Dr. Kurt Hackemer

Primary Document Collections in European History

One of the limitations of ID Weeks Library is its weak European history collection, particularly in terms of primary sources. Students writing research papers for HIST446 European Military History may consult the web sites listed below. Remember, the documents listed on these sites may be transcriptions, not digital images. Use them with appropriate caution. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you find a good web site that you think belongs here, please let me know.

Those doing research on World War I will want to consult these blog posts listing resources for WWI on Land and WWI at Sea and in the Air.

• The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
• British Library World War One project - Discover World War One historical sources from both sides of the conflict, contributed by institutions from across Europe.
• The Cabinet Papers, 1915-1986 - digitized UK Cabinet papers.
• Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts - Offers a simple and straightforward means to discover medieval manuscripts available on the web.
• De Re Militari Online Resources for Medieval Warfare
• Digital Bodleian - Digitized collections from Oxford University.
• Digital Collections: Trinity College Library
• Documents of Diplomatic History
• Documents in Military History
• Documents in Russian History
• Early English Books Online - More than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from the first 200 years of the printed book (1473-1700), with an additional 40,000 texts are planned for release into the public domain by the end of the decade.
• ECO: Early Canadiana Online - Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital library providing access to 2,009,084 pages of Canada's printed heritage. It features works published from the time of the first European settlers up to the early 20th Century.
• EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe. Selected Transcriptions, Facsimiles and Translations
• First World War Primary Documents
• French Revolution Digital Archive - The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.
• German History in Documents and Images
• Hansard 1803-2005 - digitised editions of Commons and Lords Hansard, the Official Report of debates in Parliament.
• Historical Text Archive
• Letters from David Lloyd George to his brother
• Military History on the Web - University of Washington Libraries
• Internet Library of Early Journals - A digital library of 18th and 19th Century British journals, including the Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Note and Queries, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and The Builder.
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project - Consists of three major sourcebooks (listed here) and a number of thematically based sourcebooks derived from the first three. Ancient History Sourcebook -- Medieval Sourcebook -- Modern History Sourcebook
• The Labyrinth - Resources for Medieval History
• Letters from World War One and Two - Primary source website dedicated to databasing as much mail from soldiers of World War One and Two as possible and making them freely available online. Site contains hundreds of letters, envelopes, stamps, photos and miscellanous items.
• Napoleon Digital Library
• Northvegr Foundation: Northern European Studies documents - Primary sources covering pre-Christian European history.
• Puck's Homepage: Uniting Mugwumps and the Masses - Discusses how the cartoons in Joseph Keppler's satirical magazine Puck conveyed the liberal viewpoint during the 1880's.
• Roman Military History
• Sassoon Journals - notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) during his service in the British Army in the First World War
• Texts for Ancient History Courses
• Turning the Pages - Digital images of great books and manuscripts from the British Library.
• World Digital Library - A United Nations project that makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
• World History Sources
• The World War I Document Archive