For post-medieval but pre-21st century primary sources, books, newspapers, magazines, journals, films, oral histories, and archival collections are all likely primary sources.
To find primary sources (such as books and films) in the library catalog, limit your search results by date of publication to find sources that were published during the time period you're researching.
You can also use the advanced search option to search by subject and include one or more of these terms:
Use the language option to limit your results to English (and/or another language that you can read).
Consult our Finding Primary Sources page for more tips for finding primary sources.
If you are working on a recent topic, and your sources cite web pages, you may run into many dead links. The Internet Archive has been building a digital library of archived Internet sites (over 866 billion web pages!) since 1996. It can be used to trace old links and it is also searchable.
Since your projects cover a broad range of time periods, we recommend that you consult our research guides for digital collections, primary source collections, specific media such as newspapers, and relevant chronological/geographical areas: