HISTORY: Africa & the Middle East

Africa-Wide Information (formerly Africa Wide NiPAD) combines databases to form a multidisciplinary aggregation of sources offering unique and extensive coverage of all facets of Africa and African studies. Includes over 2.4 million citations and abstracts dating back to the 16th century.The advanced search allows the research to search all the collected datasets or focus on particular sets.

This extensive annotated bibliography explores multidisciplinary literature that is “diverse, fast moving, controversial, and scattered among unfamiliar sources, we have asked leading scholars to identify the most significant themes and areas of study in their fields, recommend the best sources for exploring them, and discuss these works conceptual and empirical significance to provide a series of guided studies through the diverse approaches to a wide array of complex subjects.

“The scholarly study of children and young people is a relatively new multidisciplinary effort that spans multiple epistemologies and methodologies, making it challenging for students and scholars to stay informed. From psychology to labor rights, from ethics to education, Childhood Studies is one of the most active fields in academia today. It encompasses the meanings that adults place on children’s innocence or competence, and interrogates the notion of childhood as a social category. . . .   Researchers and practitioners at all levels need tools that help them filter through the proliferation of information sources to material that is reliable and directly relevant to their inquiries. Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

This extensive annotated bibliography focuses on the “interactions between different peoples and cultures on four continents and many islands in the period between Columbus’ voyages to the New World in the late fifteenth century and the end of slavery in the Americas in the late nineteenth century.” It consists of more than 100 separate entries, presenting the best in modern scholarship as well as key primary sources. Entries can be geographical (“Brazil, the Caribbean), or broadly or narrowly topical (Religion, Sugar.

“Oxford Bibliographies in International Law is designed to provide authoritative guidance. The field is rife with debate and controversy, as with most anything that deals with such a complex system of rules and principles meant to govern the relations between states and other institutional subjects, such as the United Nations or the European Union. Because scholarship in this field is so bound up with diplomacy, the vast array of potentially relevant material that appears on the free web can overwhelm even the savviest scholars. . . . Oxford Bibliographies in International Law will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

“The study of military history has evolved into a multidisciplinary effort to go beyond the history of military operations to consider broader political, cultural, and social questions. It spans across several disciplines and genres, including sociology and political science, biography, war and battle narratives, the history of technology, foreign affairs and international relations, and various national histories. From ancient military history to contemporary studies of international conflict, a great deal of this work has moved online with the most recent scholarship, research, and statistics appearing in online databases and often only discoverable through online search tools. . . . Oxford Bibliographies in Military History will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

The Collection indexes and abstracts 400 journals pertaining to all branches of the military and government; full text is available for close to 300 titles, including some U.S. government documents.

Full text of sixty-nine historic newspapers from different African cities. Coverage differs per title. Dates range and represents 1800-1920s. This selection is a subsection of Readex’s World Newspaper archive. See link below.

“This full-text collection includes “all of the most important papers generated by the [British] Foreign and Colonial Offices. Some of these were one-page letters or telegrams; others were large volumes or texts of treaties.” It covers a “broad sweep of history from c. 1839 to 1969, taking in the countries of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, Iraq, Turkey and many of the former Ottoman lands in Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and Sudan.”

This is a full-text collection of documents from the “United Kingdom’s Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices’ confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966.”

Empire Online contains several thousand searchable scanned images of original documents relating to Empire Studies. Includes documents from English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and German points of view, and that from indigenous peoples from Africa, India and North America. Sections also include thematic essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies.

This is a full-text collection of the publications of the British philanthropic institutions, the Church Missionary Society and the South American Missionary Society from 1804-2009. Documenting missionary work from the 19th to the 21st century, the periodicals include news, journals and reports offering a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounter. The CMS was active in many African countries, the “Mediterranean, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

This collection documents the broad range of nineteenth century religious missionary activities, practices and thought in the United States by reproducing pivotal personal narratives, organizational records and biographies of the essential leaders, simple missionaries and churches. It contains valuable primary source materials on the places the missionaries worked, including Africa, Fiji and Sandwich Islands, India, China, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Hawaii.

Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence.

With a current collection of more than 54,000 eyewitness testimonies, the Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world. It preserves history as told by the people who lived it. Each testimony is a unique source of insight and knowledge, offering powerful stories from history that demand to be explored and shared. In this way we will be able to see their faces and hear their voices, allowing each of them to teach and inspire action against intolerance.