History: European History

Produced by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Provides information on East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, covering subjects such as anthropology, culture and the arts, economics, education, and geography. Sources indexed include journals, books, dissertations, and selected government publications published in the U.S. and Canada.

Based on the FRANTEXT database (formerly the Tresor de la Langue Francaise). Consists of nearly 2000 texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to non-fiction prose and technical writing, representing the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries about equally. Includes novels, verse, works for theater, journalism, essays, treatises in fields such as biology, history, economics, and philosophy, and correspondence. Also contains a small selection of 17th-century texts, as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts.

Digital collection of books published from 1723-1921 that addressed religion and social movements, including women's rights, church and state, abolition, evolution, and education reforms.

Provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles and the British Empire and Commonwealth during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. A guide to the work of historians, the Bibliography does not contain original sources, unless they have been edited and republished by historians. Material is included irrespective of place or language of publication, although coverage is best for works published in Britain.

"Provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images."

"Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War."

Collection of works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, as well as pre-1701 works in European languages printed elsewhere. “Builds upon and complements Early English Books Online (EEBO) and is largely concerned with non-Anglophone materials,” but nevertheless includes books in English or printed in the English-speaking world that are represented in the EEBO collection.

Primary-source material covering the history of the East India Company, which originated as a 16th-century trading venture to the East Indies and at its peak became the world’s most powerful company and de facto ruler of India, controlling “over a quarter of the world’s trade and millions of the global populace.” Documents that include minutes of council meetings and council resolutions, charters, texts of legislation, correspondence, and printed books address subjects such as agriculture; courts and legal affairs; diplomacy, treaties and ambassadorial expeditions; railways; trade; and warfare and military matters. A handwritten text recognition feature enables full text searching across manuscript documents; a data visualization feature, with interactive maps and graphs, supports analysis of trade statistics.

Aims to cover every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works printed in the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, and ephemera focusing on topics in subject areas such as language and literature; religion and philosophy; fine arts; history and geography; social sciences; law; and medicine, science, and technology.

Offers integrated access to rare journals illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century political, social, and intellectual life. Among the topics addressed: writings of Sir Isaac Newton; the French Revolution; reviews of European literature, theater, and fashion; the origins and rise of Romanticism; gender; religion; political debates; influence of the press; and coffee house gossip and discussion.

"Lists over 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800, mainly but not exclusively in English, published mainly in the British Isles and North America, from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries."

"Contains more than 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750. It covers the history of European exploration as well as portrayals of native American peoples. A wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery."

Offers online access to the entire run of the ILN from its first publication on 14 May 1842 to its last in 2003, with each page digitally reproduced in full color and searchable full text of every article and caption.

Contains on-line resources for research and teaching about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (400-1700). Enables users to access citations in journal, book, and reviews databases. Provides on-line access to Paul Oskar Kristeller's Iter Italicum (a finding list of Renaissance humanistic manuscripts) and to an international directory of scholars. Citations for books, journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogs, abstracts, and discographies) are included in the Iter Bibliography, as are citations for dissertation abstracts and essays in books (including entries in conference proceedings, festschriften, encyclopedias, and exhibition catalogues).

Based on the archive of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspapers Makers, an entity that was “instrumental in the development of the printed book in early modern England, exerting enormous power over the publishing industry as it developed.” Includes the Entry Book of Copies (1554-1842); the Court Records (1602-1982); and the English Stock documents (1603-1961). Primary-source documents addressing the history of printing, publishing, bookselling, and copyright are supplemented by secondary-source features such as chronologies, biographies, and contextual essays. Relevant to research on the book trade; print culture from the early modern period to the twentieth century; English literature; Renaissance theatre; and the history of the City of London.

A collection of primary-source material addressing working-class culture, criminality and policing, prostitution, social reform, street literature, popular music, and urban topography in 19th-century London. Includes street ephemera (posters, advertising, playbills, ballads, and broadsides), penny fiction, cartoons, maps, a complete collection of Tallis’ Street Views, and “swell’s guides” to London prostitution, gambling, and drinking dens. An interactive map feature enables users to “overlay Victorian cartography over a modern, searchable base map, allowing comparison of the Victorian city with present-day London.”

Archive of Mass Observation, a pioneering social research organization founded in Great Britain in 1937. Holds material that can be relevant to research in cultural and social history, sociology, anthropology, education, literature, gender studies, and war studies. Among the subjects addressed in diaries, survey questionnaires and responses, file reports, original manuscript and typescript papers, printed publications, photographs, and interactive maps are various aspects of day-to-day lives of respondents during the period of 1937-1967. Topics include class, race, religion, sexual behavior, marriage, fashion, reading, radio and music, cinema, gambling, smoking, capital punishment, politics, World War II, propaganda, the atomic bomb, and the Korean War.

Database of content related to British and American nineteenth-century studies from the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES). Includes images and records of items held in numerous collections.

A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century.
Collections available: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; Children's Literature and Childhood; Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature; Photography: The World through the Lens; Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform; Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925 (Parts I & II); Women: Transnational Networks.

A resource produced in association with a joint University of Warwick-Nottingham Trent University project that identifies and describes writing by early modern women in the period 1500-1700. Content includes poetry, religious works, autobiographical material, cookery and medical recipes, and accounts. Detailed catalog descriptions are linked to digital facsimiles of the original manuscripts, and contextual essays and biographical and bibliographical resources are provided.

Archive of political extremist primary source materials, including oral histories, government records, campaign literature, and ephemera, drawn from collections such as the American Radicalism collection (Michigan State University), the Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda (Brown University), the Searchlight Archive (University of Northampton, UK) and the UK National Archives (UK).

Offers fully searchable full text from the most widely read and referenced Russian-language news source for Russia and the Soviet Union. Covers the era from 1912 through 2009, including the Russian Revolution, World War II, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union.

1939-1948 publications for soldiers, sailors, and airmen from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, India, and countries of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East serving in major theaters of World War II. Intended to support morale and to create an atmosphere of solidarity, wartime journalism helped to keep service personnel informed about events in their units and immediate locality and delivered news from home and about the war at large. Covers both newspapers issued by official entities and some written by service personnel themselves, including Union Jack, Stars and Stripes (London edition, for American troops in the European theatre), The Maple Leaf (for Canadian troops), Eighth Army News (for British troops in Italy), Springbok (for South African troops in the Middle East), and Victory and Fauji Akhbar (for troops serving in India).

This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba.

[1785 to within about 6 years of the current date] A “full-text facsimile” of “the oldest daily newspaper in continuous publication” and “one of the most highly regarded resources for eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century news coverage, with every page of every issue from 1785.”

Archival Victorian popular culture collections including content from the Senate House Library, University of London; The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; The British Library; the British Film Institute National Archive and more.

Registration (free) required for first-time users.

Streaming video interviews and testimonies from genocide survivors and witnesses including content from the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1996.

"A subject-inclusive, language-inclusive bibliography of 50,000 publications, 48,000 personal names, 4,572 issuing bodies and 756 subjects."

Offers "text searchable access to full page facsimiles" of pages from British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, Action!, Blackshirt, the Yorkshire Post, and the Daily Worker.