Primary Source Collections
General Collections
Eighteenth Century Collections Online [via Gale]
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Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) provides full-text searchable access to the digital images of 150,000 books and other materials published during the 18th Century. Based on the English Short Title Catalog bibliography, it includes English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
Making of the Modern World [via Gale]
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“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.”
ARTFL
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The “Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language,” better known as ARTFL, offers access to a collection of texts in a web-based digital format, 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.
Europeana: Europe’s Digital Library
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Direct access to several million digital objects: film, photos, paintings, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers. Selected from previously digitized resources available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections. French and German cultural institutions are particularly well represented.
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection [via Gale, part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online ]
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From the Corvey Castle Library, this is a collection of nearly 18,000 monographs published in English, French and German between 1790 and 1840. NOTE: The link takes you to a gateway page. Select the European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection option before you begin your search.
Early European Books [via ProQuest]
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Specialized Collections
Medieval Travel Writing [via Adam Matthew]
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“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.”
Library of Humanistic Texts
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This is a full-text collection of critical editions (frequently with translations) of a large number of 16th and 17th century texts. It is created and maintained by Dana F. Sutton, University of California, Irvine.
Travels in Southeastern Europe [via UMDL]
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This is a full-text collection in several languages of 137 titles “that describe southeastern Europe, and in particular, Bosnia and Hercegovina, throughout history.” Almost all the titles were originally published in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.
Genealogy Indexer
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Search 740,000 pages of 1,523 historical directories (business, address, telephone, etc., mostly from Central and Eastern Europe), 114,000 pages of 256 yizkor books (memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust), 32,000 pages of military lists (officers, casualties, etc., mostly from the Russian Empire and Poland), 43,000 pages of community and personal histories, and 24,000 pages of Polish secondary school annual reports and other school sources. New genealogy sources are added weekly.
e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland
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A full-text collection of Medieval Manuscripts. “At the moment, the virtual library contains 333 manuscripts from 16 different libraries. The virtual library will be continuously updated and extended.”
Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
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“Wisconsin Historical Society archivists interviewed 22 Holocaust survivors and two American witnesses between 1974 and 1981. These oral histories are now available digitally and in their entirety for the first time, uncensored and unfiltered.”
World War I Document Archive
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This site includes the full text of dozens of World War One-related documets. These include treaties, speeches and diaries. There are also extensive collections of texts pertaining to the War at Sea and to World War 1 medicine.
Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation (VHA)
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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.
Loeb Classical Library
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Online access to all of the in print volumes of this major series of Greek and Latin texts with facing translations. From the publisher: “The Loeb Classical Library® is the only existing series of books which, through original text and English translation, gives access to all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; those Church fathers who made particular use of pagan culture—in short, our entire classical heritage is represented here in convenient and well-printed pocket volumes in which an up-to-date text and accurate and literate English translation face each other page by page. The editors provide substantive introductions as well as essential critical and explanatory notes and selective bibliographies.”