American Historical Review Digital Primary Sources

Hosted by the Bayeux Museum, this interactive website allows visitors to explore the Bayeux Tapestry, “the 70 meter-long embroidered canvas which tells the story of the conquest of England in 1066.” Visitors can use digital tools to zoom in and out on an interactive high-resolution image of the tapestry, and both original and translated transcriptions of each scene are provided.
Regions: France; England
Dates: 11th c.

“The project’s aim was to virtually reconstruct the monastic library of UNESCO-World Heritage Site Abbey Lorsch. More than 300 medieval manuscripts have survived and today they are spread over 73 libraries worldwide. The unification of the Lorsch codices and fragments for the first time makes the Abbey’s intellectual foundation, and moreover the Carolingian world picture visible and researchable . . . The Virtual Library unites all Lorsch manuscripts in the form of digital reproductions. In addition all codices are complemented by manuscript descriptions, which are researchable in a database set up especially for the project.”
Regions: Hessen, Germany
Dates: c. 4th/5th c.-c. 16th/17th c.

Digisig is a search tool for more than 30,000 medieval seal matrices and impressions that survive in repositories in the United Kingdom and the United States. Users can search all or individual catalogues and repositories by shelf mark and catalogue identifiers as well as by motifs, names, and places associated with individual seals.
Regions: British Isles; Western Europe
Dates: 1050-1600

The Digital Pilgrim Project displays high-quality 3D models of "medieval pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges" that can be rotated for viewing from any angle. Each image is accompanied by a physical description and a brief exposition of the item’s historical context.
Regions: Europe; England
Dates: 1200-1600

"Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a growing organization of institutional partners with collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ... As a digital image repository, the DS website allows users to verify with their own eyes descriptive metadata about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and decoration."
Regions: Europe
Dates: 300-1900

"The Houghton Library’s distinguished collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts represents a significant resource for the study of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe ... [T]his collection includes works in Latin, Greek, and most of the vernacular languages of Europe that are the primary sources for the study of the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the periods."
Regions: Europe
Dates: 700-1600

This collection consists of digitized manuscripts of early English laws. The database seeks to provide introductions, commentaries, and translations corresponding to each text. The site will also include introductory essays on issues of law, language, archaeology, paleography, and codicology; descriptions of all manuscripts holding legal texts; glossaries in Old English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman; and a regularly updated bibliography and guide to the literature.
Regions: England
Dates: 600-1215

“The Epigraphic Database Heidelberg contains the texts of Latin and bilingual (i.e. Latin-Greek) inscriptions of the Roman Empire. The epigraphic monuments are collected and kept up to date on the basis of modern research. With the help of search functions specific queries can be carried out—e.g. a search for words in inscriptions and/or particular descriptive data. The search results are often displayed together with photos and drawings. The geographic focus is provided by the provinces of the Roman Empire. The total number of records rises continuously.”
Regions: Europe; North Africa; West Asia
Dates: 509 B.C.E.-830 C.E.

A “collection of letters to and from women dating from the 4th to the 13th century.” The site contains transcriptions of hundreds of letters. Originally written in Latin, they “are presented with English translations and are organized by the women participating. Biographical sketches of the women and descriptions of the subject matter or the historic context of the letter is included where available.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: 300-1200

The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy (EAGLE) provides “a single user-friendly portal to the inscriptions of the Ancient World.” The catalogue includes over one and a half million images and other digital objects related to Greek and Roman inscriptions, with content pages offering translations and other historical information regarding geography, era, and materials; visitors can search for inscriptions by category or enjoy a virtual museum exhibition.
Regions: Europe; Greco-Roman World
Dates: prehistory-late antiquity

“With the collaboration of five major libraries located in four countries and the support of the European Commission, this project made it possible to digitise more than 1000 rare and precious manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. All of them were once part of three great royal collections that are currently dispersed and which represent European cultural activity at three distinct periods in history: the Bibliotheca Carolina (8th and 9th centuries), the Library of Charles V and Family (14th century) and the Library of the Aragonese Kings of Naples (15th and 16th centuries). These manuscripts are now fully accessible on the websites of the partner libraries and have also been included in Europeana.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: 700-1600

Promotes "the study of the Church and its environment in the Fourth Century."
Regions: Europe; Middle East
Dates: 250-450

“The Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS) is an open access teaching and research tool. It offers a flexible online display for the parallel viewing of medieval texts in their original language and in new English translations, complemented by new introductory materials. The GMS spans one thousand years (600-1600) of literary production around the world. It contains short texts of broad interdisciplinary interest in a variety of genres, almost all of which have not previously been translated into English.”
Regions: Europe; Asia
Dates: 600-1600

Contains hundreds of textual sources that cover “the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman World.” The collection contains texts from dozens of authors, presented in transcription of their original Latin or Greek along with English translations, as well as images of buildings, coins, and other artifacts.
Regions: Europe; Greece; Rome
Dates: 700 B.C.E.-500 C.E.

“The Icelandic Saga Database is an online resource dedicated to publishing the Sagas of the Icelanders—a large body of medieval Icelandic literature. The sagas are prose histories describing events that took place amongst the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland during the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth in the 10th and 11th centuries AD . . . The sagas focus largely on history, especially genealogical and family history, and reflect the struggles and conflicts that arose amongst the second and third generations of Norse settlers in medieval Iceland, which was in this time a remote, decentralised society with a rich legal tradition but no organized executive power. This website contains all the extant Icelandic family sagas, made available in a variety of open formats using modernized Icelandic spelling, with the Old Norse versions and translations into English and other languages made available where these exist in the public domain.”
Regions: Europe; Iceland
Dates: 1200-1400

The Icelandic Saga Map is an open-access online resource that helps readers navigate the geographical world of medieval Icelandic sagas and related material. To date, geo-referenced texts include all of Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders) and Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), part of the Sturlunga saga compilation, and a selection of nineteenth-century “saga pilgrimage” travel books (e.g., William Morris’s Icelandic journals). The interface encourages users to move between text (in which all place-names are hyperlinked) and map, giving them a feel for the geographical overlap between texts as well as for how individual narratives play out spatially. In addition to expanding the selection of texts, projected future work includes adding information about saga manuscripts and their geographical provenance, uploading English translations of all place-names in the database, and optimizing search options for specific types of places.
Regions: Iceland
Dates: 1200-1400

"In addition to the 200,000 medieval image and data records available by subscription, the Index offers subscription-free access to approximately 40,000 digitized slides of several personal research collections that are of significant medieval interest. These include historical photographs that document key European and Eastern monuments and notable works from a variety of periods and cultures."
Regions: Europe
Dates: 300-1700

Digitized Irish manuscripts; the majority of the collected materials are either medieval in origin or copies of medieval texts.
Regions: Ireland
Dates: 700-1900

“Thanks to the patronage of the Polonsky Foundation, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library have engaged in a partnership which aims to digitise, scientifically catalogue and showcase an outstanding collection of 800 medieval manuscripts produced between the 8th and 12th centuries . . . The manuscripts have been selected for their historical significance in terms of relations between France and England during the Middle Ages. They are also of unique artistic, historical or literary interest. Produced between the eighth and the end of the twelfth century, they cover a wide range of subjects, illustrating intellectual production during the early middle ages and the Roman period.”
Regions: France; England
Dates: 700-1225

“Parker Library on the Web [is] a digital exhibit designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Parker Library is a treasure trove of rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, as well as early printed books. Almost all manuscripts in the Parker Library collection have been fully digitised and are available in this exhibit, along with associated bibliographic references and annotations made by scholars from around the world.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: 500-1799

"Assembles and translates the precious few pieces of documentary evidence that survive from Parthian territory. It includes texts in Greek, Latin, and (most importantly) Parthian."
Regions: Mediterranean; Middle East; Iran
Dates: 148 B.C.E.-262 C.E.

An ongoing project to digitize the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts; provides bibliographic information, digital facsimiles, and detailed description of provenance for a large volume of manuscript codices, folios, documents, and papers in a variety of languages from Europe, North Africa, India, the Middle East, and China.
Regions: World; Europe
Dates: 1000-1850

Digitized manuscripts with musical notation in a variety of languages.
Regions: Portugal; Spain
Dates: 1100-1650

This numismatic resource provides high-quality images and detailed information on ancient and medieval coins, featuring Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Celtic, and English coins. Visitors may browse the collection by region, by era, by maker, or by other historical tracking data like minting and serial numbers; in addition to photographs, the site offers text descriptions identifying the figures and imagery on the coins.
Regions: Europe; Greco-Roman World
Dates: 650 B.C.E.-1887 C.E.

“Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials.” The depositions are “witness testimonies mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion. The testimonies document the loss of goods, military activity, and the alleged crimes committed by the Irish insurgents.” Readers must create an account to view the depositions.
Regions: Ireland
Dates: 1641-1653

“The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM—the acronym means ‘homeward’ in Yiddish) includes Yiddish-language interviews with approximately 350 individuals, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1930, conducted in Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia. The interviews include linguistic and dialectological data, oral histories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Holocaust testimonials, musical performances (including Yiddish folk songs, liturgical and Hasidic melodies, and macaronic songs), anecdotes, folk narratives, children’s ditties, folk remedies, fragments of Purim plays, reflections on contemporary Jewish life in the region, and guided tours by local residents of sites of Jewish memory in the region.”
Regions: Ukraine; Hungary; Moldova; Romania; Slovakia
Dates: 2002-2009

Interactive online collection consisting of high-resolution photographs, maps, and references to texts archived in Basel. Most of these materials document missionary encounters in China, India, the Americas, Ghana, Cameroon, and Kalimantan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Regions: World; Africa; Asia; Europe
Dates: 1716-present

“The Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes represents a long and storied tradition in popular French print culture. Spanning more than 250 years and involving the publication of massproduced, inexpensive books that were sold to peasants for pennies by colporteurs (peddlers), the Bibliothèque bleue was comprised of texts ranging from the practical (recipes, almanacs, and how-to books) to the pious (hagiographies, prayer books, and other religious instruction) and to the entertaining (fiction, romans de chevalerie, songbooks, burlesque), providing a unique insight into the popular culture of 17th to mid19th century France. The most significant collection (some 2570 volumes) of Bibliothèque bleue material can be found at the Me´diathe`que du Grand Troyes, whose digitization efforts—digital page images of some 623 separate imprints— form the basis of the Bibliothèque bleue.”
Regions: France
Dates: 1592-1845

“The Breadalbane Collection, an eclectic gathering of 16th century documents of the Campbells of Glenorchy, provides unique insight into Scottish life during the early modern period. The collection was edited by Prof Jane Dawson.” It includes hundreds of letters, supplemented with background information on subjects including sixteenth-century letterwriting, the history of the clan, local geography, and the authors’ choice of language.
Regions: Scotland
Dates: 1548-1583

“A collection of campaigning leaflets from the 1975 and 2016 referendums on the UK’s membership of the common market and EU. The leaflets are from a variety of individuals, political parties and organisations active during both campaigns.”
Regions: Britain
Dates: 1975-2016

"A digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800."
Regions: Britain; Ireland
Dates: 1188-1870

"The Carlyle Letters Online features thousands of letters written by Scottish author and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866), to over 600 recipients throughout the world."
Regions: England
Dates: 1812-1866

This site “is one of the major world repositories of digitized Judaica, available for free via the Internet. The CJL presents books, works of art, old prints, manuscripts, archival materials, ephemera, and newspapers, housed by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.” Its holdings include “the Ringelblum Archive, the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, a priceless collection of over 35,000 documents registered by UNESCO as a part of the Memory of the World program,” in addition to an expanding range of other archival and published materials. The site is available in both Polish and English, though most metadata is in Polish, and it includes documents in Polish, Yiddish, German, and many other languages.
Regions: Poland
Dates: 17th c.-20th c.

"Presents the first-ever full collection of writings by the Scottish poet Gavin Turnbull. It includes the writings he published both in Scotland and later in America."
Regions: Scotland; United States
Dates: 1788-1809

This project provides digitized access to the daily receipt registers and a selection of other administrative records belonging to the French theater troupe Com´edie-Fran¸caise. Additionally, a fully searchable database derived from these registers allows one to study the attendance patterns of plays performed by this troupe.
Regions: Paris
Dates: 1680-1793

"This project aims to present a complete survey of all the surviving correspondence associated with William of Orange (1533–1584). The term ‘correspondence’ is used in the broadest sense and includes not only letters that were sent to or written by William of Orange, but also commissions, petitions, instructions and speeches. Research for this project was carried out in almost 200 archives and libraries in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, England, France, Italy, Austria, Poland, Spain, Vatican City, Sweden and Switzerland."
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1533-1584

“This is a conceptually coherent set of over 30,000 digitised and edited manuscript pages, spanning 1835–1882. None of these documents have hitherto been digitised to the present high standard of full-colour and high-resolution. While several documents are classics of the Darwin manuscripts corpus, many have never been transcribed and edited before and many that have been published previously are presented here in new and radically improved editions.”
Regions: Global; United Kingdom
Dates: 1835-1882

Contains "the career histories of every remunerated officer and servant of the English Royal household from the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837."
Regions: England
Dates: 1660-1837

This collection contains digitized images of handwritten letters by Eugène Delacroix, offering both original and modernized transcriptions; the modernized transcriptions include helpful footnotes and links to related letters. All of the letters are categorized by date and by recipient, and visitors can find additional library and museum holdings information for each letter. This French-language site also offers bibliographic resources, an index, and a glossary of terms, places, and people.
Regions: France
Dates: 1817-1863

This portal presents key documents held in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland, and digitized for that institution’s online Central Jewish Library. Delet features collections such as nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish Jewish art, as well as the underground organization Oneg Shabbat’s secret archive, assembled in the Warsaw Ghetto to document the Holocaust. The site is available in both Polish and English and allows visitors to create their own collections of documents for research and teaching.
Regions: Poland
Dates: 1800-2000

This database contains millions of digitized texts from Dutch newspapers, magazines, and books. Easily searchable, all texts are derived from the collections of various scientific institutions, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions.
Regions: Western Europe
Dates: 1618-1995

Online collection consisting mainly of archival materials pertaining to German-Jewish historical experience since the seventeenth century. The site also includes thousands of printed and visual sources as well as audio recordings.
Regions: Germany
Dates: 1476-present

Digit is a user-generated collection of digitized audio-visual content hosted by the German public broadcasting company WDR. The images and film, mostly from second half of the twentieth century, document everyday life in Germany and the rest of Europe.
Regions: Germany
Dates: 1860-1999

"A union catalogue which represents the holdings and loans of selected dissenting academies in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been compiled from a range of sources, including historic catalogues, shelf lists, loan registers, and surviving books from the academy libraries."
Regions: England
Dates: 1700-1900

“Taken in the years 1656–1658, the Down Survey of Ireland is the first ever detailed land survey on a national scale anywhere in the world. The survey sought to measure all the land to be forfeited by the Catholic Irish in order to facilitate its redistribution to Merchant Adventurers and English soldiers. Copies of these maps have survived in dozens of libraries and archives throughout Ireland and Britain, as well as in the National Library of France. This Project has brought together for the first time in over 300 years all the surviving maps, digitised them and made them available as a public online resource ... The Down Survey Maps section comprises digital images of all the surviving Down Survey maps at parish, barony and county level. The written descriptions (terrier) of each barony and parish that accompanied the original maps have also been included. The second section, Historical GIS, brings together the maps and related contemporaneous sources—Books of Survey and Distribution, the 1641 Depositions, the 1659 Census—in a Geographical Information System (GIS). All these sources have been georeferenced with 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps, Google Maps and satellite imagery.” It can be searched for landowner by name, landownership by religion, and murders in the 1641 rebellion.
Regions: Ireland
Dates: 1641-1670

“Comprising over 250 early modern printed books bearing handwritten annotations, this collection offers rich evidence for studying the material history of reading. The books collected here range in subject matter (from science and natural history to literature and philosophy), time period (1472–1818), and type of annotation (from scholarly commentary and cross-referencing to printers’ notations and polemical criticism). The annotators themselves include translator John Florio, literary critic John Dennis, painter William Hogarth, French bibliophile François-Louis Jamet, English ephemera collector Narcissus Luttrell, avian enthusiast Judith Gowing, York printer Thomas Gent, London lawyer Thomas Turner, country vicar Thomas Austen, and many other identified and unidentified readers.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1470-1869

"A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources," edited by Alastair Bellany (Rutgers University) and Andrew McRae (University of Exeter). "It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published."
Regions: England
Dates: 1603-1640

"EBBA has made broadside ballads from many different holdings easily and fully accessible: gathered together on one site as ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, text transcriptions, and recordings, and extensively catalogued. All ballads can be viewed via basic and advanced search functions."
Regions: England
Dates: 1600-1700

Digitized manuscripts and images that pertain to propagandistic enterprises in Germany under both the Nazi state and the German Democratic Republic. Some materials have been translated from German into English.
Regions: Germany
Dates: 1921-1989

This extensive digital primary source collection allows visitors to browse or search the papers and correspondence of Hannah Arendt. The series includes both personal letters, postcards, and writings and professional documents, reports, notes, and transcripts related to Arendt’s publications, lectures, and speeches. Visitors can also access a variety of miscellaneous primary sources, such as financial records and statements, newspaper clippings, course materials, and other ephemera, mostly from her time in the United States.
Regions: Germany; United States
Dates: 1923-1975

“Samuel Hartlib .. . a great seventeenth-century ‘intelligencer’ and man of science, set out to record all human knowledge and make it universally available for the education of all mankind. His correspondence, which runs to over 25,000 folios of original materials, came to the University Library in the 1960s. The full-text electronic edition realises Hartlib’s vision some 300 years later. The project’s objective was to create a complete electronic edition with full-text transcription and facsimile images of all 25,000 seventeenth-century manuscripts.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1600-1662

Hosted and maintained by the University Library of Heidelberg, this vast historical collection contains digitized manuscripts, charters, incunabula, literature, maps, and drawings from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, mostly including materials originating in Heidelberg and in Germany or German-speaking areas more broadly.
Regions: Europe; German-speaking world
Dates: 900-2011

“This online source edition published by the Institute for the History of German Jews uses a selection of sources, so-called key documents, to thematically highlight central aspects in Hamburg’s Jewish history from the early modern age to the present. Transcripts as well as digital facsimiles are provided for all sources, which are placed in historical context by interpretations and background information. The source material is further enriched by information on its provenance, historical responses to it, and scholarly controversies. All content is provided in both German and English.”
Regions: Germany
Dates: 1603-2016

“This digital collection includes letters held at institutions in Ireland and abroad alongside those in private collections. There are thousands of letters connecting hundreds of lives commenting a wide range of topics, from wars and violence at home and abroad including the Easter Rising, The Great War, The Anglo-Irish and Civil War, literature and art, love, politics, business, and ordinary life.” Visitors can browse the collection and even help the project by transcribing extant letters, in full or in part.
Regions: Ireland; United Kingdom
Dates: 1916-1922

“These letters from Philip II, King of Spain, mainly to Don Diego de Orellana de Chaves, Royal Governor of Spain’s northern coast, date from the time of naval war against England and France, 1592–1597. The collection itself is in the possession of the Special Collections Department of the Harold B. Lee Library . . . The letters have not been previously published.” Materials include “174 letters and documents, all in Spanish: 172 manuscript, 2 printed.” They are presented in facsimile and annotated with descriptions in English and in Spanish.
Regions: Spain; France; England; Ireland; Scotland
Dates: 1592-1597

"The ultimate objective of the Linnaean correspondence is to publish the complete text of the letters sent and received by Linnaeus, together with summaries in English. Facsimiles of the original manuscripts and of selected printed editions will be provided ... The texts and the summaries are searchable, as is the database."
Regions: Europe; Sweden
Dates: 1707-1778

A searchable compilation of eight archives and fifteen databases, which generate 3.35 million names of individuals living in London during the eighteenth century. In addition to primary source data, the website includes a wiki and allows researchers to register for a personal online workspace that can be used to build biographies from the data.
Regions: London; England
Dates: 1690-1800

“The Medici Archive Project is currently developing the Medici Interactive Archive—MIA—a prototype web portal specifically dedicated to the digital reconstruction, presentation, and preservation of the Medici Archive as it existed before the extinction of the Grand Ducal dynasty in 1743 . . . This portal will enable scholars to upload the entire multifarious corpus of the Medici Archive onto an online archival interface. This will allow scholars around the world to engage with new research methodologies and trajectories within an ever-growing body of digitized manuscripts from the Medici Archive.” Requires registering for a free account.
Regions: Tuscany; Italy; Europe
Dates: 1537-1743

The Municipal Archives of Lorient is a French-language digital resource on the history of the city of Lorient, offering documents, images, and other media archived and digitized from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The archive contains a number of digitized records, including parish records; birth, marriage, and death records from 1793 to 2002; census documents and electoral records; and fascinating municipal correspondence between officials and residents. A search engine can be used to find information or media on specific buildings, places, people, and organizations from Lorient’s history; visitors to the archive can also search for records by author.
Regions: France; Lorient
Dates: 1793-present

"An online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings—whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. We also make available translations of his most important Latin religious texts."
Regions: England
Dates: 1612-1761

With the NHS at 70 Oral History Project, users “can listen to oral history recordings in full that we have collected across the UK from people about their NHS experiences. Each recording has been fully summarised to enable you to search content. You can also discover images and other documents interviewees have donated.” Additionally, “the archive contains complete oral history recordings, alongside documents and images we have collected as part of their story.”
Regions: United Kingdom
Dates: 2017-present

Digitized versions of the Nazi Party’s propagandistic women’s magazine, NS-Frauen-Warte. This online archive, which is organized chronologically, contains issues published between 1935 and 1945.
Regions: Germany
Dates: 1935-1945

"The George Orwell Archive is the most comprehensive body of research material relating to the author George Orwell (Eric Blair) (1903–1950) anywhere."
Regions: England
Dates: 1903-1950

“The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select database that organizes the vast array of publicly available digital sources on the development of theology and philosophy during the early modern era (late 15th–18th c.). The PRDL spans collections from major research libraries, independent scholarly initiatives, and corporate documentation projects. With the proliferation of sources scattered across various digital libraries, it can be difficult for the individual scholar to find or keep track of all the new content that is appearing daily. The PRDL is a response to the challenge of curation arising from this situation, and is a collaborative effort to organize this content for scholars of early modern theology and philosophy. The PRDL does not directly host digital copies of sources, but rather assembles links to publicly available sources from permanent collections.”
Regions: Europe
Dates: late 15th c.-18th. c.

A digital archive containing the records of 197,745 criminal trials held at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. This fully searchable database also includes the biographical details of roughly 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn.
Regions: London
Dates: 1674-1913

Transcriptions of thousands of Russian-language and dozens of Ukrainian-language diaries, searchable by date of composition, keyword, and sex and age of author. Items are annotated with biographical information about the diarists and references to published editions of the entries.
Regions: Russian Empire; Soviet Union; Russian Federation
Dates: 1804-1999

“The records of Fond 545 reflect activities of the International Brigades and military units which took part in the civil war on the side of the Republican Army of Spain in 1936–1939 . . . Prior to its archival processing, the documents were on repository in the Joint Archive of the Foreign Personnel Commission of the Spanish Communist Party’s Central Committee . . . The documents were then transferred to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) as a loose assortment of hand-written papers, typed documents and publications. The main language of the collection is Spanish, with many documents in 26 different languages, including French, English, German, Polish, Russian and others.” Ninety-four percent of the fond’s 339,687 sheets have been digitized.
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1936-1945

“A fully searchable database containing the proceedings of the Scottish parliament from the first surviving act of 1235 to the union of 1707.” According to the site, “the inclusion of new parliaments and conventions of estates, committee records, parliamentary minutes and additional material makes the online edition the most comprehensive record of Scottish parliamentary proceedings ever available.” The transcriptions “are fully cited and an extensive editorial apparatus included,” and “a parallel translation of the original Latin, French and Scots text into English and the standardisation of place and personal names, where identifiable, enables keyword searches on an infinite number of subjects, with direct links from the modern translation to the original manuscript record.”
Regions: Scotland
Dates: 1235-1707

Following the Second World War, a number of confidential governmental, military, and intelligence documents were collected from the German Third Reich and then distributed to Allied countries, including Russia. In cooperation with the Russian Historical Society and the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the Russian-German Project on the Digitization of German Documents in the Archives of the Russian Federation has digitized these so-called “trophy collections” of German intelligence documents, now available online in this digital collection. Visitors to this Russian and German-language website can find digitized military documents from both world wars as well as dossiers of the German intelligence service.
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1912-1945

Siegfried Sassoon was a soldier-poet who maintained fascinating journals and notebooks for most of his life—most notably his war diaries from his service in the British Army in the First World War. This digital document collection “holds the world’s richest assemblages of Sassoon’s manuscripts and archival papers,” and visitors can browse each journal and enjoy photographs of his handwritten diary entries, poetry, and sketches and doodles.
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1905-1959

Hosted by the Danish National Archives, this online project offers digital access to the Sound Toll Registers (STR), which “are the accounts of the toll which the king of Denmark levied on the shipping through the Sound, the strait between Sweden and Denmark. They have been conserved (with gaps in the first decades) for the period from 1497 to 1857, when the toll was abolished. From 1574 on, the series is almost complete.” The registers “are an important source for research into trade, transport, production and consumption in Europe, [and] also into the lives of the shipmasters in the merchant marine. They are among the most important serial sources of the economic and maritime history of the Netherlands and Europe.”
Regions: Denmark; Netherlands; Europe
Dates: 1557-1856

"Visual materials and artifacts relating to Stalin: photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, etc."
Regions: Russia
Dates: 1902-2007

"View 253 digitised Renaissance festival books (selected from over 2,000 in the British Library’s collection) that describe the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe."
Regions: Europe
Dates: 1475-1700

Presents "interactive digital archives of life-writing extending from the coronation of Queen Victoria to the outbreak of World War I."
Regions: England
Dates: 1838-1914

This Russian-language website offers a portal to digital archives and transcriptions of diaries and similar ego documents in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. The site relies on volunteers to assist with transcription, editing, typesetting, and indexing/tagging, and visitors may contribute as well by providing the researchers with original family documents, manuscripts, or diaries.
Regions: Russia; Ukraine; Belarus
Dates: 1700-present

This digital collection from the State Public Historical Library of Russia includes documents and materials on national and general history, genealogy and heraldry, military affairs, and the ethnography and geography of Russia. It is regularly updated, and users proficient in Russian can both browse and search the collection by document type or by keyword.
Regions: Russia
Dates: 1567-2018