Primary source documents covering five centuries of exploration and colonization. Subjects include: journeys, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts.
Includes rare manuscript and early printed material, illustrated maps and documents, diaries and ships' logs. Covers the earliest voyages of Vasco da Gama, the opening of trade with the Spice Islands, the colonization of the Americas and Australasia, the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages, and finally the race for the Poles.
The ARTFL Project is a collection of digitized resources on the French language.
ARTFL's main corpus, ARTFL-FRANTEXT, consists of nearly 3,000 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts.
Provides access to primary documents, images, and video covering worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico, the European Union, Afghanistan, Israel, Turkey, The Congo, Argentina, China, Thailand, and others.
Includes historical context and resources, representing both personal and institutional perspectives, for the growing fields of border(land) studies and migration studies, as well as history, law, politics, diplomacy, area and global studies, anthropology, medicine, the arts, and more. At completion, the collection will include 100,000 pages of text, 175 hours of video, and 1,000 images
Searchable full-text of advice literature covering household management, education, leisure, shoppping, sexuality, consumption and sport.
Defining Gender is a collection of fully digitized rare primary source advice literature covering five centuries between 1450 through 1910. The documents have been selected from a European perspective with an emphasis on British and European sources.
Defining Gender contains complete scanned books, pamphlets, periodicals, collections of letters, biographies, short stories, novels, and poetry, as well as recent thematic essays by leading scholars in the field of Gender Studies which place the documents within a broad historical, literary and cultural context.
Currently containing sections on Conduct and Politeness and Domesticity and the Family, Defining Gender includes some of the seminal texts used in Gender studies from authors such as Christine De Pisan, Daniel Defoe, Delarivier Manley, Margery Kempe, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Some key areas of behavior of men and women addressed include cookery, health, courtship, marriage and role of husband and wife, sexuality, courtly behavior, children, education, class, and religion and morality.
Coverage ranges from early German texts to works of major 19th-century authors, including areas such as literature, history, philosophy, theology, politics, and art history.
The Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker offers an electronic version of the texts published since 1981 by the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag [German Classical Publishing Company], an affiliate of the Suhrkamp publishing company. As the title suggests, it makes available major works by German-language authors, spanning eleven centuries and ranging from such early texts as Lancelot und Ginover and works by Wolfram von Eschenbach to writings by major 18th- and 19th-century authors such as Herder, Büchner, Schleiermacher, and Fichte. As well, there are collections of historical, philosophical, theological, political, and art history texts. All works have been newly edited and are accompanied by extensive commentaries. Searching can be done for titles, keywords, or authors. Searches can be limited to the works of a particular author or to a specific genre of texts. Keyword searches can be performed on words in combination or for words in proximity. Truncation and wildcard searching allows retrieval of documents containing variations on a search term.
Database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960, aggregating indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids.
Eight Centuries (formerly 19th Century Masterfile) is a database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960 (varies by source). 8C aggregates indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids, and includes citations to 9,000 periodicals in 30+ languages. 8C provides access to articles, newspapers, books, U.S. patents, government documents, and images. Links to open access and subscription full-text sources are included where available.
Provides access to over 50 million digitized items from European archives, libraries, and museums.
Provides access to over 50 million digitized items from European archives, libraries, and museums.
Provides access to historical Scandinavian manuscripts as well as bibliographic information for manuscripts not yet digitized. Icelandic sagas, German/Nordic mythology and tales of chivalry.
A project of the National and University Library of Iceland and Cornell University Library in association with the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, contains ca. 250,000 manuscript pages and ca. 150,000 printed pages. These images cover the Icelandic family sagas (Íslendingasögur), the sagas of (chiefly Norwegian) kings (konungasögur), chivalric romances (riddarasögur) and the Indigenous Icelandic epic form called rímur, among other texts. Printed editions and translations published before 1901 and housed in the Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library complement the manuscripts from the National and University Library of Iceland and the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.
Latin Literature from its origins to the Renaissance.
Those who are interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages know how difficult it is to identify a particular work encountered by chance in a manuscript, or, when studying or publishing a particular text, to make an inventory of all the manuscripts in which it appears. These difficulties arise primarily from the manner in which literary works circulated prior to the invention of printing. Before Gutenberg, the text had a life of its own, independent of its author, and was modified from copy to copy. It is not only the text that changed; titles might vary and authorial attributions could shift. There was a tendency to lend only to the rich, and Ovid, Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard found themselves credited with a host of apocrypha. The incipit or first words of a work thus remain the surest means of designating it unambiguously. In a sense, the incipit, by virtue of its invariability, is the identity card of the text. Standing apart from the diversity of attributions and titles, the incipit guarantees the presence of a particular text.
Digital access to European works printed before 1701. The contents are drawn from major repositories, including the Danish Royal Library, the National Central Library in Florence, the National Library of France, the National Library of the Netherlands, and the Wellcome Library in London.
Includes access to collections 1-10, and 15. Religious works dominate, but the resource also includes secular material. Fully searchable pages scanned directly from the original printed sources in high-resolution full color. Each item is captured in its entirety, complete with binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages and any loose inserts.
Materials on early economics, commerce, trade, transportation, industry, manufacturing, political systems and social history. Includes access to parts 1 through 4.
Digital facsimiles of literature on economics and business published from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century. The collection documents the dynamics of Western trade and wealth. Includes facsimiles of rare books and primary source materials such as political pamphlets and broadsides, government publications, proclamations, and a wide range of ephemera.
Primary source collections covering the long nineteenth century. Includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.
Includes access to the following modules: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange ; British Politics and Society ; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture ; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection ; Children's Literature and Childhood ; Mapping the World ; Europe And Africa ; Photography: the World Through the Lens ; Science, Technology, and Medicine; Women: Transnational Networks.
Provides access to historical primary sources, digitized from leading societies, libraries, and archives around the world. Includes access to the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI), the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), Royal Geographical Society, 1478-1953 (RGS) ; The Royal College of Physicians (RCP).
All Archives are cross-searchable, and contain tools for searching, browsing, analyzing and visualizing primary source content.
Digital access to the complete corpus of medieval translations of the works of Aristotle.
Aims at documenting the various tools that were used in the Middle Ages for the study of Aristotle, with a special emphasis on Latin translations. Includes Greco-Latin translations in the printed Aristoteles Latinus series and also in some unpublished editions in preparation. Also includes the corpus of Latin translations of Greek commentaries and glosses on Aristotle (most of them published in the Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum), texts that were closely associated with the Corpus Aristotelicum (such as the Liber sex principiorum, the Paraphrasis Themistiana or the Vita Aristotelis), and some translations from the Arabic (the Analytica Posteriora, tr. Gerardi and Averroes’Poetria, tr. Hermanni).
Searchable database covering The Iliad, The Odyssey, Theogony, Works and Days, Shield of Herakles, Homeric Hymns in their original Greek and English and German translation.
Multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. Except for fragments, it contains all the texts in the original Greek, in addition to English and German translations.
Contains texts from the beginning of Latin literature to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).
The Library of Latin Texts is a searchable full-text database of classical, patristic, medieval and neo-Latin writers. It includes:
- Literature from Antiquity (Plautus, Terence, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Titius-Livius, the Senecas, the two Plinys, Tacitus and Quintilian and others).
- Literature from Patristic Authors (Ambrose, Augustine, Ausonius, Cassian, Cyprian, Gregory the Great, Jerome, Marius Victorinus, Novatian, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, Tertullian and others) It also contains non-Christian literature of that period (Ammianus Marcellinus, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Claudian, Macrobius and Martianus Cappella).
- Literature from the Middle Ages (Anselm of Canterbury, Beatus de Liebana, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, Sedulius Scottus, Thomas à Kempis, Thomas de Celano, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the Rationale of Guilelmus Durandus and important works by Abelard, Bonaventure, Ramon Llull, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and others).
- Neo-Latin Literature (decrees from the modern ecumenical Church councils up to Vatican II and translations into Latin of important sixteenth-century works).
Interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing, virtual library of Greek and Latin literature.
Includes epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory.
If you chose to register for an optional, personal account using your indiana.edu email address you will need to update your account to use your iu.edu email address before December 31, 2025. Please use the following instructions to update your account:
Electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1855, and the four volumes of indexes published between 1862 and 1865. Covers the works of the Latin Fathers from Tertullian in 200 A.D. to Pope Innocent III in 1216. Includes the complete Patrologia Latina, including all prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indexes. Migne's column numbers, essential references for scholars, are also included.
Bible versions of the Latin Fathers.
From the Vetus Latina Institute: The Vetus Latina Institute was founded in Beuron in 1945 by the Benedictine monk Dom Bonifatius Fischer OSB († 1997). Its goal is the complete collection and critical edition of all surviving remnants of the Old Latin translations of the Bible from manuscripts and citations in ancient writers. Vetus Latina or "Old Latin Bible" is the collective title for the large and very diverse collection of Latin biblical texts used by Christian communities from the second century. Following the expansion and triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Latin became increasingly used as a lingua franca in place of Greek, first in North Africa and then in Spain, England, Gaul and Germany. A diverse array of translations of the Bible appeared, frequently inaccurate and not controlled by any ecclesiastical authority. This flood of versions came to an end in the fourth century as one of them, later known as the Vulgate, gradually established itself in place of the others. By the Carolingian era, the variety of Old Latin texts had been completely superseded. In contrast [to the Vulgate] the Vetus Latina consists of all biblical texts translated from the Greek which do not correspond to the Vulgate. Most Old Latin versions have only been transmitted as fragments. Alongside the few manuscripts which have been preserved, covering an uneven selection of biblical books, the citations and allusions in Latin Church Fathers (and Christian writings in Greek which were translated into Latin at an early date) are an essential source for investigating the tradition. The citations of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage († 258) provide a firm starting-point: the vocabulary and translation technique of the version used by Cyprian are clearly differentiated from later forms of text, attested in abundance from the fourth century onwards.
Abbreviationes identifies abbreviations used in medieval Latin manuscripts (Latin paleography). It includes large collections such as the manuscripts held by the Vatican Library, the libraries at Oxford and Paris, the Morgan Library, the Huntington Library , as well as many smaller collections. The entries in the database cover the period from the 8th century up to and including the 15th century.
Electronic version of the Acta Sanctorum, a collection of documents examining the lives of saints, organized according to each saint's feast day.
Contains the text of the sixty-eight printed volumes of Acta Sanctorum published in Antwerp and Brussels by the Société des Bollandistes, from the two January volumes published in 1643 to the Propylaeum to December published in 1940. All prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indices, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL) reference numbers, are also included.
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
The Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-commercial online image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, or manuscripts made in the tradition of books before printing. DS unites scattered resources from a consortium of many libraries into a union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance studies. It provides unprecedented access to illuminated and textual manuscripts through digital cataloging records, supported by high resolution images and retrievable by various topic searches. DS enables users from the most casual to the most specialized to study the rare and valuable materials of academic, research, and public libraries. It makes available collections that are often restricted from public access and includes not only recognized masterpieces but also understudied manuscripts that have been previously overlooked for exhibition or publication. DS fosters the public viewing of non-circulating materials otherwise available only within restricted access libraries. As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars and beginners to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials, i.e., manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes, thus beginning the American contribution to the goal established in 1953 by the Comité international de paléographie latine (International Committee of Latin Paleography): to document photographically the proportionately small number of codices of certain origin that will serve stylistically to localize and date the vast quantities of unsigned manuscripts. DS publishes not only manuscripts of firm attribution but also ones that need the attention of further scholarship and traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. Because it is web-based, it also allows for updates and corrections, and as a matter of form individual records in DS can and do acknowledge contributions from outside scholars. DS encourages interaction between the academic and the library world to build a growing and reciprocally beneficial body of knowledge. DS looks to the needs of a very diverse community of specialists: medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists, literary scholars and art historians. At the same time DS recognizes a broader user community in the public that values rare and unique works of historical, literary and artistic significance.
Index to over 45,000 works of Medieval art from early Christian period to A.D. 1400.
Based on The index of Christian art, a thematic and iconographic index of early Christian and medieval art objects begun at Princeton University in 1917, the index catalogs primarily Christian art from early apostolic times to approximately 1400 A.D. While coverage is predominantly of Christian iconography, Jewish, Islamic, and non-ecclesiastical subjects are also covered. The database contains a portion of the index's backfiles as well as all works cataloged since 1991. Entries include descriptive information, provenance, location and ownership information, bibliographical references, and, when available, a photographic reproduction of the work of art.
Digital edition of The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury as part of The Past Masters collections. Edited with an introduction by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (1998).
This book is the first English edition of all of Anselm’s major works to appear in one convenient volume. Contents:
Letter to Archbishop Lanfranc -- Monologion -- Proslogion -- Pro insipiente (On behalf of the fool), by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers -- Reply to Gaunilo -- De Grammatico (Dialogue on literacy and the literate) -- On truth -- On free will -- On the fall of the devil -- On the incarnation of the Word -- Why God became man -- On the virgin conception and original sin -- On the procession of the Holy Spirit -- De concordia (The compatibility of God's foreknowledge, predestination, and grace with human freedom) -- Philosophical fragments.
Contains full-color images of the original medieval manuscripts that comprise the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor, and Armburgh family letter collections, along with full-text searchable transcripts from printed editions
Also includes: a chronology, a visual sources gallery, an interactive map, a glossary, family trees and links to other scholarly free to access digital resources for researching the medieval period.
Only five major letter collections exist from fifteenth century England and they are all available digitally via this resource.
The Paston letters have long been a subject of both literary and historical interest and are the largest of the collections and the best known of the five families. Their letters document the life of a gentry family during the War of the Roses. Hundreds of documents and letters exchanged between different family members cover in microcosm the dilemmas of a nation beset by war, disease and legal disputes.
The Celys were a merchant family, and crucial players in the wool trade between England and the Channel ports. This collection covers every aspect of their commercial dealings.
The Stonors were a well-established gentry family in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. These documents cover the longest time period of any of the collections and throw light on both business and domestic issues.
The Plumptons were a dominant northern family. Their documents, which continue right through to the early sixteenth century, reveal a family entangled in the social and economic affairs of the region.
The Armburgh family material is primarily concerned with a dispute over a family inheritance.
European travel writing from the later medieval period.
Provides an extensive collection of manuscript materials for the study of medieval travel writing. The core is a collection of medieval manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The main focus is accounts of journeys to the Holy Land, India and China. The manuscripts are from the British Library; Bodleian Library; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Cambridge University Library; Trinity College, Cambridge; Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen; the Beinecke Library at Yale University and about 15 other Libraries and Archives.
Access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources.
The Middle English Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary (MED), a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and an associated network of electronic resources, including a large collection of Middle English texts.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica is a large collection of medieval historical sources for the study of German-speaking Europe (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) during the Middle Ages.
The database contains texts from all five divisions of MGH: Scriptores, Leges, Diplomata, Epistolae, and Antiquitates.
Full text and translation of the meetings of the English parliaments from Edward I (1272 - 1307) to the reign of Henry VII (1485 - 1509).
The rolls of parliament were first edited in the eighteenth century and published in 1783 in six folio volumes entitled Rotuli Parliamentorum ( RP ) under the general editorship of the Reverend John Strachey. They were later superseded by the journals of the lords and, somewhat later, of the commons. This new edition reproduces the rolls edited in RP in their entirety, plus those subsequently published by Cole, Maitland, and Richardson and Sayles as well as a substantial amount of material never previously published, together with a full translation of all the texts from the three languages used by the medieval clerks (Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English). It also includes an introduction to every parliament known to have been held by an English king (or in his name) between 1275 and 1504, whether or not the roll for that parliament survives.
The Rolls of Parliament set includes:
Introductions to Individual Parliaments:
Historical background for the time, sometimes quite long and in considerable detail.
Text/Translation, original text:
The original text is in Latin or Anglo-Norman or Middle English.
Translations are side-by-side with the original text
Appendix:
The appendix usually contains lists of bills, petitions, grants, letters, complaints, commissions, appointments, orders and other similar matters
Images:
The images section reproduces the original manuscript as written by the clerk
The general introduction to the Rolls of Parliament describes the editorial approach to the set and provides historical information concerning the rolls themselves.
Translations of the work of influential Catholic theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas.
Electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1855, and the four volumes of indexes published between 1862 and 1865. Covers the works of the Latin Fathers from Tertullian in 200 A.D. to Pope Innocent III in 1216. Includes the complete Patrologia Latina, including all prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indexes. Migne's column numbers, essential references for scholars, are also included.
Covers the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora. Focus is on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France.
The collection includes primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.
Contains more than 550 works by black authors from the Americas, Europe and Africa, expertly compiled by the curators of Afro-Americana Imprints collection. Genres include personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, expedition reports, military reports, novels, essays, poems, and musical compositions.
Created from the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Black Authors, 1556-1922. Major subject areas addressed in Black Authors include Literature, Ethnic History, Colonialism, Gender Studies, Slavery, and Diaspora Studies. Authors included are Leo Africanus, Ignatius Sancho, Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Ruggles, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Alexander Crummell, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass, Bethany Veney, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, and hundreds of others.
Access to primary sources, supporting materials, and archives, along with 125 hours of video related to disability studies.
Full text and searchable correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the "Long Eighteenth Century."
Electronic Enlightenment offers unrivalled access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long 18th century and their family and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. Over 53,000 letters from 6,000 correspondents are available in their original languages, including English, French, German, and Italian.
Contains over 70,000 images of original manuscripts (including biographies and chronologies) and printed materials covering Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Oceana, and South Asia.
Includes interactive maps and original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, c1783-1969. The images are sources from the British Library, including the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library; the University of Birmingham Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Public Record Office and the State Records, New South Wales, Australia.
European Views of the Americas is a searchable bibliographic index to books, manuscripts, broadsides and other materials printed in Europe relating to the Americas, 1493-1750.
Among the topics covered by are the slave trade, piracy, French in American, British colonies, commerce, exploration, Dutch in America and the Jesuits. Other subjects include botany, shipping, natural history, mines, minerals, law, navigation and named areas like Chile, Hispaniola, Jamaica, New York, Peru and other individual countries, islands, cities, colonies and regions.The original bibliography was co-developed by John Alden and Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books at The John Carter Brown Library.
Primary source documents related to the First World War, covering personal experiences of men and women, recruitment, the development and dissemination of various forms of propaganda, women's war work, the Home Front and international perspectives.
Document types include: personal narratives, diaries, newspapers, posters, postcards, photographs, printed books, military and government files, ephemera, artwork, personal artifacts and film. Also includes secondary source materials such as interactive maps, and chronologies.
Modules include: Personal Experiences; Propaganda and Recruitment; Visual Perspectives and Narratives; A Global Conflict
Digital access to primary source material covering the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere. Includes printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government reports, films, and illustrated content.
Includes access to Modules 1 and 2. The bulk of the material ranges from the sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Module 2 includes six rare Apicius cookbooks, the earliest of which dates from the ninth century.
Primary source documents related to French colonial activities and policies in Africa, 1910-1930. Includes correspondence, studies and reports, cables, and maps.
U.S. Consulates were listening posts reporting on the activities of the French colonial government and the activities of the native peoples. Highlights of the collection include the beginning of an anti-colonial movement and problems along the Moroccan-Algerian border.
Primary source documents related to German colonial policies and activities, 1910-1929.
German colonial aspirations in Africa ended with the end of the First World War. British and French Army forces seized German colonies in Africa and British naval forces occupied the German port facilities. The Treaty of Versailles legitimized and officially mandated the former German colonies to British and French colonial authorities. This collection comprises correspondence, studies and reports, cables, maps, and other kinds of documents related to U.S. consular activities. U.S. Consulates were listening posts reporting on the activities of the German colonial governments and later the mandate authorities, and the activities of the native peoples
Primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. Includes visual, manuscript and printed materials sourced from over twenty key libraries and more than a dozen companies and trade organizations around the world.
Includes business accounts, mercantile papers and correspondence, government reports, rare pamphlets and dock records, and material from specialist collections such as the George Arent’s Tobacco Collection at the New York Public Library, the Braga Brothers Collection from the University of Florida, and the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. Explores fifteen commodities: chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver and gold, spices, sugar, tea,timber, tobacco, wheat, and wine and spirits.
Collection of primary and secondary resources, including writings, artworks, photographs, and maps for the study of travel, c. 1550-1850.
The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century: a phenomenon which shaped the creative and intellectual sensibilities of some of the eighteenth century’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers. These accounts of the English abroad, c.1550-1850, highlight the influence of continental travel on British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.
The Grand Tour includes the travel writings and works of some of Britain’s artists, writers and thinkers, revealing how interaction with European culture shaped their creative and intellectual sensibilities. It also includes many writings by forgotten or anonymous travelers, including many women, whose daily experiences offer an insight into the experience and practicalities of travel over the centuries.
Digital archive covering all aspects of 20th-century human migration. includes firsthand accounts from reputable sources around the world, covering such important events as post-World War II Jewish resettlement, South African apartheid, Latin American migrations to the United States and much more.
Contains reports gathered every day between the early 1940s and 1996 by a U.S. government organization that became part of the CIA . These include translated and English-language radio and television broadcasts, newspapers, periodicals and government documents, as well as an analysis of the reports.
Access to prominent and lesser-known periodicals published throughout the interwar period, covering various facets of culture, entertainment, fashion, home and family life, world current affairs, class, social and welfare issues. Includes access to modules 1 and 2.
Documents reflect the social, artistic and cultural dynamism that characterized the 'Roaring Twenties' in fashion, music, literature, dance and entertainment as well as post-war intellectual thought and modernism.
Provides digital access to documents relating to the evolution of British and American working class tourism from c.1850 to 1980.
Includes access to guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs, personal travel journals posters, and ephemeral items.
Primary source documents related to the history of injury, treatment and disease, and medical advances during warfare.
The four conflicts robustly represented are the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War. Many other conflicts also have relevant documents and can be discovered via keyword searching, including the Boer Wars, Spanish-American War and the Spanish Civil War. Includes access to two modules, 1850-1927 and 1928-1949. It covers medical advances during warfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the influenza epidemic in 1918, the discovery of penicillin in 1928, and up to post-war reforms such as the foundation of the British National Health Service.
Primary source documents related to the Portuguese colonial government and its policies and activities in Africa, 1910-1929.
This collection includes correspondence, studies and reports, cables, maps, and other kinds of documents related to U.S. consular activities. U.S. Consulates were listening posts reporting on the activities of the Portuguese colonial government and the activities of the native peoples. Highlights include the beginning of an anti-colonial movement and the industrialization and economic exploitation of Portugal’s African colonies.
Primary source materials chronicling the plight of refugees and displaced persons across Europe, North Africa, and Asia from 1935 to 1950. Includes pamphlets, ephemera, government documents, relief organization publications, and refugee reports that recount the causes, effects and responses to refugee crises before, during and shortly after World War II.
Access to The Early Cold War and Decolonization module available through June 12, 2026 via the Gale Accelerate Program, an evidence based acquisition model.
Coverage includes the entire “war theatre,” from evacuations in Burma and mass migrations within central and Eastern Europe to the displacement of North African populations and resettlement of refugees in Latin America.
Includes access to two modules: Forced Migration and World War II and The Early Cold War and Decolonization.
Access to documents chronicling the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trades.
European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Allows users to analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action. Also includes access to the African Names Database, which provides personal details of Africans taken from captured slave ships or from African trading sites. It displays the African name, age, gender, origin, country, and places of embarkation and disembarkation of each individual.
Designed as a portal for slavery and abolition studies, this resource provides access to documents and collections covering 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.
Access to legal materials on slavery in the United States and the Europe. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, the resource includes documents from several archives originally available only on microfilm. Includes the following sections: Part I: Debates Over Slavery and Abolition ; Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World ; Part III: The Institution of Slavery ; Part IV: The Age of Emancipation.
Collection of documentaries, newsreels and features by Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, East European, British and Latin American filmmakers, ranging from the early twentieth century to the 1980s.
Documents the communist world from the Russian Revolution until the 1980s. The digitized film covers all aspects of socialist life from society, war, culture, the Cold War, memory and contemporaneous views on current affairs. Footage includes documentaries, newsreels and feature films. Geographically the films deal with the Soviet Union alongside significant groupings of material on Vietnam, China, Korea, the German Democratic Republic and Eastern Europe, Britain, Spain, Latin America and Cuba. Includes access to three modules: Module I: Wars & Revolutions, Module II: Newsreels & Cinemagazines, and Module III: Culture & Society.
Provides access to official records, monographs, publicity, artwork and artifacts, covering world's fairs from the Crystal Palace in 1851 and the proliferation of North American exhibitions, to fairs around the world and twenty-first century expos.
Offers insight into the phenomenon of international expositions by presenting official records, monographs, personal accounts and ephemera for more than 200 fairs. The first fair represented in this resource is what many consider the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in London, 1851. The latest case study is Montreal’s Expo 1967, but there are documents as recent as Milan’s (successful) bid to host Expo 2015. The largest concentration of documents relate to fairs from the late Victorian-early Edwardian era of 1880-1920; the ‘golden age’ of expositions when neighboring cities raced to outdo each other – sometimes hosting rival fairs in the same year. While there are documents for host nations from every continent, the historical focus of international expositions (and therefore this resource) is Northern European, North American and – in the twentieth century in particular – East Asian.
About 800 valuable Yiddish books, printed in Hebrew letters, from the Frankfurt University Library.
The texts were printed in Hebrew letters in West, Central and East Europe. The dates range from the middle of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection contains the whole spectrum of Yiddish texts, including a large number of women's bibles (Tse'na Re'ena), liturgy, medical guide books, science and education, works on religious customs (Minhagim), legends, historical chronicles and translations of well known tales like "A Thousand and one Nights".
Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980. Includes access to sections I through IV.
Includes letters, diplomatic dispatches, reports, trial papers, activists’ biographies and first-hand accounts.
Collection of British and Irish women's personal writings spanning over 400 years.
Includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, and over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection also includes biographies and an annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
Facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials.
Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript. Images of the complete manuscript can be viewed, manipulated and navigated on screen. Please note that the text of the manuscripts themselves is not searchable.
British Literary Manuscripts Online is published in two parts: British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance and British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900
Chatham House Online Archive contains the publications and archives of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the independent international affairs policy institute founded in 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference.
The Institute's analysis and research, as well as debates and speeches it has hosted, can be found in this online archive, subject-indexed and fully searchable.
Official British government correspondence concerning Africa from the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office.
Includes correspondence, some one-page letters or telegrams, others large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked Confidential Print were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad. All documents are fully text-searchable, and the set includes collection of 300 maps separated from their parent print.
This collection consists of the Confidential Print for Central and South America and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Topics covered include slavery and the slave trade, immigration, relations with Indigenous Peoples, wars and territorial disputes, the fall of the Brazilian monarchy, British business and financial interests, industrial development, the building of the Panama Canal, and the rise to power of populist rulers such as Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil.
Covers a broad sweep of history from c. 1839 to 1969, taking in the countries of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, Iraq, Turkey and former Ottoman lands in Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and Sudan. Materials include reports, dispatches, correspondence, descriptions of leading personalities, political summaries, and economic analyses.
Beginning with the Egyptian reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 1830s, the documents trace the events of the following 150 years, including the Middle East Conference of 1921, the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia, the partition of Palestine, the 1956 Suez Crisis and post-Suez Western foreign policy, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This collection consists of the Confidential Print for the United States, Canada and the English-speaking Caribbean, with some coverage of Central and South America, and covers such topics as slavery, Prohibition, the First and Second World Wars, racial segregation, territorial disputes, the League of Nations, McCarthyism and the nuclear bomb.
The Confidential Print series was issued by the British Government between 1820 and 1970, and originated out of a need to preserve the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad.
Digital access to documents covering key events across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during a period of political upheaval, civil unrest and escalating conflict. Includes correspondence, maps, photographs and memoranda. Documents reveal the growing intervention from foreign powers, as China and the Soviet Union sought to expand their influence over communist parties in the region. Includes access to Section I: Crisis and Upheaval, 1959-1964 and Section II: Escalation, Reunification and Withdrawal, 1965-1979.
Access to British Foreign Office Political Correspondence files on Palestine and Transjordan, 1940-1948. Covers the modern history of the Middle East, the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, and the wider web of postwar international world politics.
Early records in the collection focus on events in Palestine, Britain’s policy toward Palestine, and how the situation in Palestine affected relations with other nations. The files also survey the contours of Arab politics in the wider Middle East. Additionally, they cover the political, philosophical, and personal fractures within and between both the Jewish and Arab communities from 1940-1948.
Contains every book published in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the United States between 1475-1700.
From the first book published in English through the 17th-century, this collection contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. The database offers complete citation information and page images.
Primary source documents covering the everyday lived experience in England from 1500-1700. Includes legal records, family correspondence, administrative records, wills, inventories and commonplace books, and images of everyday objects used in early modern households.
Also includes contextual essays by leading academics, as well as an interactive chronology.
Includes the writings of 30 18th-century writers from the British Isles.
Includes the works of 30 of the most influential writers of the British Isles in the eighteenth century. It contains 77 collected works or 96 discrete items, of which 71 are first editions.
The aim of the database is not to be definitive, but to provide a representative selection of texts from the eighteenth century; both those familiar to the modern reader and those popular when first published. The database gathers as complete a corpus as possible for the major authors of the period, such as Fielding, Richardson, Defoe, Sterne and Smollett. The strong representation of female authors and lesser-known writers augments this corpus, thereby providing a thorough and balanced collection.
Searchable electronic versions of every book published in Great Britain in the 18th century.
Based on the English Short Title Catalogue. Includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more.
Archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824. Also includes hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.
Eighteenth Century Drama features three distinct areas:
Primary source documents; the focus of which is the Larpent collection of plays and Anna Larpent's Diaries
John Larpent was the English Inspector of Plays from 1778-1824 and responsible for executing the Licensing Act of 1737, a landmark act of censorship which required the Lord Chamberlain's office to approve any play before it was staged. The main focus of Eighteenth Century Drama is the John Larpent plays from the Huntington Library; this is the collection of plays that Larpent preserved from the original licence submissions. There are over 2,500 plays which make up the majority of the collection. Also included are the diaries of Larpent's wife and professional collaborator Anna, recording her criticisms of plays as well as insights into theatrical culture and English society. The resource also features correspondence between key theatrical figures, biographical information, portraits, advertisement, historical information, and visual material.
The London Stage Database
The companion text, The London Stage 1660-1800, which lists every traceable performance 1660-1800, has been made available as a searchable database. The information from this database has been used to power the text analysis tool, The London Stage Data Associations in order to illustrate trends within and between theatres, across years, between works performed, roles enacted and actors included in The London Stage. Users can also view The London Stage in its original printed format.
The Biographical Dictionary Database
The companion text A Biographical Dictionary of Actors etc. 1660-1800 has also been made available as a searchable database.
British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1919 and 1980.
The six parts of this collection make available all British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1919 and 1980:
1919-1929: Kuomintang, CCP and the Third International
1930-1937: The Long March, civil war in China and the Manchurian Crisis
1938-1948: Open Door, Japanese war and the seeds of communist victory
1949-1956: The Communist revolution
1957-1966: The Great Leap Forward
1967-1980: The Cultural Revolution
This collection of files from the Foreign Office (later the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and Dominions Office focuses on the political and social history of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Consists of the complete run of documents in the series DO 133, DO 134 and FCO 37, as well as all documents covering the Indian subcontinent in the FO 371 series. Events covered include independence and partition, the Indian annexation of Hyderabad and Goa, war between India and Pakistan, tensions and war between India and China, the consolidation of power of the Congress Party in India, military rule in Pakistan, the turbulent independence of Bangladesh and the development of nuclear weapons in the region.
The files address these events from the standpoint of British officialdom. In addition to high politics, they deal with such issues as economic and industrial development, trade, migration, visits to South Asia by British politicians and by South Asian politicians to Britain and elsewhere, education, administrative reorganisation, conflict over language, aid, political parties, agriculture and irrigation, and television and the press. Together they form a resource of fundamental value to scholars and students of modern South Asia.
Primary source materials documenting the shifting nature of Anglo-Japanese relations in the first half of the twentieth century.
Includes access to three modules:
Japan, 1931-1945: Japanese Imperialism and the War in the Pacific:
Section one begins in 1931, as Japan invades Manchuria. This incident, and continued Japanese activities in the region, would lead to their dramatic withdrawal from the League of Nations and further alienation from the western powers they had allied with during the First World War. The files in this section document the decline in relations, through war in the Pacific, up until Japanese surrender on board the US Missouri in 1945.
Japan, 1946-1952: Occupation of Japan:
From 1946-1952 Japan was occupied by Allied Powers. The files for this period offer a British perspective on the creation of a democratic state in Japan and the enforcement of a new constitution. They include key British communications and reports covering topics such as war crime trials, reparations, and Japan’s economic recovery. They conclude in 1952, the year the Treaty of San Francisco normalized Anglo-Japanese relations and the first post-war British Ambassador to Japan, Esler Dening, was appointed.
Japan and Great Power Status, 1919-1930:
In 1919, as a vital member of the Allied Powers, Japan found itself occupying a new position of international power within a reorganized world order. The files in this section trace the development of this power and Japan’s relationship with the West during a decade of turbulent economic, political and social change in the wake of the First World War. Beginning with the Paris Peace Conference and the ‘Shantung Question’, the files offer insight into the events of the 1920s, from the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the devastation of the Kantō Earthquake, and the end of the Taishō democracy, to the beginning of the Shōwa period, financial crisis and Japan’s increasingly imperialist policies in Manchuria.
Collection of Foreign Office Files covering South East Asia between 1963 and 1980 in a time of conflict, growth and change.
Includes access to two modules: Module I: Cold War in the Pacific, Trade Relations and the Post-Independence Period, 1963-1966; and Module II: Foundations of Economic Growth and Industrialisation, 1967-1980.
This collection follows the establishment of an independent Malaysia in 1963, following the release of the Cobbold Commission Report. Under President Sukarno, Indonesia strongly opposed this decision and hostilities between the two countries escalated. Alongside tensions with Malaysia, Indonesia would experience growing civil unrest in this period, with anti-Communist sentiments on the rise. Documents featured in this collection cover these fundamental events alongside a number of key themes, including trade, economic development and authoritarian rule in this period.
Resource for primary source documents covering the events in the Middle East during the 1970s. Includes diplomatic correspondence, minutes, reports, political summaries and personality profiles.
Module 1: Middle East, 1971-1974: The 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the Oil Crisis
Explores the politics of the Middle East region in the run-up to the Arab-Israeli War and its effect on global industry, political relations and social stability, as well as providing in-depth coverage of separate conflicts in Cyprus, internal and external political relationships, and details about military exports.
Module 2, 1975-1978: The Lebanese Civil War and the Camp David Accords
The Foreign Office files in Module 2 tackle the aftermath of the Arab-Israel War, tracing the successes and failures of the prolonged peace talks led by Henry Kissinger, which conclude with the historic Camp David Accords in 1978. This module explores the economic and political impact this conflict had on the UK’s relationships with other Middle East nations, as well as continuing to track the progress of peace talks between Cyprus and Turkey. These files also contain reports on the devastating civil war in Lebanon and its impact on the region, as well as assessing the political climate in Iran in the run up to the revolution.
Module 3, 1979-1981: The Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War
Module 3 is dominated by conflicts in Iran, with extensive coverage of events surrounding the revolution, the hostage crisis at the United States Embassy, and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. These Foreign Office files also continue to examine the on-going peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel, with a particular focus on the Israeli Occupied Territories, and contain a number of personality profiles to accompany yearly country reviews.
Primary source materials documenting the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan.
Digital facsimiles from the manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland. Includes diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. The collection documents the relationship between Britain and India in an empire where the Scots played a central role as traders, generals, missionaries, viceroys, governor-generals and East India Company officials. The dates of the documents range from 1710 to 1937.
Poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period includes more than 80 volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842. Compiled and edited by Stephen Behrendt of the University of Nebraska, the database also offers numerous biographical and critical essays prepared by leading scholars specifically for the project. New content is added to the collection on a regular basis.
Complete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.
The database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and a large selection of color images demonstrating over 320 examples of 17th and 18th century English handwriting.
Collection of primary source documents related to the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions and the history of bookbinding.
Documents are sourced from the archive of The Worshipful Company of Stationers & Newspaper Makers, located at Stationers’ Hall in the City of London. Includes materials related to the history of the book as well as publishing history, the history of copyright and the workings of an early London Livery Company. Also includes rare documents dating from 1554 to the 21st century.
Searchable collection of color digital images of rare books, ephemera and other materials relating to popular culture in 19th and early 20th century London.
London Low Life is "A full-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 19th and early 20th century London."(OCLC)
London Low Life (subtitled on the site as Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld) includes Fast literature, Street ephemera, posters, advertising, playbills, ballads and broadsides, Penny fiction, Cartoons, Chapbooks, Street Cries, Swell’s guides to London prostitution, gambling and drinking dens, Reform literature, andMaps and views of London. Among its topics are the underworld, slang, working-class culture, street literature, popular music, urban topography, ‘slumming’ , Prostitution, the Temperance Movement, social reform, Toynbee Hall andpolice and criminality.
Listed as themes, you can explore:
Street Literature and Popular Print
Politics, Scandal and the News
Disreputable London
Sex, Prostitution and Obscenity
Religion, Charity and Social Reform
Crime and Justice
Geography and the Built Environment
Tourism
Leisure and Entertainment
Work, Industry and Commerce
Women and Gender
The database has a basic and advanced search. Pdfs of the items received may be downloaded and saved.Citations also will download into citation managers, including EndNote.
Provides coverage of the Cabinet conclusions (minutes) (CAB 128) and memoranda (CAB 129) of Harold Macmillan’s government, as well as selected minutes and memoranda of policy committees (CAB 134).
Sourced from The National Archives, the UK government's official archive. The resource casts new light on Britain's relationship with the EEC, Anglo-American ties, the Cold War, decolonization, and issues of public and political morality.
Field research into the cultural and social life of Britain from 1937 to 1965.
A pioneering social research organisation, Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, film-maker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles Madge. Their aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves', and by recruiting a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers they studied the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This resource covers the original Mass Observation project, the bulk of which was carried out from 1937 until the mid-1950s, offering insight into everyday life in Britain during these transformative years.
Consists of the directives (questionnaires) sent out by Mass Observation in the 1980s and the thousands of responses to them from the hundreds of Mass Observers. Addresses such topics as the Falklands War, clothing, attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, and Britain's relations with Europe.
Launched in 1981 by the University of Sussex as a rebirth of the original 1937 Mass Observation, its founders' aim was to document the social history of Britain by recruiting volunteers to write about their lives and opinions. It is one of the most important sources available for qualitative social data in the UK.
Provides digital access to manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA.
This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. “Perdita” means “lost woman” and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were “lost” because their writing exists only in manuscript form.
Access to original archival materials related to popular culture in the U.S. and U.K. from 1950-1975. Includes color images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia.
Primary source materials documenting the interactions between government policy and public philanthropy in Victorian and early twentieth-century society. Covers a shift in welfare reform and the social tensions surrounding poverty and public welfare.
Covers the complex social climate of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain between the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834 and the eventual abolition of the workhouse system in 1930. Includes materials covering the conditions of workhouses and the administration of the new poor relief system through the official government correspondence of the Poor Law Office, documenting conditions and providing reports of healthcare, diet, sanitation and employment within the institutions.
Access to historical materials on early modern English politics and culture. Includes correspondence, reports, memoranda, and parliamentary drafts from ambassadors, civil servants and provincial administrators of Tudor and Stuart Britain.
Includes access to: Part I: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Domestic ; Part II: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Foreign, Scotland, Borders, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council ; Part III: The Stuarts and Commonwealth, James I - Anne I, 1603-1714: State Papers Domestic ; Part IV: The Stuarts and Commonwealth, James I - Anne I, 1603-1714: State Papers Foreign, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council ; Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782, Part 1: State Papers Domestic, Military, Naval and Registers of the Privy Council ; The Stuart and the Cumberland Papers from the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle.
Access available through June 12, 2026 via the Gale Accelerate Program, an evidence based acquisition model. Digitized files from the Colonial Office of the British Government. Documents record Britain's administration and governance of countries under Britain's colonial rule, their international relations across the period, and the changing demographics and daily life of their inhabitants.
Indexing and full text of the British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers from 1901-2022.
The U.K. Parliamentary Papers are part of the historical record of Britain, its former Colonies and the world in general. They provide detailed primary sources for the study of history and for an understanding of legislation, policy making and the political environment.
Popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe during the years from 1779 to 1930.
Contains four modules:
Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic
This section explores the relationship between the popularity of Victorian magic shows and conjuring tricks and the emergence of séances and psychic phenomena in Britain and America. Contains material from the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature at Senate House, University of London, as well as the Harry Houdini archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks
This section focuses on the world of travelling entertainment, which brought spectacle to vast audiences across Britain, American and Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. From big tops to carnivals, fairgrounds and dime museums, it covers the history of popular shows and exhibitions from both audience and professional perspectives. The collection features hundreds of posters, postcards, photographs, cabinet cards and illustrations, in addition to handbills, pamphlets, manuscripts, printed ephemera, memorabilia, rare books, children’s literature and memoirs of celebrity showpeople.
Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment
This section features material on music halls, theatre (legitimate and illegitimate), pantomime, pleasure gardens, exhibitions, scientific institutions, and magic lanterns shows and dioramas. Also includes rare books, periodicals aimed at industry and fans, titles from the scarce popular series ‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’, posters and playbills, visual ephemera, and the archives of May Moore Duprez, the American music hall star who topped international bills with her ‘Jolly Little Dutch Girl’ act.
Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
Provides thorough coverage of Victorian and Edwardian visual entertainments, early optics, magic lantern shows, panoramas, dioramas, early photography, and early motion pictures. The source material is drawn from the collections of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. Based at the University of Exeter, the UK’s largest research center for the history of international cinema and pre-cinema.
Digital archive documenting the founding and economic development of Virginia (1590-1790).
This is an essential source for the study of the Atlantic World and Early Colonial Period. It documents the founding and economic development of Virginia as seen through the papers of the Virginia Company of London, 1606-1624. It then shows the continuing interest of the Ferrar family in the settlement of North America from Jamestown to the Bermudas. This collection provides a rich source for the study of trade between Britain and America. There is valuable evidence on the ethnic and gender composition of Virginia and new evidence of tensions amongst the colonists and of early relations with Native Americans. It is also a crucial source for London’s economic history and will be welcomed by religious and social historians of Early Modern England. The project is made up of four constituent parts:
Previously unpublished transcripts by Dr David Ransome of over 500 documents from the Virginia Company Archives. These will be fully searchable and are linked to the original manuscripts.
A fully searchable text of The Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols, Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1906-1933).
The complete Ferrar Papers from Magdelene College, Cambridge, together with a fully searchable listing linked directly to the manuscripts.
An extensive contextual introduction to the Ferrar papers and a wide range of maps, illustrations and other works.
This collection consists of two elements: A finding aid to women's studies resources in The National Archives, and original documents on the suffrage question in Britain, the Empire and colonial territories.
Begins with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary in July 1914 and continues through until the armistice between Germany and the Allies in November 1918, and beyond, into 1920. Documents cover a wide variety of topics on World War I as reported by and to the British Foreign Office. The documents include dispatches, reports, and telegrams.
Access to primary source documents on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich." The Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP [Records of the Party Chancellery of the National Socialist Party] cover decision-making in all areas of the Nazi regime, from the command system’s inner structure; to the history of legislative regulations in the “Third Reich,” and to state organized measures discriminating against and persecuting Jews, regime critics, and the church; as well as material on the history of one of the most important entities in the Nazi state.
Access to primary source documents on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich." Includes all articles on persons of the standard reference work Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, which was built up by the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration.
Full-text documents received in the British Foreign Office from all European states under Nazi occupation during World War II.
Collection of searchable original reports and documents from the British Foreign Office records, class F.O. 371 in the National Archives. Includes detailed information indexed by year and section, from the occupied states of Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the Vatican, and the "neutral" countries Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Items include newspaper articles but primarily intelligence reports, material such as political intelligence summaries, regular press surveys, estimates of the political situation, and reports on Economic and social conditions. There are also browsable indexes of persons, document types, senior officials, organizations, languages, and FO File numbers and a searchable chronology, all from the National Archives of the UK.
Digital access to the diaries of German Nazi politician, Joseph Goebbels. Contains transcriptions of all handwritten documents from 1923 to July 1941 as well as subsequent writings that were dictated up to 1945.
The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those who were in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Please note: To access users need to create an account with their official iu.edu email and submit a request.
Click more for instructions to create account and submit request, as well as more details about the archive.
The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with thirty-six affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions).
Create Account & Request Testimony:
1. IU Bloomington users must register with their official iu.edu email. To create an account select Log In, and then Join Now. Users will then receive a confirmation email.
2. Login and then enter a search term. Click on a testimony in the search results and request access. Please note that records truncate last names of those who gave testimony to protect their privacy. If you are looking for a specific person’s testimony, either shorten their last name to the first initial (“Eva B.”) or contact the archive directly. You only need to request access to one testimony to obtain viewing access for the entire collection.
3. Once the approval email is received, users may view testimonies. A browser refresh may be necessary.
Users who set up an individual account with their indiana.edu email will need to update their account to reflect their iu.edu email address before December 31, 2025. Please use the following instructions to update your account:
Digital access to 170 German-language titles of books and pamphlets. The collection presents anti-Semitism as an issue in politics, economics, religion, and education.
Most of the writings date from the 1920s and 1930s and many are directly connected with Nazi groups. The works are principally anti-Semitic, but include writings on other groups as well, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons. Also included are history, pseudo-history, and fiction.
Access to primary source documents on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich." Includes documents published by the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) titled Hitler – Speeches, Writings, Proclamations (1925–33). Focuses on Hitler’s speeches and includes documents from the Max Domarus edition (1932–1945) that first appeared in 1965. The source collection is supplemented by documentation of Hitler’s trial for high treason in 1924.
Access to documents related to the investigation and prosecution of war crimes committed by Nazi concentration camp commandants and camp personnel.
Documents include: correspondence; trial records and transcripts; investigatory material, such as interrogation reports and trial exhibits; clemency petitions and reviews; photographs of atrocities; newspaper clippings; and pamphlets. Many concentration (and later extermination) camps and sub-camps are represented in this collection, including Mauthausen, Dachau, Belsen-Bergen, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Sobibor, sub-camp Gros-Raming, sub-camp Gusen I, sub-camp Ebensee, and others.
The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) was organized in London in August 1938 as a result of the Evian Conference of July 1938, which had been called by President Roosevelt to consider the problem of racial, religious, and political refugees from central Europe. This collection comprises, in its entirety, the primary source media microfilm collection entitled Records of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, 1938-1947.
Access to two digital collections related to Holocaust Era Assets. The first includes records Regarding Bank Investigations and Records Relating to Interrogations of Nazi Financiers, from the records of the Office of the Finance Division and Finance Advisor in the Office of Military Government, U.S. Zone (Germany) (OMGUS), during the period 1945-1949. The second comprises Records Regarding Intelligence and Financial Investigations, 1945-1949, from the Records of the Financial Intelligence Group, Office of the Finance Adviser. These collections consist of memorandums, letters, cables, balance sheets, reports, exhibits, newspaper clippings, and civil censorship intercepts.
Digital access to documents covering the diplomatic, legal and political maneuvering during and after World War II regarding German art looting in Europe, recovery of cultural objects dispersed during World War II, efforts by the U.S. and other Allied Powers to prevent the secreting of Axis assets, claims from victims for financial or property restitution from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), other claims cases, and meeting minutes and background materials regarding the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold.
This collection reproduces the Tagebuch or journal of Dr. Hans Frank (1900-1946), the Governor-General of German-occupied Poland from October 1939 until early 1945. The journal is in typed format, in chronological order, covering all aspect of Generalgouvernment (GG) administration from its seat in the royal Wawel castle in Krakau (Kraków). The entries reflect administrative matters, rather than the spontaneous thoughts or feelings usually found in a diary.
Digital collection consisting of index cards listing the name, date and place of birth, occupation and last address of Jews whose German citizenship was revoked in accordance with the "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935, including Jews from Germany, Austria and Czech Bohemia. The cards are generally in alphabetical order. Suffix names "Israel" for men and "Sara" for women were added by law in 1936 to readily identify persons of Jewish descent.
The trial materials from the main Nuremberg war criminal trials in 1945-46 and the succeeding trials, consisting of over 200,000 pages of evidence.
An archive of primary source documents, covering the repatriation and emigration of the Displaced Persons and survivors of the Holocaust and World War II.
Files include original reports on orphans and Unaccompanied Children Under UNRRA Care, Voluntary Societies British Zone Monthly Reports, 1949-, Welfare Work Amongst Jewish Prison Inmates, DPs in Assembly Stations, 1950, Displaced persons and prisoners of war to and from Italy, Complaints about Russian refugees and displaced persons (DPs); allegations of mistreatment of Soviet nationals, and Repatriation and disposal of prisoners of war, surrendered personnel, displaced persons etc.
SAFEHAVEN was the code name of a project of the Foreign Economic Administration, in cooperation with the State Department and the military services, to block the flow of German capital across neutral boundaries and to identify and observe all German overseas investments during the World War II era. This collections includes SAFEHAVEM project documents digitized from the US National Archives.
To coordinate research and intelligence sharing regarding SAFEHAVEN-related topics, the War Crimes Branch received SAFEHAVEN reports from various agencies of the U.S. government in addition to SAFEHAVEN-related military attach reports regarding the clandestine transfer of German assets outside Germany that could be used to rebuild the German war machine or the Nazi party after the war, as well as art looting and other acts that elicited the interest of Allied intelligence agencies during the war. Another aspect of the SAFEHAVEN project was the restoration of looted art treasures to their rightful owners.
The leaders of the Nazi state were informed regularly of the mood of the population, the activities of regime opponents, and about state organized measures of persecution. This database includes access to these reports and research on resistance from a Nationalsocialist perspective.
Access to primary source documents on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich." Includes resistance and anti-regime writings published and distributed illegally in Germany and Austria from 1933 to the end of the war.
Digital access to the archives of the Wiener Library, London, the first archive to collect evidence of the Holocaust and the anti-semitic activities of the German Nazi Party.
Includes documentary evidence collected in several different programmes: the eyewitness accounts which were collected before, during and after the Second World War, from people fleeing the Nazi oppression, a large collection of photographs of pre-war Jewish life, the activities of the Nazis, and the ghettoes and camps, a collection of postcards of synagogues in Germany and eastern Europe, most since destroyed, a unique collection of Nazi propaganda publications including a large collection of 'educational' children's' books, and the card index of biographical details of prominent figures in Nazi Germany, many with portrait photographs. Pamphlets, bulletins and journals published by the Wiener Library to record and disseminate the research of the Institute are also included.
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view the 51,537 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide currently available in the Archive that were conducted in 61 countries and 39 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide. Please note: authorized IUB users may register for an account with their iu.edu email address. Users must accept vendor terms of use to complete registration process.
Access to primary source documents on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich."
Political resistance to National Socialism was defined by the judicial system of the “Third Reich” as high treason. Indictments and verdicts of cases brought before the various central courts are therefore an important source of information on the history of the German resistance. The database combines indictments and cases brought before the Reichsgericht, Volksgerichtshof, Reichskriegsgericht, and trails against Austrians in Vienna and Graz. Additionally, the database contains the political writing and letters of Carl Friedrich Goerdeler.
Digital access to documents related to WWII, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Map Room Files, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Records of the War Department Operations Division, U.S. Navy Action and Operational Reports, Records of the Office of War Information, Papers of the War Refugee Board, George C. Marshall Papers, FBI Files on Tokyo Rose, Manhattan Project documents, Potsdam Conference Documents, and records on lend-lease.