BIS 300: Interdisciplinary Inquiry (Gardner): Primary sources

Research guide for students in Ben Gardner's BIS 300 section during Spring Quarter 2024.

First-person accounts

UW Libraries Search
Try searching the catalog for "Sudan" and "personal narratives," "diaries," or "letters" to find collections of first-person accounts.
VAD Foundation Channel on YouTube
Other searches in YouTube may yield useful first person accounts as well.

Government or International Organization Documents

International Criminal Court - Darfur, Sudan
Court materials and transcripts pertaining to the case(s) brought before the ICC.
US State Department - Bureau of African Affairs
Contains policy statements, "dipnotes" (observations from State Department staff), links to relevant legislation and transcripts of official meetings.
Intergovernmental Organization Search Engine
A custom Google search that accesses documents from a variety of intergovernmental organizations (including the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, etc.).

Historical Material

Travelers in the Middle East Archive - Sudan section
Digital archive of images, books, cartoons and other items, focused on "Western interactions in the Middle East."
International Institute of Social History - Visual Archive Search
Based in the Netherlands, the IISH is dedicated to preserving the heritage of social movements around the world. Try doing a search for "Sudan" in the image archive.
Empire Online
Collection of primary source documents and essays related to colonial studies.
Koloniales Bildarchiv
Over 50,000 images from German colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Google or another search engine should be able to translate the page from German to English. Please reach out if you need help with it!
Sudan Archive
Enormous collection of material related to British colonial rule in Sudan, held at Durham University Library in the UK. Important note: not everything you will find in this archive is digitized and available online.

Primary Sources vs. Secondary Sources

Human Rights

Human Rights Documents Online
Repository of historical human rights reports. Many documents are scanned from the original, so beware of image quality issues.
Human Rights Watch - Sudan section
This site contains not only reports of human rights violations, but correspondence between HRW staff and government entities, news and video.

Images

Artstor
Search over one million digital images in the fields of the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences.
As of August 1st, 2024, ARTstor is available exclusively at JSTOR.

News

Note that news articles can serve as both primary and secondary sources. If you're using facts or details pulled directly from a news article, that would mean you're using it as a secondary source. If you're analyzing the news story, especially a historical story, and interpreting what it means for your research, it would be a primary source.

Access World News
Regional, national, and international newspapers, 1980's-present.

Historical Economist Archive
Issues of the Economist magazine, from 1843-2006.
Historical New York Times
Articles from 1851-2009. For issues of the NYT from 2009 until the present, go here.
The Times (of London)
Digitized copies of this fundamental British newspaper from 1785-1985.