For historical research, the phrase "primary sources" refers to items that were created at the time an event occurred usually by direct observers or participants. Primary sources are not limited to traditional text-based documents such as newspaper articles and journal entries; photographs, posters, audio recordings, video clips, books, and more can all serve as primary sources if they are used as evidence of the time in which they were created. It's not about the source type...it's about how the source is used for your research.
The Gale Primary Sources cross-search interface provides access to millions of pages of content spanning many centuries and geographic regions. Users can explore a wide range of content including monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps, and more.
Some relevant collections in this database include:
American Historical Periodicals
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Indigenous Peoples of North America
The Making of the Modern World
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926
"Part of a nation's history lies in what people eat. Artifacts at the Museum document the history of food in the United States from farm machinery to diet fads."
"Since 1950, new technologies and cultural changes
have transformed what and how we eat.... This website is based on an exhibition that opened at the National Museum of American History in November 2012."
The Digital Public Library of America includes "highlights of collections from libraries, archives and museums across the United States, organized into easy-to-navigate topics." Subtopics for the food collection include Farm and Factory, Cooking at Home, Markets, Dining Out, Food in Wartime, and Food and Social Justice.
This collection of food and cooking related materials from the State Archives of North Carolina includes a variety of resources including advertisements, cookbooks, recipes, trademarks, books, and more.
"Collection includes radio interviews with Julia Child and Simone Beck, public speaking engagements, musical performances in Child's honor, and Public Service Announcements."
Posters in this collection were used during World War I by countries on both sides of the conflict to disseminate information, "garner support, urge action, and boost morale." This subset of posters focuses on issues related to the food supply and rationing efforts.
"The Waxman Collection of Food and Culinary Trade Cards comprises approximately 6,500 printed advertising cards dating from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.... Among its subjects are agriculture, food processing and food distribution, cookery in both home and restaurants, kitchen equipment, tableware, views on food and health, and many related sectors of domestic life."
The Advertising Archives was established in 1990 by Larry and Suzanne Viner. While primarily focused on the UK, the site also includes a collection of ads from Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the USA from as early as the 1870s to present.
Vintage Ad Browser was launches in 2010 by Philipp Lenssen. The site is organized by category (e.g. food, alcohol, "got milk") and includes vintage ads from around the world from as early as 1840-present.
"Feeding America is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries' collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions."
"UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is comprised of more than 2,000 cookbooks, from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940-2000. In addition to broad general coverage, the collection includes concentrations in the areas of regional cooking, healthy and vegetarian recipes, corporate advertising cookbooks, and manuscript recipe books. A selection of the materials from this collection have been digitized and are available online, including manuscript cookbooks from the collection. These handwritten recipe books provide an intimate view of domestic life and Mexican culinary culture. Also available online is the extremely rare 1828 cookbook, Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano, once owned by Diana Kennedy."
"The digitized historical cookbooks in this collection date from the 1700s to the 1900s. Mostly American and British, they contain not only recipes, but also elegant engravings of table settings and cooking paraphernalia, home remedies and cure-all tonics, instructions on managing servants, and more. In short, these gastronomical treasures reveal much about the societies and economic times that created them."
"Collection spans the years 1851-2005 and includes hang tags, inserts, recipe cards and guides, cookbooks, operating instructions, owner's manuals and other promotional materials addressed to cooking and kitchen arts. Materials in the collection were used to educate consumers and promote the use of a variety of foods (meat; fish and poultry; dairy; soups; fruits and vegetables; beverages); condiments and spices (sauces, bouillon and broths, chocolate and cocoa, baking soda and baking powder); canning jars; small appliances (cookware, blenders, mixers, microwave ovens); and large appliances (stoves and refrigerators)."
Selections from two notable collections compiled by Louis Szathmary, "a Hungarian-born chef, restaurateur, and food writer." The Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks collection contains "handwritten cookbooks, circa 1600s-1960s, documenting culinary history in America and Europe and how tastes have changed over the years"; The Szathmary Recipe Pamphlets collection "includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations (the majority are listed in an index)."
Search the digitized collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library including over 10,000 digitized cookbooks, receipt books, and recipe collections from the 17th and 18th centuries.
"The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics."
"This collection includes a sampling of menus drawn from the world-renowned CIA Menu Collection, a collection of nearly 40,000 historical menus from over sixty individual collections." Includes menus from CIA Restaurant and Event Menus, Smiley Family Menu Collection, New York Central Railroad Menus
Ship Menus, and Historical Menus.
"With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts." Not only can you search this robust collection, you can also participate in the project by helping to transcribe recipes for future researchers.
HathiTrust provides full-text access to millions of public domain titles found in library collections around the world, many of which serve as primary accounts of events and topics throughout history. This particular collection of sources is focused on cooking, gastronomy, food production, etc.
"The Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime collection presents books and government publications documenting the national effort to promote and implement a plan to make food the key to winning World War I. Within the collection are materials explaining the world food situation, the nutritional value of foods, how to grow productive gardens in less than ideal conditions, and cookbooks with recipes for dealing with scarcity of various commodities such as meat and wheat. Included are works published between 1917 and 1919 in the United States and England."
"This site is dedicated to the study of historical texts on cookery, food, nutrition and dietetics. At present, the main aim is to prepare a corpus of culinary and dietetic texts and to make these texts freely available for different kinds of research." Texts are primarily from Germany, as well as England, Italy, France, Spain, Catalonia, and Portugal.
"The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is primarily a collection of landmark agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. These full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science, forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science."
"HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance."
A project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Library, this digital collection contains "substantive or essential information in the agricultural sciences, document[s] United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) research, and
serve[s] as a national resource for agricultural information."
This collection provides full-text access to a wide range of primarily U.S.-based newspaper titles from the 19th-21st centuries including the Atlanta Constitution (1868 - 1984), Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1993), Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1993), New York Times (1851 - 2013), Wall Street Journal (1889 - 2000), Washington Post (1877 - 2000), and more!
Atlanta Constitution (1868 - 1984) Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003) Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) Baltimore Sun (1837-1992) Boston Globe (1872 - 1985) Chicago Defender (1909-1975) Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1993) Christian Science Monitor (1908 - 2004) Globe and Mail (1844-2014) Irish Times (1859 - 2016) Louisville Courier (1830 - 2000) Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1993) Minneapolis Tribune (1867 - 2001) New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993) New York Times (1851 - 2013) U.S, Northeast Collection (1785 - 2010) Some issues for 1953, 1962-1963, 1965, 1978 were never published due to pressman's strikes. No Sunday issue was published until April 21, 1861. New York Tribune (1841-1962) Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002) South China Morning Post (1903-1998) Times of India (1838-2008) Wall Street Journal (1889 - 2000) Washington Post (1877 - 2000)
The Gale Primary Sources cross-search interface provides access to millions of pages of content spanning many centuries and geographic regions. Users can explore a wide range of content including monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps, and more.
Some relevant collections in this database include:
British Library Newspapers
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspaper Collection
"One of the largest projects of its kind, the National Life Stories collection Food: From Source to Salespoint (shelfmark C821) charts the extraordinary changes which transformed the production, manufacture and consumption of food in 20th-century Britain. Tesco: An Oral History, a National Life Stories project funded by Tesco (shelfmark C1087), recorded 39 life story interviews with employees of Tesco between 2003 and 2007, of which 28 are available online. It charts the rise of the supermarket retailer from an East End market stall to multinational giant."
"Based on extensive oral history interviews with indigenous food practitioners, this project highlights the critically important work being done by Native leaders today. We have conducted over 30 oral history interviews with Native American elders, teachers, farmers, hunters, wild food foragers, fishermen, cooks and chefs, activists, and advocates. This audio journey features contemporary Native American community leaders and traditional food gatherers sharing diverse stories of native foodways, their cultural knowledge and practices of indigenous nutrition and health."
The University of South Carolina houses a variety of collections documenting plantation life. Some noteable collections include the Keziah Brevard Journal, 1860-1861, which discusses preparation and preservation of food, menus offered to guests, winery procedures, and more and the Marx E. Cohen Plantation Records, 1840-1868, which detail daily activities of plantation life such as planting and harvesting of crops, timber cutting, sale of goods, weather observations, and records of plantation slaves.
"Grenada Plantation Records consist of manuscript documents from the Lataste Estate, a sugar plantation in Grenada, West Indies, dating from 1737-1845. The documents are in French, reflecting the fact that colonial control of Grenada changed hands several times during the time period of this collection. Included are deeds of sale, account records for running the plantation, inventories, survey reports about the property, total amount of rum and molasses produced, and detailed account books of profits and expenses, as well as letters and copies of letters, powers of attorney, a 1756 marriage contract, and a hand drawn folio map."
"Family papers and sugar plantation records of the Hall family of England and Jamaica.... The collection provides an abundance of primary source material on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Jamaican plantation economy and culture.... The family papers contain correspondence between family members, wills, certificates of military commission and genealogical memoranda."
Digital Collections
