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

Online Sources: Minnesota

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 - currently only available onsite at the Gale Family Library
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.

Online Sources: National and International

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.

Useful Terms

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!

Online Primary Sources Links

Collections Online
Search for 3/D objects, photographs, art, maps, and more from the MNHS Collections.
Electronic Library of MN
MN residents can search online magazine, journal, newspaper, and encyclopedia articles and eBooks.
American Memory
A gateway for searching over 9 million items from the Library of Congress's collection of American History materials.
Docs Teach
An online resource with 2000+ primary source documents from the National Archives that can be used by teachers and learners.
Chronicling America
Access digital historic newspapers from MN and other states through this project by the Library of Congress.
Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub
A searchable website of Minnesota newspapers. Contains geographically and culturally diverse papers from 1856 to 1924.
Minnesota Reflections
A searchable collection of images, maps and digitized documents from more than 150 of Minnesota's cultural heritage organizations.