Research Guides: Native Turtle Island (North America): Native Peoples and Sovereignty in the Americas

About

This is a course guide prepared for the students in Professor Thomson's Capstone Seminar: Native Peoples and Sovereignty in the Americans (HIST-UA 413), Spring 2024.

What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources are the artifacts left behind by participants or observers, providing firsthand evidence of historical events. These include:

written materials, such as archival documents, autobiographies, interviews, newspaper and magazine articles
data of the period
audio materials, such as oral histories, original recordings of music and speeches, radio broadcasts, and interviews
visual materials, such as photographs, art, posters, maps, and films

In contrast, secondary sources, such as scholarly books or journal articles, synthesize and interpret primary materials. Tertiary sources, on the other hand, such as bibliographies and encyclopedia entries, summarize and synthesize secondary and primary sources and can be incredibly useful when first starting your research.

Whether primary, secondary, or tertiary, it is important to critically analyze your sources.

For more general information related to disciplines or area studies, please see the following research guides:

How to Find Primary Sources

To find primary sources in library catalogs, including NYU Libraries' search portal, use a Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) -- for example, Indians of South America -- along with the following genre words:

Anecdotes
Caricatures and cartoons
Correspondence
Description and travel
Diaries
Exhibitions
Interviews
Oral History
Maps
Notebooks, sketchbooks
Personal narratives
Songs and music
Sources (for historical documents)
Speeches

Examples of LCSH for primary sources:

Indians of South America -- Wars -- Argentina -- Personal narratives

Indians of North America -- Land tenure -- Maps Early works to 1800

Digital Primary Sources

Archives Unbound: Native American Studies
Includes entry points to the following 5 collections: 1) American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism; 2) Indian Trade in the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Papers of Panton, Leslie and Company; 3) Meriam Report on Indian Administration and the Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the U.S.; 4) War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800-1824; 5) American Indian Correspondence: Presbyterian Historical Society Collection of Missionaries' Letters, 1833-1893.

American Indians and the American West (History Vault) This link opens in a new window
American Indians and the American West consists of one module on American Indians and the American West from 1809-1971. This module contains several collections focusing on the interaction between American Indians and the U.S. government in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Notable collections in this module from the 19th Century focus on Indian Removal from 1832-1840, the U.S. Army and American Indians in the years from the 1850s-1890s, including detailed coverage of Indian Wars. The featured collections on the 20th Century are Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and records from the Major Council Meetings of American Indian Tribes.
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters is a digital collection of primary source documents that provides context for the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Users can discover documents like pamphlets, diaries, letters, and images that reveal the plight of colonizers and indigenous peoples.
Indian Claims Insight This link opens in a new window
Indian Claims Insight provides researchers with the opportunity to understand and analyze Native American migration and resettlement throughout U.S. history in the context of U.S. Government Indian removal policies and subsequent actions to address Native American claims.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America This link opens in a new window
A wide-ranging digital resource presenting a unique insight into interactions between Indigenous Peoples in North America and European colonists from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. This resource contains material from the Newberry Library's extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection. Includes manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books, photographs and newspapers. Browse through a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps and travel journals.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America This link opens in a new window
Indigenous Newspapers in North America includes historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, covering nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. With newspapers representing a variety in publisher, audience and era, users can research how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.
Indigenous Peoples: North America This link opens in a new window
Indigenous Peoples: North America sources collections from across Canadian and American institutions, providing insight into the cultural, political and social history of Native Peoples from the seventeenth into the twentieth century. Including diverse manuscripts; book collections; newspapers from various tribe and Indian-related organizations; materials such as Bibles, dictionaries and primers in Indigenous languages all enable students' examination of important primary source materials.
Latino American Experience This link opens in a new window
The Latino American Experience is a digital resource focusing on the history and culture of Latinos in the United States. Its chronological coverage spans the pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations of the Americas, the Spanish colonial period and the nineteenth century, up to the present day. Content includes articles and essays, reference materials, excerpts from primary sources, and a tool for simple analyses of statistical data.
Native American Indians, 1645-1819 This link opens in a new window
The Native American Indians, 1645-1819 collection offers text and data analysis tools, author biographies, and documents, including treaties, transcribed letters from Native American leaders, the minutes of tribal meetings, histories of numerous tribes, missionary reports, captivity narratives, firsthand accounts of battles, trading records, military rosters, expedition logs and maps, trial records, legislative bills, books on Native American languages and grammar, military rosters, governors' and legislators' reports, ballads, songs, plays and more.
Native American Tribal Histories This link opens in a new window
The Native American Tribal Histories database includes primary source documents that cover not only encounters between Indigenous people and the U.S. government, but also accounts of Native American cultures during a time when disease and forced relocation were transforming their lives. These documents are related to dozens of Native tribes from every region of the contiguous United States, including Apache, Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cherokee, Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Klamath, Lummi, Mandan, Mojave, Navajo, Nez Perce, Osage, Potawatomi, Pueblo, Seminole, Sioux, Ute and numerous others.
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
North American Indian Thought and Culture is a resource that supports scholarly research into the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples. The project integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files.

Secondary and Tertiary Sources

Databases for Searching for Secondary Sources

America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Indexes literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes 1,700 journals and also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages. Publication dates of coverage: 1964 to present.
Historical Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Indexes more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages. Publication dates of coverage: 1955 to present.

Native Turtle Island (North America)

Boolean Logic

Phrase Searching with Quotes

Boolean Operators

Truncation Searching with an Asterisk

Order Operations with Parentheses

Searching for Archival Materials Beyond NYU

Books Beyond NYU