HIST 5340 - Age of Napoleon: Find Primary Sources
This guide contains library and web-based information for students enrolled in HIST 5340 - Age of Napoleon
What is a Primary Source?
A primary source is generally defined as document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Depending on your research topic and perspective, primary sources can include:
- Original Documents (autobiographies, personal correspondence and diaries, speeches and oral histories, newspapers, government documents, and maps)
- Creative Works (Art, drama, poetry, music, novels)
- Relics or Artifacts
[Image Source: Buonaparte's soliloquy at Calais. 1803. Isaac Cruikshank. British Library. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-7195]
Published v. Unpublished Primary Sources
Unpublished primary sources are original documents and objects created by individuals but not formally published. Unpublished materials are typically found in archives, libraries, and museums.
Published primary Sources include a wide-range of publications, including first-person accounts, memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers, statistical reports, government documents, court records, photographs, and more. Some of these materials were not published at the time of their creation but have subsequently been published in a collected volume (e.g. The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook)
Find published sources by using Library Catalogs, Research Guides, and published bibliographies. To find primary sources in catalogs try using the following strategies:
- Search by publication date to find sources published during the time period
- Use advanced search options to restrict by material type
- Include the following subjects in your search: Correspondence, Letters, Sources, Diaries, Personal Narratives, Interviews, or Speeches
Historic Newspapers & Periodicals
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British Newspaper Archive ($) Searching free, register to get 3 free downloads of newspaper pages.
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Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers (LOC) Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1756-1963
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American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 1 This link opens in a new window American periodicals published between 1684 and 1820 (more...).
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Gallica (newspapers) Gallica gives the full text of several important French newspapers including Le Figaro (1826-1942), Le temps (1861-1939), L'humanité (1904-1944)
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The Unviersal Gazeteer (Le gazetier universel) The Gazetier universel is a virtual library of the press of the Ancien Régime. It gives online access to more than 320 French language periodicals of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is regularly updated. To access a particular item click on the name of the library providing the digitized version.
World Digital Collections
Topical Digital Collections
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French Revolution Digital Archive (Stanford) The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.
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French Revolution Pamphlets (Ball State Univ.) 1789 to 1799, this collection of pamphlets documents the time leading up to the revolution through the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Often privately printed due to newspaper censure by the monarchy, the pamphlets were used to disseminate information and ideals concerning nationalism, citizenship, personal freedoms, and social injustice.
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French Pamphlet Collection (Newberry) Includes thousands of pamphlets published between 1780 and 1810 from the French Revolution Collection (FRC), the Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection, and several smaller collections of French Revolution era material
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Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (George Mason Univ.) LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION provides an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution as well as an extraordinary archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site itself is a collaboration of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) and the American Social History Project (City University of New York), supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Napoleonic Period Collection (Univ. of Washington) This collection showcases 83 satirical prints, or caricatures, from the Napoleonic Period, all giving political commentary on events of the period. Fifty of the prints were created by French artists, and thirty-three by English artists. Nearly all of the French prints date from the last two years of Napoleon's reign, but the English prints represent a broader time period ranging from 1793 to 1815.
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Napoleonic Satires (Brown) The Napoleonic satires housed in the Anne S. K. Brown Military collection of the John Hay Library represent several important gifts made to the library in the 20th century. In addition to the Napoleonic satires located in the military collection bequeathed by Ms. Brown, Paul Revere Bullard (Class of 1897) and William H. Hoffman contributed a variety of significant objects with a Napoleonic theme. In addition to print caricatures and satires, their donations include historical volumes, manuscripts, sculpture, and some paintings.
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Revolutionary France (Univ. of Manchester) The project focussed on a collection of over 10,000 proclamations and broadsides, now categorised as the European Proclamations and Broadsides Collection as they in fact span a period from c1530 to 1890 and cover much of the European continent. A
European Digital Collections
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Gallica (BnF)Digital library that provides access to millions of documents from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
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Archives Nationales (Fr) French National Archives has a large collection of documents available online relating to the French Revolution.