Research Guides: Journalism & Public Relations: Finding Primary Sources

Audio and Video Primary Sources

Use these sites to find primary audio and video sources.

British Pathé Film Archive 1896-1976 View hundreds of historic films from the 20th Century. Excellent for primary visual material.
Historical Voices "The purpose of Historical Voices is to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century - the first large-scale repository of its kind."
Internet Archive The Internet Archive... "is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form." Good for audio and visual primary material.
Sound Recordings: American Memory, Library of Congress Search across 25 different collections from the 1880s to date: Listen to former slave interviews, early regional music recordings, speeches, and oral histories.
youtube If used carefully, a youtube search can produce quite a few visual and audio recordings of historical events. Be careful to assess the authenticity and neutrality of the media you decide to use.
Vincent Voice Library Vincent Voice Library collection of over 40,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888. The collection includes the voices of over 100,000 persons from all walks of life.
VOAHA III: The Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive This Site provides access to the full audio recordings of oral histories. You will hear the actual spoken words of oral history narrators. No transcriptions available. The CSULB oral history collections include topics ranging from women's social history and ethnic studies to Long Beach Area history and the Arts in Southern California. Some of the interviews in the Asian-American, Mexican-American and women's history collections date back to 1972 and include intervees born in the 1860s.

Meet the Press This link opens in a new window A weekly American television news/interview program broadcast on NBC. Contains episodes from 1947 to 2013. There are interviews with leaders on politics, economics, foreign policy and other public affairs, with panel discussions providing opinions and analysis.
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North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. ... Several thousand pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews, indexed and searchable for the first time, are included, along with thousands of political cartoons.
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Primary Image Sources

These sites may produce primary visual information.

Ad*Access Images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.
American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement (up to 1844) American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
Archive of Early American Images A database of images of the colonial Americas, 1492-1825 A database of pictures of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra Del Fuego based entirely on primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.
Getty Images Online database of historical images.
LIFE Magazine Image Database Photographs that appeared in LIFE Magazine.
New York Public Library Picture Collection Online Contains 30,000 high-resolution digital images taken from the New York Public Library's extensive collection of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and prints. Most images are pre-1923, and the collection is especially strong in the areas of fashion and natural history.
Perseus Digital Library Extensive digital library of primary source texts and artifacts, covering Ancient Greece and Rome, the English Renaissance, and early North American history.
Prints and Photographs Online Catalog Provides access to more than one million historically significant digital images, some of which can be freely downloaded.