There are few products to which Pitt subscribes that you may use to help you with this assignment.  They are technically databases, but they are not "article" databases like Academic Search Premier.  Instead, these databases contain primary source material - diaries, letters, oral histories, etc.

What is a primary source?

♦ Original documents and contemporary accounts of an event written by either someone who experienced the event or someone who witnessed the event.

♦ Include diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, autobiographies, memoirs,  court cases, official records, debates, community meetings, surveys, observations, research studies about experiments, news film footage, audio and video recordings, poems, plays, novels, short stories, music, art, photographs, pottery, furniture, clothing, buildings, etc.

There are a number of excellent digital collections that colleges, libraries, and other organizations have made available to the public via the Internet.  (Check out the Library of Congress's American Memory or Digital Public Library of America.)

HINT: Use Google's "Advanced Search" feature to limit to a sites that tend to be more reliable such as .edu, .org, or .gov.  (These tend to be better than .com or .net.)  For example, if I wanted to see what colleges, universities, or academic libraries have made available on my topic, I would enter .edu into the advanced search field labeled "Search within a site or domain."  The results list will only contain hits from websites that have the .edu domain (such as www.pitt.edu).  Remember that Wikipedia is a .org site and is inappropriate for college research, so you will still have to evaluate your websites even if you use this to filter your results list!

Don't forget to use the evaluation questions listed on the "Home" tab to determine if a website is reliable.  If you aren't sure, ask Dr. Sears or see a librarian for help.