Pursuing Primary Sources

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Internet Archive is a non-profit collection of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3.9 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

A free database of pre-1900 documentary watercolours from private as well as public collections around the world

Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge. The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

Explore more than 130,000 digitized images from the Newberry’s renowned Graff collection, documenting America’s westward expansion. Topics covered include narratives from explorers, pioneers, hunters, traders, and prospectors; accounts of the Mormon treks of 1846 and 1849, the California gold rush, and overland travel during the 19th century; the development of transcontinental railroads; the growth of Western city and town life; and the history and culture of Native Americans.

Learn about Islamic medicine and science during the Middle Ages and the important role it played in the history of Europe. This site, with its biographies, colorful images, and extensive historical accounts of medieval medicine and science is designed for students and everyone interested in the history of Islamic and European culture.

This collection features digital copies of 113 antique maps of Africa and accompanying text dating from the mid-16th Century to the early 20th Century. All scanned maps are authentic and originally collected by the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. Melville J. Herskovits established Northwestern University's Program of African Studies in 1948.

AODL is an open access digital library of African cultural heritage materials created by Michigan State University in collaboration with museums, archives, scholars, and communities around the world.

Online access for the first time to a wealth of previously unexplored records on the history of Madagascar.

DISA is a freely accessible online scholarly resource focusing on the socio-political history of South Africa, particularly the struggle for freedom during the period from 1950 to the first democratic elections in 1994, providing a wealth of material on this fascinating period of the country’s history.

Digital collection of items related to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, pre-genocide history and post-genocide reconstruction processes.

These posters represent a sampling (approximately 2200) of our growing collection of over 5000 Africana posters housed at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The subjects covered here include politics, health, religion, liberation struggles, art exhibitions, and social issues.

The James J. Ross Archive of African Images presents approximately 5000 pictures of African art published before 1921.

Extensive archive of over 40 000 resources, including text, pdfs, audio and video material. The archive is searchable by keyword and medium. It is organised into collections of related material.

The collection portrays both African life and European life in Africa in all its manifestations. It chronicles the daily experience of colonial residents: how they traveled, the lives they created for themselves, their social activities, and their early interaction with the rest of Africa. There are images of Europeans on hunting safaris, of African chiefs and royalty, and of the African landscape, revealing how it changed over time.

Free access to the Ibero-American digital cultural heritage

Milner Library’s Circus and Allied Arts Collection is one of the largest special collections of its type in existence. While the primary focus of the collection is upon the circus, related arts such as carnivals, sideshows, carousels, conjuring, music halls, and vaudeville are also represented.

This collection of more than 140,000 clippings, arranged by subject and date, includes news stories and editorials from newspapers, mostly Canadian, documenting every aspect of the war. The English-language clippings are from the archive of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper, while the French-language materials are from a collection of the newspaper Le Devoir.

The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis.

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

Explore more than 100,000 digitized images from the Newberry's Edward E. Ayer collection, one of the world's premiere sources of primary documents on American Indians. Topics covered include Native American archaeology, ethnology, art, and language; the history of the contact between Europeans and native peoples; voyages, travels, and accounts of early America; the development of cartography of the Western Hemisphere; and the history of the aboriginal peoples under the jurisdiction of the U.S. in the Philippine Islands and Hawaii.

Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) collection is the shared documentary heritage of all Canadians and spans the entire history of our country. The collection contains materials in all types of formats from across Canada and around the world that are of interest to Canadians.

Explore more than 80 digital projects covering a wide array of subjects including, art, architecture, history and literature, engineering, medicine, maps, music, and urban design.

The entire collection of Chinese video interviews with English subtitles is available online. While this collection contains just the video recordings, please see The CR/10 Project site for more information.

Propaganda posters created by various Chinese agencies, 1968-1989.

The material initially selected for inclusion in this database was from the Cultural Revolution period, however additional materials from outside this period (which are relevant to the events of the Cultural Revolution) are also being included.

The Fine Arts Library and Harvard-Yenching Library holds rubbings of objects that date from the Qin Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty.

A variety of primary sources and more related to South Asia.

Digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, and slides of colonial Taiwan (1900-45) and occupied Japan (1947-52). The collection is built around core sub-collections of visual materials donated by the family of Gerald & Rella Warner and Michael Lewis.

Leading scholars from India, Pakistan, the US, UK, and Europe have published their work in slideshows, essays and articles that cover the basic facts and the latest research.

JACAR has built and operates an online database for releasing Asian historical records, that are historical documents of Japan concerning to the modern Japanese relations with other countries, particularly those in Asia. The documents of the archive are provided by the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and the National Institute for Defense Studies of the Ministry of Defense of Japan.

During the Korean War, North Dakota native Albert G. Brauer served as Chief of the Projects Branch, Psychological Warfare Division, G3 section. He was responsible for overseeing the creation of propaganda pamphlets that were airdropped over North Korea. This collection contain propaganda leaflets produced by the United States Army a as well as leaflets produced by the communist forces in Korea.

Ling long women's magazine, published in Shanghai from 1931 to 1937, was popular during a time of dramatic material, social, and political change in China. Today, the magazine offers researchers a unique glimpse into women's lives in Republican-era (1911-49) Shanghai. This site features Columbia University's collection of Ling long magazine, one of the most complete holdings outside China.

The Old Hong Kong Newspapers Collection is a selective collection of major old Hong Kong Newspapers published from early Hong Kong to nowadays, aiming at preserving historical news reporting of Hong Kong for reference and research.

a database of the recollections of the lives and times of Mongolians, from herders to prominent politicians as they shaped and were shaped by the events of the twentieth century, which saw Mongolia move from being a part of the Qing Empire to an aristocratic theocracy to Soviet-style socialism and democracy.

Welcome to SAOA. South Asia Open Archives is a free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.

Virtual Shanghai is a research and resource platform on the history of Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century to nowadays. It incorporates various sets of documents: essays, original documents, photographs, maps, quantitative data, etc. The objective of the project is to write a history of the city through the combined mobilization of these various types of documents. The implementation of this approach relies on the use of digital and GIS technologies. On the research side, the platform offers various ways to step into the history of the city and follow its course at different levels over time. On the resource side, apart from providing original textual and visual documents, it develops a powerful cartographic tool for spatial analysis and real-time mapping (to be upgraded soon). The authors of the present project suscribe to the idea of sharing scholarship and research tools for the benefit of scholars, students, and citizens at large

The Digital Panopticon website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey, to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and to learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.

Open Access Infrastructure for a Future Web of Culture and Science

These open access sources are readily available to all -- without fees or subscriptions. Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.

Europeana empowers the cultural heritage sector in its digital transformation. We develop expertise, tools and policies to embrace digital change and encourage partnerships that foster innovation.

The European Library is designed to meet the needs of the research community worldwide, our online portal offers quick and easy access to the collections of the 48 National Libraries of Europe and leading European Research Libraries.

A collection available through the Royal Collection Trust

The catalogue of digitised content, Georgian Papers Online, is updated regularly with new content as the cataloguing and digitisation work progresses. For a full list of the collections currently available, please see What's in the Catalogue?

Browse or search over 200,000 items related to European History

The online collection comprises visual images of photographs, posters, paintings, banners, sculptures, chinaware, pins, etc. relating to Stalin/ism.

a digital public library of Arab and Islamic culture

Digitally available scroll fragments.

An Image Database of Persian Historical Documents from Iran, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

Early Tel Aviv through the Eyes of the Eliasaf Robinson Collection

A unique resource for the study of modern Iranian history.

During the summer of 1919, a delegation under the leadership of Oberlin College President Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman Charles R. Crane travelled to areas of the former Ottoman territories. Their mission was to determine the wishes of the people of the region as their future was being determined by the major powers at the Paris Peace Conference. The King-Crane Commission, as it became known, met delegations and invited written petitions from various religious and political groups. This digital collection unifies the archival records of Commission members for the first time. It also includes resources on conducting research in the collection.

The Middle Eastern Posters collection comprises posters produced by government offices and private organizations, primarily in Iran and Afghanistan

The Middle East Water Collection provides access to over 5,000 public items on political, socio-economic, demographic, and legal issues of water in the Middle East. Materials include data, books, journal and newspaper articles, and documents published in the Middle East, Europe, and North America originating from a variety of publishers and national and multinational agencies and organizations.

This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time.

Explore the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.