Use Wikipedia, Spark Notes, etc. for inspiration, but not as sources for your paper. For Wikipedia in particular, scan the article's cited sources at the bottom of the page for sources relevant to your project.
Do a site search.
Use Google Scholar.
The Freedom of Information Act allows citizens to petition the U.S. government to declassify and release formerly classified material after a review process. This database contains all such released material.
Contains nearly one million digitized documents relating to the professional and personal life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Making of America (MOA) represents a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and make accessible through digital technology a significant number of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure.
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln represented the first major scholarly effort to collect and publish the complete writings of Abraham Lincoln, and the edition has remained an invaluable resource to Lincoln scholars.
The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents. The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material.
Mission: American Memory 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. It is a digital record of American history and creativity.
Welcome to Chronicling America, enhancing access to America's historic newspapers. This site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) currently includes more than 500,000 digitized pages, representing 163 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. Due to copyright restrictions, CHNC does not generally include newspapers published after 1923.
The Library of American Civilization (LAC) is a collection of 4,500 titles focused on all aspects of American life and literature from their beginnings to the outbreak of World War I. It includes books, pamphlets, periodicals and documents, many of which are out of print.
In January 2010, the website "ipl2: information you can trust" was launched, merging the collections of resources from the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians' Internet Index (LII) websites. The site is hosted by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology, and a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science are involved in developing and maintaining the ipl2.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. We do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.
Here are some factors to consider when determining whether a website contains reliable information:
Authority
Who is responsible for the webpage? What authority or expertise does the author have?
Currency
When was the page created? When was the page last updated?
Motive
What are the goals and objectives of the page? Is the page trying to get you to buy something?
Research
Are there links to other resources? If so, are those resources reliable?
Design
Is the webpage well organized and easy to navigate? Does the page include help or search sections?
