Howdy folks, I'm in my first history class, and I'm sitting down to write my first paper. As the title says I'm having great difficulty finding sources. My paper is about the Age of Exploration, and for at least part of it, I want to look at the Economic repercussions of the fall of Constantinople, forcing Portugal to go round Africa (if that's a thing). What I'm asking is a) if anyone has any links to primary/secondary sources about that, and b) if anyone has any general advice on finding this stuff on my own, I've been tooling around on google for a while, but I feel like there is probably a more efficient way of doing this.
Thanks.
Hey. I recently graduated with a degree in history and the best advice I can give you is this: get comfortable in the library. I'm assuming that your university/college has an online database for the library, and that's where i would start. I would search key words or phrases and sift through the results. If you see a book that looks helpful, check the books around it on the shelf also. Once you find a couple of good books, mine their bibliographies/references for other sources. A great way to find primary sources is to check the references of secondary sources. It's not as easy as google searching, and its definitely more time-consuming, but you'll write a better paper. And you'll feel like you've accomplished something too. And your professor will see that you spent some time in the books and not just on the internet. Many history books are old (shocking) and a lot of historical scholarship is sitting on shelves with little or no access aside from physically picking the book up and reading it.
If you're in a university, you can search JSTOR (or your university's own journal archive) for articles by keyword and time period. It's how I usually get secondary sources in a pinch. So you could search economy/Constantinople/age of exploration or any combination and find relevant literature. Google Scholar is also generally a good resource.
For primary, do you know what sort of source you're looking for? Period maps with trade routes could be helpful, for example. My university has a lot of that kind of thing scanned, but it would depend on how large the collection is. You could also try searching for accounts by merchants written during that time period, or something like that.
Like LearnedHandLOL said, your best bet for primary sources is the library. I'm not sure when this is due (hopefully not tomorrow!) but it won't actually take that long to find what you're looking for in the library, if you have a tight enough focus.
Source: I write a lot of history papers in university.