HISTORY: Asia

This full-text primary source collection includes materials on the international relations between Asian countries and the United States and Britain during the 19th century. It contains government reports, diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, newspapers, treaties, trade agreements, NGO papers, and more. Documents are sourced from The National Archives, Kew; The National Archives, United States; and other collections. Most of the collection focuses on China and Japan, but significant material addresses Siam, Korea, the Philippines, Sumatra and Vietnam as well.

NOTE: The link takes you to a gateway site. Select this collection from the options at that site.

From 1935-1967, Time Inc. offered Americans views of significant historical events in their newsreel series The March of Time. Several hundred of these newsreels can be searched and viewed as streaming videos. Transcripts of these commercial, documentary, instructional and public service videos accompany the films. In support of research and teaching, the resource enables users to create, edit, and share playlists or film clips.

“Presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia. The collection also includes a number of important accounts of travels to or through the Holy Land.” Documents “are in a range of languages including French, Latin, German, Spanish, Dutch and English. Supporting the manuscripts are relevant secondary texts of translations and editions, as well as full catalogue details.”

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.

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.

“The Making of the Modern World provides digital facsimile images of unique primary sources that track the development of the modern, western world through the lens of trade and wealth from 1450-1914.”

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.

Searchable 19th and 20th century newspapers from South Asia. Featuring titles from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

“The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users” It includes books, journals, maps, photographs, statistics and much more.

Mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. These cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards and magazines, on topics such as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform, were produced by both Kuomintang (Nationalist) and Gongchantang (Communist) supporters. Mostly in Chinese, but SOME PAMPHLETS ARE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH.

A full-text collection containing “an extensive range of archival material connected to the trading and cultural relationships that emerged between China, America and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. [It includes] Manuscript sources, rare printed texts, visual images, objects and maps”