History Day Research @ the MNHS Library: Step 2: Online Primary Sources

Newspapers:

• Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub:  Useful for Minnesota newspapers published before 1922
• ELM: Electronic Library for Minnesota: Access to research databases and other sources, including several newspapers.  
• Historic Minneapolis Tribune: Useful for local, national, and international news articles published between 1867 and 2001, as well as opinion pieces and editorials.  Only accessible in the Library.  

Photographs:

• Collections Online: Lots of images and photos of artifacts from our collections
• Minnesota Reflections: Images and documents relating to Minnesota’s history, collected from over 150 MN cultural heritage organizations
• Images as Primary Sources: Strengths/weaknesses of photos as evidence, reading photos, and citing photos

Oral Histories:

• Voices of Minnesota: 1300 interviews from the Society's Oral History collection, including streaming audio & video and written transcripts accessible online in digital formats.

• American Memory Project (Library of Congress): A source for primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.
  
  
• Chronicling America (Library of Congress): A digital collection of historic American newspapers from 23 states, dating from 1860-1922.  A number of Minnesota newspapers are included.   
  
  
• DocsTeach documents (National Archives): Documents from 1754 to the present, sorted by era and document type.  
  
  
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project (Fordham University): Historical texts from around the world broken down by timeframe and region.  Sources range from Ancient Greek texts to modern American history.  

Primary Source - Materials from the time of the person or event being researched.  (Letters, diaries artifacts, photographs, and other types of first-hand accounts and records, as well as reminiscences and oral histories. Stories from newspapers of the time may also be primary sources.)

Secondary Source - Materials that were created at a later time.  They analyze and interpret primary sources; footnotes or bibliographies can lead to primary sources.

Still confused about Primary vs. Secondary Sources?  Check out our short video tutorial!

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