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 access on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.
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Emancipating Lincoln : The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory
Emancipating Lincoln seeks a new approach to the Emancipation Proclamation, a foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These seventeen hundred words are Lincoln's most important piece of writing, responsible both for his being hailed as the Great Emancipator and for his being pilloried by those who consider his once-radical effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted. Harold Holzer, an award-winning Lincoln scholar, invites us to examine the impact of Lincoln's momentous announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time. Using neglected original sources, Holzer uncovers Lincoln's very modern manipulation of the media-from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation-in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his "greatest act" in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration across the past century and a half, as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln's endeavor. Holzer shows the faults in applying our own standards to Lincoln's efforts, but also demonstrates how Lincoln's obfuscations made it nearly impossible to discern his true motives. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, this concise volume is a vivid depiction of the painfully slow march of all Americans-white and black, leaders and constituents-toward freedom.
Voices of Emancipation
Voices of Emancipation seeks to recover the lives and words of former slaves in vivid detail, mining the case files of the U.S. Pension Bureau, which administered a huge pension system for Union veterans and their survivors in the decades following the Civil War. The files contain an invaluable, first-hand perspective of slavery, emancipation, black military service, and freedom. Moreover, as Pension Bureau examiners began interviewing black Union veterans and their families shortly after the Civil War, the files are arguably among the earliest sources of ex-slaves reflecting on their lives, occurring decades before better-known WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s took place. Voices of Emancipation explores the words of former slaves topically, beginning with recollections of slavery, moving on to experiences of military service in the Civil War, the transition to freedom, and finally to reflections on marriage and family before and after emancipation. With an introduction that places the pension files in context and presents the themes of the book, and historical commentary interwoven throughout the excerpts of the interviews themselves, Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer effectively introduce the files and the treasures they contain to students and general readers, but also provide specialists with an indispensable research tool.
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.
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American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation
For the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, here is a collection of writings that charts our nation's long, heroic confrontation with its most poisonous evil. It's an inspiring moral and political struggle whose evolution parallels the story of America itself. T
The Slave Narratives of Texas
Over 100 former slaves describe their slave life in Texas. Edited from oral interviews of the 1930s. Originally published in 1974.
Here are more primary sources. Must access on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.
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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
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