HIST133: History of Sexuality (Randall): Primary Sources

What Are Primary Sources:

"Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons. These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research."
(American Library Association, Reference and User Services, History Section)

Not sure about the difference between primary and secondary sources? Watch this video:

WOMEN AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT, INTERNATIONAL: 1840 TO THE PRESENT
Database of primary sources relating to women's international activism since 1840.  Includes conference proceedings, reports of international women's organizations, letters, diaries, and memoirs of women active internationally since 1840. 

GENDER ISSUES AND SEXUALITY:  ESSENTIAL PRIMARY SOURCES (e-book)
(covers the 19th and 20th centuries and include a rich variety of sources from England and the United States.  

SEXUAL OUTCASTS, 1750-1850 (on order)
Presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850.

Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaign:  Diseases of the Body Politic (5 vols.)
This set deals in detail with Josephine Butler's campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain and the Colonies.  In addition to Butler's writings it includes pamphlets, media responses to Butler's activities, letters to the Times, articles from The Lancet and the Pall Mail Gazette as well as private letters both to and from Butler. 

HOMOSEXUALITY IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE: A Documentary Collection

SEXUALITY AND GENDER IN THE  ENGLISH RENAISSANCE: An  Annotated Edition of Contemporary Sources

WOMEN AND EMPIRE, 1750-1850:  Primary Sources on Gender and Anglo-Imperialism (on order)

How to Find More:

You can  use the library online catalog, OSCAR, to find  additional published primary sources or books including primary documents    If you are interesting in the writings of a specific individual, just do an author search.  If you are looking for primary sources on a specific topic, just enter your keywords and add one of the following words, depending on what you are looking for:  correspondence, papers, speeches, memoirs, personal narratives, documents, sources.  
For example: sexuality and England and sources

On the right you can find examples of collection of primary sources available through the library.  

Articles from the time period of the events you are researching are also primary sources.  If you are researching a topic related to the British Empire, you may wnat to look at the following newspaper archive:

The Times of London Digital Archives, 1789-2009

If your topic relates to imperial power (or colonialism) and sexuality, you need to check this database.  It's a  collection of primary documents and essays  on colonial history, politics, culture, and society. The type od documents includes letters, periodicals, exploration journals, government documents, travel writings, maps, exhibition catalogs, etc.  The collection is organized around five thematic sections introduced by scholars in the field. 

Many primary sources have been digitized and made available on the web. You have to be careful, though, because often the source of the document is not provided.  You need to evaluate each web site carefully to determine if it is reliable.  In general, you can just add the words "primary sources" to your search to locate such documents on the web. The following sites are examples of what you can find on the web.

Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook 
(Compiled by Rictor Norton, an American freelance scholar and journalist based in England)

Digital Transgender Archive
"The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings .  We collect materials from anywhere in the world with a focus on materials created before the year 2000."

European History Primary Sources
The purpose of EHPS is to provide an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe.

Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914

Images of Colonialism
"this collection of more than 700 images offers insight into European perspectives on varying aspects of colonial experience by documenting how popular perceptions of Asia and Africa were created and disseminated"

Gallica
Gallica is a digital library of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.  It  "provides access to all media: print (monographs, periodicals and newspapers) in image mode and text mode, manuscripts, sound recordings, graphic materials, maps and plans".