The William & Mary Libraries have an outstanding collection of databases. We have about 150 primary source databases, and another 150 newspaper databases. This does not include digitized primary sources indexed in the main library catalog, nor does that touch upon our unique physical holdings in Special Collections. The options can be overwhelming.
When looking for primary sources, you need to choose your keywords very carefully.
Words change over time (Examples: Nice, Silly, Meat, Literally, Gay, Bachelor, etc. See Oxford English Dictionary for more)
Try to imagine the wording people would have used centuries again.
For example, If your topic is the impact of resistance among enslaved persons upon the Transatlantic slave trade, you'd need to rephrase it in 18th century language. It would be slave instead of enslaved, and Uprising or revolt or rebelling, not resistance.
Another example: instead of African culture, they'd possibly say "customs"
More importantly: use as few word as possible. The more words you use, the more likely you are to use an anachronism. Try to only use 2 or 3 very carefully selected keywords, then use the database itself to limit by publication date, document type, etc. This is especially true using the primary source databases.
The main catalog indexes material from HathiTrust & from many of our history databases.
Limit the publication date to before 1800 and try basic searches in the catalog to start finding a few primary sources.
Example: The search I used to find SECONDARY sources also works for Primary.
Looking for a specific type of document? Letter, journal, map, broadside?
Add that as a subject search term. Hear are some of the terms: