History

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

All Archives are cross-searchable, and contain tools for searching, browsing, analyzing and visualizing primary source content.

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).

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.

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).

Includes epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The database contains texts from all five divisions of MGH: Scriptores, Leges, Diplomata, Epistolae, and Antiquitates.

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.

The collection includes primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Includes access to guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs, personal travel journals posters, and ephemeral items.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Includes letters, diplomatic dispatches, reports, trial papers, activists’ biographies and first-hand accounts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also includes contextual essays by leading academics, as well as an interactive chronology.

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.

Based on the English Short Title Catalogue. Includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Onemail Instructions

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:

1. Log into your Fortunoff account.
2. Select profile from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner.
3. Update your email in the email field. 
4. Select Update.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.