HISTORY: Europe

Provides the most comprehensive, current bibliography of international scholarly literature in Medieval Studies available.

This database is the combined archive  of two bibliographic indexes, Pascal and Francis. They provide multidisciplinary and multilingual coverage of humanities and social sciences. Source documents include journal articles, books, conference proceedings, dissertations, and reports.  It was produced and is now hosted as an open access resource by the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

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.”

This extensive set of 120 bibliographic entries explores the world as known to Europeans during the period “which spans roughly from the 14th through 17th centuries. The entries provide excellent orientations to seminal and current scholarships on broadly (the Ottoman Empire)and narrowly constructed topics (Montaigne).

This extensive set of annotated bibliographies “explores European and Mediterranean civilization from the 4th to the 15th centuries” through the lenses of many different academic disciplines. Nearly 100 entries are organized around people, places, concepts, ideas, events and more. They offer, equally, a survey of what is new as well as thoughtful orientations to key primary and secondary literature.

“This database contains the data of two former EBSEES databases, one for 1991-2000, the other for 2001-2006. The new unified database with about 85.500 titles has been developed by the Berlin State Library in cooperation with the Maison des Sciences de l´Homme, Paris. For the years 1975-1990 EBSEES is available in printed form only. Work on adding records to EBSEES ended in 2007, and no further editing will take place after December 2007. The end date for each country’s contribution varies.”

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. Because of the explosion of research in Women’s Studies during the past two decades, scholars and students interested in women during the Middle Ages find an ever-growing flood of publications. Identifying relevant works in this mass of material is further complicated by the interdisciplinary nature of much of the scholarship. In order to help researchers find current articles and essays quickly and easily, librarians and scholars began compiling the Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index in July 1996. Books written by a single author are not indexed in Feminae; for these, check library catalogs that have strong collections in medieval studies.

“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.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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 traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.

Early European Books provides scholars with new ways of accessing and exploring all works printed in Europe before 1701, drawing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield. Developed and produced in close collaboration with scholars, rare book librarians, bibliographers, and other experts from the library world, this resource offers full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of some of the world’s most significant collections of early printed books in Europe.  More information

“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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

“Pravda was the official voice of Soviet communism and the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1918 and 1991, when Boris Yeltsin signed a decree closing Pravda down. Founded in 1912 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Pravda originated as an underground, daily workers’ newspaper, and soon became the main newspaper of the revolutionary wing of the Russian socialist movement. After the collapse of the USSR, nationalist and communist journalists intermittently published a print newspaper and an online newspaper under the name Pravda. Today, Pravda represents the oppositional stance of the Communist Party in the Russian Federation.”

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.

“These magazines were written by and for every type of unit from every combatant nation. As such they contain the hitherto unheard voices of hundreds of thousands of men and women writing from every facet of the conflict. . . Although the majority of journals that have survived originate from units based on the Western Front in France and Belgium, there are also magazines from units serving on the Eastern Front, in Gallipoli, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Britain and America.

BANCHE DATI DI PERIODICI DISPONIBILI ON LINE–This is an Italian language list of and links to (mostly)European journal and newspaper collections digitized by libraries and other institutions. It is especially useful for Italian publications.

Google has a growing collection of digitized historic and contemporary newspapers mostly from the U.S. and Canada. It’s hard to know exactly what is included, but this link goes to the alphabetical list of papers including the years covered and number of issues scanned.

This innovative site seeks to “provide the user. . .with new ways to understand the relationship of hundreds of buildings conditionally described as ‘Gothic’. . .within a defined period of time and space that corresponds to the advent of the nation of France.” It “seeks to establish linkages between the architectural space of individual buildings, geo-political space, and the social space resulting from the interaction (collaboration and conflict) between multiple agents—builders and users.”

“The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. . . .”

The Album Interactif de Paléographie Médiévale/Interactive Album of Mediaeval Palaeography is an interactive site to practice reading and transcribing Mediaeval Latin and Old French. It is a project of the CIHAM (Centre Interuniversitaire d’Histoire et d’Archéologie Médiévales)in Lyon, France.