History
History Librarian
Phone: 985-448-4621
Email: clifton.theriot@nicholls.edu
What are Primary Resources?
Introduction to Primary Sources
Primary sources provide firsthand evidence of historical events. They are generally unpublished materials such as manuscripts, photographs, maps, artifacts, audio and video recordings, oral histories, postcards, and posters. In some instances, published materials can also be viewed as primary sources for the period in which they were written. In contrast, secondary sources, such as textbooks, synthesize and interpret primary sources.
From the UCLA Institute on Primary Resources
Primary Resources at Nicholls State University
The Ellender Archives holds over two hundred collections of primary source material relating to University and regional history. Check out the Archives webpage to learn more.
Ferry across Bayou Lafourche at Labadieville, late 19th century. Joe Boudreaux (front) and Hypolite Truxelleau (ferry man) pulling ferry across bayou. Photograph #443 from the William Littlejohn Martin Collection.
Primary Resources on the Web
- Digital Public Library of AmericaDigitized primary sources from libraries, archives, and museums.
- Discovering American Women's History OnlineThis database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Ancestral Pueblo pottery to interviews with women engineers from the 1970s.
- EuropeanaExplore millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings, they’re all here.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsThe Library of Congress has made digitized versions of collection materials available online since 1994, concentrating on its most rare collections and those unavailable anywhere else. The following services are your gateway to a growing treasury of digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, and books, as well as "born digital" materials such as Web sites.
- Louisiana Digital LibraryThe Louisiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of Louisiana institutions that provides over 144,000 digital materials. Its purpose is to make unique historical treasures from the Louisiana institution's archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories in the state electronically accessible to Louisiana residents and to students, researchers, and the general public in other states and countries. The Louisiana Digital Library contains photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, oral histories, and more that document history and culture.
- Louisiana State Museum Historic Map DatabaseThe Louisiana State Museum’s cartographic holdings, comprised of original works as well as photostat, photographic and facsimile reproductions, are dated 1525 to the present. The museum’s collection contains maps related to the exploration and settlement of Louisiana during the colonial period as well as maps delineating Louisiana and her cities after the Louisiana Purchase, from 1803 to the present time.
- Louisiana Digital Media ArchiveHome of the Louisiana Public Broadcasting Digital Collection and the Louisiana State Archives Multimedia Collection. The Archive contains over 1,000 hours of media from the past fifty years, including interviews with Louisiana civil rights pioneers, notable political figures, war heroes, artists and literary icons.
- Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization ProjectThe French Superior Council and Spanish Judicial records have long been essential to the study of American colonial history for the quantity, quality, depth, and diversity of the documentation they contain. They have provided generations of historians, students, sociologists and genealogists with a rich source of data on New Orleans’s earliest days, the Louisiana territory, the slave trade, and Native American relations, the Atlantic World, and Canada and the Caribbean, among other topics.