Primary sources are records created at the time of an event or experience, or as told by people who were present at the event, historical works of literature or others works such as historical artifacts, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, government documents. Get Tips for Finding Primary Sources.
COM Library has some great collections of primary sources. Primary sources are records created at the time of an event or experience, or as told by people who were present at the event. Must be on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.
Want more on finding primary sources? Try Tips for Finding Primary Sources or Tips for Finding Primary Sources Open Access.
Go to A-Z Databases: Books & eBooks to search for more eBooks. Must be on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.
Want more on finding books or eBooks? Try our How to Use Books & eBooks guides.
Civil and Political Rights
Introduction to Civil and Political Rights...295
Dred Scott v. Sanford...296
Women's Disabilities Removal Bill...300
Plessy v. Ferguson...304
Lynch Law in America...308
The Birth of a Nation...311
The Causes of the Chicago Race Riot...314
The Social Equality of Whites and Blacks...319
American Women Enfranchised...322
Man Buying Tickets at Black Entrance to Theater...325
Executive Order 9981...328
Rosa Parks Is Fingerprinted by Police...330
Newton Girl Jailed in Mississippi with Eight Freedom Fighters...333
"I Have a Dream"...336
Civil Rights Act of 1964...339
Voting Rights Act of 1965...343
City of Memphis v. Martin Luther King, Jr...345
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid...348
Mourners Surround the Coffin of Black Leader Steve Biko...353
Nelson Mandela's Second Court Statement...355
Tiananmen Square Protest...360
Secretary of State's Morning Summary for June 5 and 6, 1989...362
Tiananmen Square Declaration of Human Rights...365
Appeal for Action to Stop Repression and Trials in South Africa...367
Afghan Women Approach a Voting Station...371
Defining Documents in American History : The Great Migration
Also known as the Great Northward Migration and the Black Migration, this movement of more than six million African Americans from American's rural southern regions to its urban northern regions occurred over more than 50 years, from 1916 to 1970. Some historians separate this great move into two periods - the first from 1916 to 1940, during which 1.6 million people moved from the rural south to the industrial north, and the second following the Great Depression, from 1940 to 1970, which saw more than 5 million people, many with urban skills, move north and west. Two main causes for this massive migration were poor economic conditions and racial segregation and discrimination in Southern states when Jim Crow laws were upheld. The Great Migration was historic for its sheer number, called ""the largest and most rapid internal movements in history."" It also brought historic change to the cities the migrants moved to, where African Americans established influential communities of their own at a time when these cities were already exerting cultural, social, political, and economic influence in the country.
Defining Documents in American History : The Underground Railroad
Offers in-depth analysis of seventy-six documents, including biographies, book excerpts, court cases, editorials, essays, laws, maps, memoirs, novels, a questionnaire, pamphlets, public postings, sermons, songs, speeches, a stamp series, and more. These selections help define events surrounding the Underground Railroad, which operated in the United States from approximately 1800-1865, helping enslaved people escape to freedom through a network of routes and safe houses.
Defining Moments : The Underground Railroad
Provides users with a detailed and authoritative overview of the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and secret routes used by thousands of enslaved African Americans in the 1800s to escape to free states. Includes biographies of principal figures involved in these efforts, primary source documents, and more.
Defining Moments in American History : Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball
Defining Moments: Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball provides a comprehensive account of Robinsons life and career, with a detailed and authoritative overview of the events surrounding the shattering of Major League Baseballs longstanding color barrier.
Defining Moments in American History : Plessy v. Ferguson
Provides a detailed account of the legal drama that established the "separate but equal" doctrine. Details the postwar Reconstruction era; the legal issues involved in Plessy v. Ferguson; the spread of discriminatory Jim Crow laws; the effects of segregation on African Americans; and the efforts to overturn Plessy.
Defining Moments in American History : The Great Migration North, 1910-1970
Provides a detailed account of the Great Migration. Explores the history of African Americans, the events leading up to their northern movement, and its lasting influence on society.
Defining Moments in American History : The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Provides a detailed account of the events that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Explores both the racial discrimination and violence that pervaded the South and the civil rights protests that changed American voting rights. Includes a narrative overview, biographical profiles, primary source documents, and other helpful features.
Freedom's Journey : African American Voices of the Civil War
The men and women represented in this book had the extraordinary opportunity of witnessing the end of a 200-year struggle for freedom: the Civil War. Gathered here are the stirring testimonies of many African Americans including slaves who endured their last years of servitude before escaping from their masters, soldiers who fought for the freedom of their brethren and for equal rights, and reporters who covered the defeat of their oppressors. These African American voices include the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass on the meaning of the war; Martin R. Delany on his meeting with Lincoln to gain permission to raise an army of African Americans; Susie King Taylor on her life as laundress and nurse to a Union regiment in the deep South; Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress, on Abraham Lincoln’s journey to Richmond after its fall; Elijah P. Marrs on rising from slave to Union sergeant while fighting for his freedom in Kentucky; and letters from black soldiers to black newspapers. Each testimony is presented unabridged, allowing the full flavor of these voices to be heard, and each is supplemented with introductions and notes that provide rich context.
Memories of the Enslaved : Voices from the Slave Narratives
This book offers a first-person perspective on the institution of slavery in America, providing powerful, engaging interviews from the WPA slave narrative collection that enable readers to gain a true sense of the experience of enslavement. * Provides a historical overview of the scholarship on slavery via first-person perspectives into the institution of slavery * Supplies an introductory essay for each theme as well as brief contextual explanations for each excerpt with the text of the oral narrative * Supplies primary source documents in the form of interviews with actual slaves from the WPA slave narratives that allow readers to better understand the experiences of those who lived in slavery * Presents a history of the slave narratives project under the New Deal * Gives eye-opening insights into the plight of women within the institution of slavery
Milestone Documents in African American History
This set covers 125 iconic primary documents from the 1600s to the present. Each entry offers the full text of the document as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. Among the sources included in the set are important legislative documents such as the Reconstruction era amendments; critical Supreme Court decisions; and iconic speeches and writings by leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.
Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black American Pioneers
Provides a comprehensive exploration of the obstacles black men and women, both historic and contemporary, have faced and overcome to succeed in professional positions. The set covers well-known figures, but is also an invaluable source of information on lesser-known individuals whose accomplishments are no less admirable.
Voices of the African American Experience
From early accounts of free blacks in the Colonies to slave narratives recorded by Works Progress Administration employees in the 1930s to a recent speech by Senator Barack Obama, this collection offers a treasure trove of carefully selected primary documents from and concerning African Americans. It is among the largest and widest-ranging collection of documents on the entire African American experience in print. Voices of the African American Experience provides access to fresh voices from history until today in more than 130 documents. Examples include speeches, articles, mission statements, ephemera, testimony, letters, sermons, prayers, spirituals/songs, slave narratives, memoirs, essays, interviews, and more. Key official documents and important communications from noted African Americans are of course present, while making the words of ordinary African Americans from the past easily accessible to the general public. Each document is introduced and contextualized, making this set especially valuable and helpful in student research.
With a Black Platoon in Combat : A Year in Korea
The first year of the Korean Conflict was a dark and humiliating period for many of the troops who fought there. Against a backdrop of U.S. political indecision and reduced military capability, American soldiers fought a dedicated and numerically strong enemy force that was determined to overrun South Korea. One of these units, the segregated 24th Infantry Regiment, was made up of black soldiers commanded for the most part by white officers. Lyle Rishell, an infantry platoon leader, led a black platoon of Able Company in that regiment. This book tells the dramatic, often frustrating, sometimes heroic story of that platoon in that first, fateful year of war.
Witness for Freedom : African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation
Encompassing a broad range of African American voices, from Frederick Douglass to anonymous fugitive slaves, this collection collects eighty-nine exceptional documents that represent the best of the five-volume Black Abolitionist Papers. In these compelling texts African Americans tell their own stories of the struggle to end slavery and claim their rights as American citizens, of the battle against colonization and the "back to Africa" movement, and of their troubled relationship with the federal government.
Working Americans, 1898-2016 : African Americans
Each volume in the widely-successful Working Americans series focuses on a particular type of American and illustrates what life was like for that group from the 1800s to the present time. The volumes are arranged into decade-long chapters, each introducing to the reader three individuals or families. Individual profiles examine life at home, life at work, life in the community, family finances and budget, cost of living and amusements. To further the reader's understanding of the time period, profiles are supplemented with national current events, economic profiles, an historical snapshot, news profiles, local news articles and illustrations derived from popular printed materials. Profiles cover a wide range of ethnic groups and span the entire country, providing a thorough examination of all types of Americans in that particular group. From a wealth of government surveys, social worker histories, economic data, family diaries and letters, newspaper and magazine features, these unique volumes assemble a rema
Go to OneSearch to search for more print books.
Want more on finding print books? Try our How to Use OneSearch guide.
The Audacity of Hope : Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchoered itself in listeners' minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in US history, the people have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senetor Obama called the audacity of hope.' In this book Obama calls for a different brand of politics - a politics free from the fear of losing, raising money and the media. A politics for the future.'
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr
Celebrated Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson is the director and editor of the Martin Luther King Papers Project; with thousands of King's essays, notes, letters, speeches, and sermons at his disposal, Carson has organized King's writings into a posthumous autobiography.
Brown v. Board of Education : A Brief History With Documents
This book addresses the origins, development, meanings, and consequences of the 1954 Supreme Court decision to end Jim Crow segregation. Using legal documents to frame the debates surrounding the case, Waldo Martin presents Brown v. Board of Education as an event, a symbol, and a key marker in the black liberation struggle.
Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
The Eyes on the Prize : Civil Rights Reader - Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts From the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990
The most comprehensive anthology of primary sources available, spanning the entire history of the American civil rights movement. A record of one of the greatest and most turbulent movements of this century, The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader is essential for anyone interested in learning how far the American civil rights movements has come and how far it has to go. Included are the Supreme Court's Brown vs Board of Education decision in its entirety; speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., and his famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"; an interview with Rosa Parks; selections from Malcolm X Speaks; Black Panther Bobby Seale's Seize the Time; Ralph Abernathy's controversial And the Walls Came Tumbling Down; a piece by Herman Badillo on the infamous Attica prison uprising; addresses by Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandel, and much more. "An important volume for students and professionals who wish to grasp the basic nature of the civil rights movement and how it changed America in fundamental ways." --Aldon Morris, Northwestern University
Milestone Documents in African American History : Exploring the Essential Primary Sources
This set covers 125 iconic primary documents from the 1600s to the present. Each entry offers the full text of the document as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. Among the sources included in the set
My Soul Looks Back in Wonder : Voices of the Civil Rights Experience
"More than 30 people tell personal stories about the nonviolent struggle for civil rights, then and now, not only the leaders but also ordinary citizens who bear witness to transforming moments when they suddenly found the courage to try to change things. David Dinkins, New York City's first black mayor, served with the U.S. Marines in World War II; at home, he had to use the back of the bus. A white woman remembers herself as a child after the Birmingham murders.
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
More than two decades since his death, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas--his call for racial equality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, and his insistence on the power of nonviolent struggle to bring about a major transformation of American society--are as vital and timely as ever.
Remembering Jim Crow : African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South
Remembering Jim Crow, the groundbreaking sequel to Remembering Slavery, is an extraordinary opportunity to read and hear the voices of black southerners who were firsthand witnesses to one of the most heartbreaking and troubling chapters in America's history. 50 photos.
Twelve Years a Slave
Aside from its vivid depiction of the detention, transportation, and sale of slaves, Twelve Years a Slave is admired for its classic accounts of cotton and sugar production, its uncannily precise recall of people, times, and places, and the compelling details that re-create the daily routine of slaves in the Gulf South
Here are more primary sources. Must be on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.
Check Open Access for primary sources that anyone can access.
COM Library has full image periodical archives from some great sources. The top archives that have coverage for this era are linked below.
The Invasion (D-Day),1944
© 2026 COM Library
1200 Amburn Road, Texas City, Texas 77591
409-933-8448 . FAX 409-933-8030
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
