Primary sources are powerful tools for deepening your students’ understanding of historical events, increasing engagement and retention, and developing visual literacy and observational skills. JSTOR offers a wealth of primary source, image, and multimedia content contributed by libraries, museums, and archives–now available alongside secondary literature on our comprehensive platform.
Browse collections on JSTOR
Discover the visual side of JSTOR, including artwork, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs, and other artifacts.
Gain insights on effective primary source teaching strategies
We’ve partnered with Choice, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, to produce a comprehensive report, Teaching and Learning with Digital Primary Sources. The report explores nine key insights to address challenges of awareness and discoverability, digital literacy, and cooperation between librarians and teaching faculty.
Spark curiosity with compelling images and multimedia
JSTOR now includes Artstor’s collections of millions of high-quality images contributed by leading museums and archives worldwide. Our guide to working with images on JSTOR brings together the key information you need to begin working with Artstor and other image content in your JSTOR Workspace.
These resources can help you integrate images and multimedia into your assignments, lectures, and classroom activities:
Discover unique shared collections from our library partners
Libraries and archives are digitizing their special collections and making them freely available to students and researchers on JSTOR. These include illustrations, letters and postcards, literary documents, newspapers, magazines, photographs, oral histories, and much more, on a wide variety of subjects.
View highlights from these collections, including:
Capturing the Civil War
The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.
Maps, Power, and Identity
The Ancient East Asian Maps Collection at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology demonstrates the power held and discursive work done by mapmakers.
Eastern Kentucky University American Slavery Collection
Sixteen documents, including slave bills of sale, tell the cruel story of the enslaved lives that were listed in ledgers.
Explore underrepresented voices through Reveal Digital collections
Reveal Digital develops open access primary source collections from underrepresented 20th-century voices of dissent, funded and published by libraries, museums, and historical societies. Explore the following collections:
- American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present: Voices from the Inside: This collection brings together hundreds of prison newspapers from across the U.S. A curated set of teaching materials facilitates research and discovery about mass incarceration in the United States.
- Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements: This collection brings to light untold stories of civil rights activism, highlighting everyday citizens’ contributions and expanding historical narratives.
- Black Periodicals: From the Great Migration through Black Power: This collection showcases Black periodicals from the mid-20th century, representing diverse political, cultural, and literary movements across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
- Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s: This collection provides scholars with important documentary evidence of organized white nationalism in the 1920s, along with the activity of organizations that actively resisted it.
- HIV, AIDS & the Arts: This collection documents the artistic responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis, preserving visual, literary, and performing arts created by marginalized artists.
- Independent Voices: Featuring alternative press publications from the 1960s to the 1980s, this collection highlights the radical voices of feminists, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, LGBT communities, and more.
- Student Activism: This collection documents the history of student organizing in the U.S., exploring how student activists shaped American higher education and continue to enact change.
View highlights from Reveal Digital collections, including:
How Women Fought Misogyny in the Underground Press
Men dominated the underground papers of the 1960s. Feminist journalists like Robin Morgan and Sheila Ryan called them on their sexism.
Independent Voices of the Black American Press
The digitized newspapers in this open access collection offer insight into the country’s diverse civil rights movements following the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Summer of Love Wasn’t All Peace and Hippies
Articles in the underground press capture what’s missing from our romanticized memory of that fateful season.
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Image credits: 1. Kentucky. For the Union. Grand Valley State University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. 2. 西固城圖. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library. Ancient East Asian Maps. 3. William Todd to John Love, for “a negro boy named Charles about fifteen years of age.” via Eastern Kentucky University. 4. From the cover WomanSpirit, April, 1978 via JSTOR. 5. JSTOR. 6. From the cover of Volume 5, Issue 13 of Berkeley Barb via JSTOR’s Reveal Digital Independent Voices Collection.