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HIST 143: Soccer and History in Latin America: Primary Sources and Web Sites

Soccer and History in Latin America: Making the Beautiful Game
Professor Roger Kittleson

What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources are first-hand accounts, that serve as original evidence documenting a period, event, people, idea or work. 

Primary sources can be printed materials like books or newspapers, manuscript and archival materials like diaries and documents, artifacts, and audio/visual materials. Primary materials can be found in analog, digitized, and born-digital forms. 

Some examples of primary sources include:

  • Memoirs, speeches, writings, correspondence
  • Papers of a political party, agency, or association
  • Official documents such as congressional hearings and reports
  • Contemporary magazine and newspaper articles
  • Contemporary art, films, literature, and music
  • Contemporary artifacts, such as buildings and monuments

Finding Primary Sources

When looking for primary sources, you need to consider:

  • Who would create the documents? Who would preserve the documents?
    • Who can be individuals or groups, such as local, regional, or international organizations, associations, and governmental agencies.
  • How would the documents be preserved and accessed? Would they have been
    • Formally published/produced, such as books, newspapers, magazines, films, music, court cases, etc.? You are likely to find these items in library databases.
    • Informally published/produced web documents, such as press releases, reports, policy statements, etc.? You may find recent documents through Google or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (going back to 1996). 
    • Personal or internal documents? If these materials were preserved, they may only be available through visiting private collections, library archives, museums, historical sites, or corporate/organization archives. A national library, public library, historical society, or university/college library may have digitized some of these materials. Interviews and oral histories produced as part of a scholarly research project are often only available from the researcher.

Organizations

The websites of organizations provide primary documents related to their work. To find relevant organizations, read news stories on your topic and note which organizations are mentioned. Then, search Google to find their websites. Here are a few examples:

 

News Sources

For additional news resources, see How to Find Newspaper Articles guide.

Professor Kittleson's Favorite Sites

Note: these are mostly English-language blogs and websites; Professor Kittleson likes lots of blogs/sites in Portuguese, too!

These sites are great for keeping up with the soccer world, and they may post links to useful primary documents from time to time.