Welcome to U.S. History 1864-Present! The purpose of this guide is to gather together, in one place, potential source points for you to use in your papers and projects for this class. This guide will also help you sort out the different types of sources; not all sources are always suitable for every assignment, so it's good to know when to use a primary source or a peer-review article, and how books fit into this. This guide in particular will focus on primary sources--more on that below--but will also cover some basic research and writing information.
PLEASE NOTE that primary sources often contain stereotypes and offensive viewpoints that reflect what many people of that time thought, but do not reflect those of your professor or the librarians. They are included to provide insights into the way people thought and the reasons behind historical events and are not intended to offend--unfortunately, many of the events that shaped America were done in reaction to ignorance, fear, and hate, and many primary sources will reflect that. Please note that sources from wars, conflicts, epidemics, and other events that led to injury or death may include text descriptions, sounds, and images (either as motion pictures or as still photography or illustrations) that show violence or death.
This guide can be used to help you to understand and to locate sources. Descriptions of sources can be found under the Source Types tab, while each topic will have lists of likely places to find sources specific to that topic. To browse for ideas, you might want to explore the tab General Source Collections, which will provide links to library databases and open source digital collections; these collections will provide sources on multiple topics, rather than ones specific to those under the tabs. Some of the collections under the specific topics tabs may be smaller collections found within a larger one; for instance, the Library of Congress has a huge collection of primary sources and the link to its digital collections is under the General Source Collections tab, but its collection "Americans React to The Great Depression" will have a link under The Great Depression tab. Some collections may be in multiple topic tabs, such as The Great Depression and the New Deal, since there will be overlap in subject content.
While this guide provides links to collections of sources, it is up to you as a student to determine the value of each individual source in the collection and whether it will be of use to you for your project or paper. The collections may have multiple source formats, including documents, scanned diary entries or letters, newspaper clippings, political cartoons, photographs, and some may even contain audio or video recordings. Ultimately, the decision of what to use is yours and you may want to consider using a variety of source types.
Finally, the guide will provide some basic information on searching databases, the language of writing papers, and some basic MLA direction.