HIST 273: East Asia's Global Wars: Opium War to Vietnam (HC): Primary Sources: Texts and Images

Primary sources can take many different forms.  Letters, accounts and other kinds of documents written at the time of an event or era allow a nuanced and detailed understanding of historical issues.  Material below explains ways to locate primary sources in Tripod and Worldcat.  To find additional primary sources, historical studies in books and journal articles will often offer the best recommendations. Check footnotes and bibliographies for references to material written in the period of time you are researching.

Primary Source Database

Finding Printed Copies of Primary Sources 

Primary source translations that are in the Tricollege libraries will often be listed in Tripod under subject terms using the word "sources"  or "early works."  For example, the search (Keyword: (war OR soldier* OR military) AND Subject: sources  AND (Subject: (china OR chinese) produces books including:

If you have the name of a newspaper or magazine, search for it first in Tripod.  If not listed there, check Google for accessible digitized issues.  If you are searching for articles but have no newspaper or magazine name, see the indexes below.

General Periodical Indexes

Selected Individual Magazines and Newspapers

Chinese recruiting poster during the Korean War. "The poster depicts two People's Liberation Army soldiers, each holding a book, on the left, the page says 'Soviet Army Defeated 1,200,000 German Nazi, Italian, Japanese and other countries' soldiers during World War Two'. On the right book, the page says 'Chinese People's Liberation Army defeated 8 million soldiers from American Imperialist sponsored Chiang Kai-Chek's army'. On the bottom section of the poster, it depicts defeated Americans holding a dollar sign flag, and the writing states 'Next year we can accumulate 3 million soldiers'." (Source: Flickr, Jason Ford)