Research Guides: Social Justice and Equity Studies: Primary Sources

What are Primary and Secondary Sources?

The library has access to many repositories that focus on primary source materials that relate to your program dating back to early history and running up until the present. On this page you will find a list of some of our recommended resources as well as a helpful video describing what primary sources can include. You can check out this link to find a larger list of databases that include primary source documents. Depending on your research topic Special Collections and Archives here at Brock might be a great resource to explore as well.

Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
- Find books, articles, letters, speeches and other texts of black leaders.
- Coverage: 1700-current
- Permitted Uses
Archives of Sexuality and Gender This link opens in a new window
- Materials relating to the history and study of sex, sexuality, and gender and literature regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.
- Includes scholarly, popular and regional resources from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries.
- Coverage: 1520-2019
- Permitted Uses
Defining Gender, 1450-1910, Online This link opens in a new window
- Find primary sources including ephemera, pamphlets, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, ledgers, manuscript journals, poetry, receipt books and conduct and advice literature.
- Divided into 5 thematic areas: Conduct and politeness; Domesticity and the family; Consumption and leisure; Education and sensibility; The body.
- Permitted Uses
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
- This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920
- Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.
- Permitted Uses
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
- Primary materials including letters, diaries and oral histories of immigrants to America and Canada
- Coverage: 1800-1950.
- Permitted Uses
Sixties This link opens in a new window
- Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974.
- Find diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.
- Covers American history, culture, and politics.
- Permitted Uses
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new window
- Find primary sources including addresses, manuscripts, legal documents, pictures, maps, essays, tutorials, bibliographies and links to secondary resources.
- Resources are grouped into themes, geographic regions, documents types, archival sources and time period.
- Permitted Uses
Heritage This link opens in a new window
- Primary-source documents covering Canadian history from the 1600s to the mid-1900s.
- Terms of Use from Publisher Site