Subject terms (same Subject terms as those used in HOLLIS) for a particular topic
You can then further refine the results using the left-hand Refine Results column by country of publication, language, date, etc.
Internet Archive offers full text for a variety of digitized books and periodicals. Also includes archived web pages (Wayback Machine), as well as manuscripts (a few), digitized microfilm, films, audio files, TV News, and more. Many recent books are full text viewable if you set up a free account. You can use a Google password.
Details on searching HathiTrust and Internet Archive
African Online Digital Library is an open access digital library of African cultural heritage material
Aluka Digital Library images and full text concerning: World Heritage Sites: Africa and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa.
Current Events in Africa Web Archive (CEAWA), 2014- .
African Activist Archive (1950s-1990s) includes: pamphlets, newsletters, leaflets, buttons, posters, photographs, and audio/video recordings relating to social justice activism in supporting Africans. Offers an international directory of non-digitized collections in repositories worldwide.
Archive of the Republic of Niger (AREN) at Boston University
Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest
--To search, select Advanced Search and deselect the other archives under Limit to.
European colonialism in the early 20th century. Political and economic consolidation of Portuguese colonies in Africa, 1910-1929 - Guinea-Bissau
Corpus de la première littérature francophone d'Afrique noire, écrite et orale, des origines aux Indépendances (fin 18e siècle - 1960)
HOLLIS Record
Select Collections (top right, then Littérature française et francophone)
Liberia and the U.S.: Nation-Building in Africa, 1864-1918 and Liberia and the U.S.: Nation-Building in Africa, 1918-1935
World constitutions illustrated: contemporary & historical documents & resources offers full text of constitutions and constitutional law, but also of many more general historical sources for each country.
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers includes committee reports, draft bills, and other material emanating from the House of Commons. Includes reports submitted to Parliament. For more on Parliamentary papers.
Confidential print: Africa, 1834-1966 contains printed material, from single letters to large volumes, circulated to officials in the Foreign or Colonial Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad. Nature and Scope
African blue books of statistics, 1821-1953. Colonial administrators filled out annual reports which were sent to the Colonial Office in London.
See also the Government Documents page of this guide.
Much more information in: Library Research Guide for British Colonial and Foreign Relations Sources.
European colonialism in the early 20th century. French colonialism in Africa: from Algeria to Madagascar, 1910-1930 (actually 1910-1941)
More information in: Library Research Guide for History 82d: French Colonial Encounters: 1870's to Present
HOLLIS Search for Nigerian films. Place of publication codes for other countries: Country code list. Many videos are on DVDs. You can view them in the Lamont Multimedia Lab or borrow a viewer at the Lamont circulation desk.
See the Streaming Video @ Harvard guide.
African Studies: African Video Collection. Some dead links, but still useful.
African Government Web Archive, 2000- .
There is a substantial collection of African government documents on Level D in Lamont (Old Widener call number Afr Doc). Some documents are also in other location such as the Widener stacks and the Law School Library.
To find government documents from a African nation in HOLLIS, try these two types of advanced searches:
1) Local call Number: Afrdoc*
2) Author: [name of country]
You can also browse the HOLLIS Library Catalog by call number. Open STARTS WITH/BROWSE:
For Nigeria, Call number: Old Widener: Afr doc 2300 - Afr Doc 2699
Material from Level D must be paged. Instructions: HOW CAN I ACCESS GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS AND MICROFORMS FROM LAMONT LEVEL D?
For guides to colonial and early independence government documents. see the Colonial Era page.
LLMC Digital
Go to Online Services, then Browse Collections. A rich source of legislative and judicial documents
World constitutions illustrated: contemporary & historical documents & resources offers full text of constitutions and constitutional law, but also of many more general historical sources for each country
Free Legal Research Resources - Foreign & International: African Legal Materials (Harvard Law School guide)
African writers series (1962- )
Black women writers offers fiction, nonfiction and poetry by women from North America, Africa and the Caribbean, together with essays on feminism and genre studies in these regions.
Black short fiction and folklore :from Africa and the African diaspora (mid-1900s-present) contains stories, folktales, and short fiction by African, African American, and Caribbean authors.
Grand Corpus des littératures (Moyen Age-20e s.) includes Corpus de la première littérature francophone d'Afrique noire, écrite et orale, des origines aux Indépendances (fin 18e siècle-1960)
The Harvard Map Collection contains one of the world’s finest collections of maps. As well as political and topographic maps, they have numerous thematic maps which map demographic, social, and economic other features.
Africa Map Project (Harvard)
Maps of Africa to 1900 (Univ. of Illinois)
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
AFRITERRA Foundation is a non-profit Cartographic Library and Archive for rare maps of Africa.
Maps of Africa (British Library)
16th-Early 20th Century Maps of Africa (Northwestern)
Newspapers/Government Gazettes
Electronic Newspapers of Africa (Columbia guide)
NexisUni (1980s- ) is the usual first choice for finding recent newspaper articles, with full text (pictures omitted) coverage of numerous U.S. and overseas newspapers.
Newspapers, news sources and popular magazines: Online news sources (Rhodes University Library guide)
Africa Confidential (1999- ) is a news digest for Africa. Founded in 1960.
African Newspapers (World Newspaper Archive) offers full text of about 40 newspapers covering various date spans, 1800-1922.
Africa-Newsroom.com (2007- ): Press release distribution platform.
AllAfrica.com (1997- ) provides news stories in French and English from African and other news sources.
East African Newspapers (3 titles) - 1943-2017
SA Media (1977- ) covers South African newspapers.
Egypt Daily.com provides links to news stories on Egypt.
Government Gazettes are periodical produced by the national government giving government news and proclamations.
Harvard Law School Official Gazettes
--Sénégal 1926-29 2,912 pp. -- Togo 1926-29 1,698 pp.
To find statistics in HOLLIS, search for the name of the country along with the subject statistics - Example for Togo
International historical statistics, 1750-2010 contains statistics in many areas, including health, agriculture, industry, education, transportation, and communication.
Africapolis is a geospatial database on cities and urbanisation dynamics. Includes demographic sources, satellite and aerial imagery and other cartographic sources. Covers 7500 agglomerations in 50 countries.
Country Statistical Yearbooks (Univ. Wisconsin)
World Urbanization Prospects: Country Profiles (UN) offers longitudinal data on urbanization on the country level.
International Cities: Information & Statistics: Data
Government Resources: International Information (Louisville) The tabs behave oddly, but the dropdowns work