Research Guides: History Day: Web Resources

Useful Websites

Avalon Project - Yale
Documents in law, history, and diplomacy spanning thousands of years.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Provides searching and viewing of American newspapers from 1880-1922. Also provides information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection
Includes more than 500,000 digitized pages, representing 163 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923.
Colorado Histories - Colorado Virtual Library
A new resource with biographies of famous Coloradans. Check regularly for updated resources and information.
Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America is an effort of many libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives from across the United States to develop a search environment to identify digitized materials across thousands of individual libraries. Over 35 million different text resources, images, video, and sound files are in these collections, all provided Open Access for public use.
Europeana
Europeana.eu links you to 4 million digital items. Including: Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects; Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers; Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tap
History Colorado
History Colorado Project
Internet African History Sourcebook
Links to potential primary sources on the web
Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
Library of Congress - Digital Collections
The Library of Congress is a truly great research library and has digitized many resources that could be useful for students. The American Memory collections provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Making of America
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction (1850 - 1877).
New York Times Learning Network
Links to summaries of events as well as original New York Times articles.
Our Documents
Contains a list of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.
Sangre De Cristo National Heritage Area
Site for the Sangre De Cristo National Heritage Area organization.

Google search strategies

There are so many places to look for primary sources online beyond the links above.

Try a Google search for your topic and one of the following types of primary sources:

archival resources
archives
atlases
bibliography
biography
broadsides
case studies
charts, diagrams
concordances
correspondence
diaries
dictionaries
encyclopedias
handbooks, manuals, etc.
illustrations
indexes
manuscripts—catalogs
maps
newspapers
periodicals
personal narratives
photograph collections
pictorial works
portraits
sermons
sources
speeches in Congress
speeches, addresses, etc.
statistics

Alternatively, just try a search for your topic with the phrase "primary sources".

Evaluating primary sources on the web

Is the primary source you're looking at online real? Is it legitimate? Take a moment to find out about the author or owner of the website you're looking at.

Clues about a website in the URL/domain name:

.edu = educational institution

.gov = US government site

.org = organization or association

.com = commercial site

.museum = museum

.net = personal or other site

Clues about a website based on the author/owner:

Who is the author/owner? Try the about link for the site to see who is putting the information on the internet and why. If the author/owner is a museum, archive, library, university or other educational organization or a governmental entity, this a is a good sign for the validity of the site.

History Day: Web Resources

Useful Websites

Google search strategies

Evaluating primary sources on the web

Search Google Books