Research Guides: HIS 400 S01: How to Do History Like a Marxist [Fall 2025]: Finding primary sources

The source-driven junior paper

Often, the best work arises from close engagement with a primary source. As you read, historical questions or problems will begin to take shape for you. The hard part is to find a primary source that addresses the broad general area of interest. Here are some strategies for finding primary sources:

Check the footnotes, endnotes and bibliography of a good academic book on your topic.
Use the word sources as a keyword when searching the Catalog.
Consult the subject guides at http://libguides.princeton.edu
Search the finding aids for collections in Special Collections and Mudd Manuscript Library.

The Big Four Online Primary Source Providers

Adam Matthew, Gale, Proquest, and Readex provide a large portion of our online primary source materials. Each company has created a consolidated search engine which allows you to search all of the materials they provide. It is important to note that the majority of primary sources published online are focused on the the United States and United Kingdom.

AM explorer (Adam Matthew)

Gale Primary Sources (Gale)

Proquest History (Proquest)

Readex AllSearch (Readex)

Additional Historical Newspapers

American Indian Newspapers
Collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada.

Marxists Internet Archive
Marxists.org is the main multilingual repository for international papers starting in the 1840s.

Leftist Newspapers and Periodicals
Previously called "Left of Liberalism: Marxist Socialist Newspapers, 1900-2015" Newspapers published by communist, socialist, and Marxist organizations in the English-speaking world, addressing issues such as labor conditions, the working class, McCarthyism, labor unions, the and civil rights.
World Newspaper Archive
Provides full-text access to historical newspapers in Africa, South Asia and Latin America.
Communist Historical Newspaper Collection (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
Collection of Communist American and British papers: The Daily Worker (1936-1958); The Ohio Socialist (1917-1919); People's Daily World (1986-1990); People's Weekly World (1990-2013); Sunday Worker (1936-1958); The Toiler (1919-1922); The Worker (1922-1924); New York; and The Worker (1958-1968); London.
RetroNews
More than 400 French press titles published from 1631-1945.

Library collections spotlight: primary source material

African History and Culture
A collaborative project to preserve and disseminate African cultural materials. Materials come from archives and libraries from across Africa.
American Indian Histories and Cultures
Wide variety of materials relating to American Indian history in the United States, Canada and Mexico, from the Newberry Library's Edward E. Ayer Collection. Covers pre-contact through the mid-20th century.
Archives Unbound
Digital collections of historical material on many topics. Includes manuscripts, printed books and periodicals, and government documents. The material comes from the U.S. National Archives, the U.K. National Archives, and many other libraries and archives.
British Online Archives
Provides online access to several collections on the history of the Atlantic world, from British archives.
Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories
Discover political ephemera from across the world covering twentieth century political parties, pressure groups, and trade union movements, created for, about and by local actors.
Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera
Steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis.
History Vault
Digital archive of U.S. history primary sources. Includes government documents, personal papers and organizational records.
Policy Commons: Global Think Tanks
Policy Commons preserves and provides access to more than 30 million pages of curated policy reports and briefs, analyses, working papers, books, case studies, tables, charts, media, and statistical publications created by 25,000 policy organizations (NGOs, IGOs, foundations, think tanks, government agencies, etc.) from around the world. Platform provides multiple filters and advanced searching operators.
Proquest Congressional
Indexes publications of the U.S. Congress such as hearings 1824+ (including previously unpublished hearings: Senate 1824-1992 and House 1833-1982), committee reports, documents and prints. Material is available in microfiche and/or electronic. Essential tool for doing legislative history research. Includes Congressional Research Reports from 1916+, Bills & Laws 1789+, U.S. Serial Set from 1789+, Annals of Congress from 1789-1824, Register of Debates from 1824-1837, Congressional Globe from 1833-1873, and Congressional Record from 1873+. Also includes Executive Branch Documents 1789-1948 and Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations 1789+.
Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propoganda
This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba.
South Asian History and Culture
South Asian History and Culture indexes hundreds of thousands of documents from over 500 collections and links to the original sites. The collection includes reports, journals, videos, audio files, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, and other primary-source materials to support studies in history, gender studies, religion, language, political science, and South Asia—with local-language interfaces and mobile access.

Additional resources with digital collections

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Free digital access to more than 11 million items from U.S. libraries, archives, and museums

HathiTrust
Digital repository of materials from member libraries.

From the Public Collections or My Collections tabs, login using your Princeton ID to see public PDFs.

Internet Archive
Access to to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Library of Congress
Includes links to print and digital primary and secondary source material regarding a variety of topics related to the global Depression era.
National Archives and Records Administration (U.S.)
Europeana Collections
Multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.

Digital South Asia Library
Digital materials for reference and research on South Asia: dictionaries, texts, images, maps, statistics.

LAOAP: Latin American Open Archives Portal
LAOAP provides access to social sciences grey literature produced in Latin America. The portal provides access to working documents, pre-prints, research papers, statistical documents, and other difficult-to-access materials from the "deep Web."

Policy Commons: Global Think Tanks
Policy Commons preserves and provides access to more than 30 million pages of curated policy reports and briefs, analyses, working papers, books, case studies, tables, charts, media, and statistical publications created by 25,000 policy organizations (NGOs, IGOs, foundations, think tanks, government agencies, etc.) from around the world. Platform provides multiple filters and advanced searching operators.
Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC)
The Latin American Network Center (LANIC), from the University of Texas at Austin provides web access to information to, from, or on Latin America.
East View Universal Databases
Full-text indexing of contemporary journalism and humanities and social science academic periodicals for Russia and parts of the near abroad. Retrospective coverage varies by individual title, with some going back to the 1980s and most to the 1990s. Full-page images are available for approximately 25 Moscow newspapers. Near-comprehensive full-page image archives for a number of periodicals, including newspapers and illustrated magazines and journals, many dating to the early years of the twentieth century. Collections of print ephemera related to elections and other high-impact events. Provides access in Russian or English. Searches submitted in English will yield results in English. Searches in Russian may be conducted in Cyrillic or in Roman script following the Library of Congress Romanization Table for Russian. 1980+

Data

ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research)
The ICPSR has one of the largest collections of data in the world. It focuses mainly on social sciences data.

Roper iPoll Survey Database
Largest collection of public opinion poll data, 1935-present. Contains more than 825,000 searchable questions and over 25,000 datasets from both U.S. and international polling organizations. Topics include social issues, politics, pop culture, international affairs, science, the environment, and much more. When available, results charts, demographic crosstabs, time-series trends, and full datasets are provided for immediate download. Registration is required but free using your Princeton email. Many of iPoll's international surveys are not searchable at the question level, but downloadable as full datasets. See also Roper's Featured Projects, including their Health Poll Database and Researching Black American opinion.

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
The NBER Public Use Data Archive is an eclectic mix of public-use economic, demographic, and enterprise data obtained over the years to satisfy the specific requests of NBER-affiliated researchers for particular projects.
UK Data Archive (UKDA)
The UK's largest aggregator of research data in the social sciences. A number of the datasets are relevant to topics in history.

UNData (formerly UN Common Database of Statistics)
The United Nations Statistical Office provides this smooth interface to some key statistics from the broad range of statistical offices found throughout the UN system. Coverage varies by measure, but can go back to 1950.

Latin American Databank
The Latin American Databank provides a portal for Latin American datasets acquired, processed and archived by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. This valuable collection includes data from public opinion surveys conducted by the survey research community in Latin America and the Caribbean.

World Development Indicators

Includes annual economic, social, educational, environmental and health data from many of the World Bank's major statistical publications. 1960+
Latinobarometro
Summary level public opinion data for Latin America. 1995-1998, 2000-2013, 2015-2018, 2020, 2023.

A href="https://dss2.princeton.edu/data/3031/">Microdata is also available through 2023 in Stata format. 2013+ is also in R format. Note: A survey was not conducted in 1999, 2014, 2019, 2021, or 2022.
International Historical Statistics
Collection of statistical data from around the world, covering a wide range of socio-economic topics. Includes data collected between 1750-2010. Data tables can be downloaded as ePDFs and/or Excel files. Also know as the B.R. Mitchell books.
Historical Statistics of the United States Millennial Edition
Statistical series on subjects ranging from population and land area to production figures for crops and manufactured products. Detailed documentation provides brief histories of the statistical series and source materials.

Primary source: world history

Africa: primary sources
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Feb 12, 2025 1027 views this year
Canadian history
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Aug 27, 2020 71 views this year
Modern Europe
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated May 30, 2025 190 views this year
Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Sep 2, 2025 125 views this year
South & East Asia: primary sources
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated May 30, 2025 1180 views this year
Latin America, Spain and Portugal: Guide to Library Resources at Princeton
by Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez Last Updated Sep 4, 2025 1308 views this year

Middle East: primary sources
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Dec 19, 2023 1042 views this year

Primary sources: British history

British Parliamentary Papers
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Dec 19, 2023 199 views this year
Finding British government documents at Princeton
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Jan 8, 2025 2069 views this year
Finding historical world newspapers at Princeton
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Jul 15, 2025 988 views this year
Modern Britain
by Alain St. Pierre Last Updated Jul 16, 2024 194 views this year

Primary sources: American history

U.S. economic, business and labor history
by Steven Knowlton Last Updated Jun 3, 2025 183 views this year
Twentieth-century U.S. society and politics
by Steven Knowlton Last Updated Jul 28, 2025 1045 views this year
U.S. presidential papers
by Steven Knowlton Last Updated Jun 4, 2025 443 views this year
Twentieth-century U.S. foreign affairs
by Steven Knowlton Last Updated Jun 3, 2025 379 views this year
Finding historical U.S. newspapers at Princeton
by Steven Knowlton Last Updated Aug 4, 2025 1747 views this year

Microforms Service

If microfilm, microfiche, or other microfomat materials (commonly called "microforms") are unfamiliar, learn more about the Microforms Service in Firestone Library. Microforms staff are available for assistance with material retrieval and equipment use during the service's hours of operation.