Primary Sources - World History - History - LibGuides at Bethel College Library

NINES

NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online

"Devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first."

EuroDocs

EuroDocs is an online directory of primary documents in Western European history compiled by Richard Hacken, librarian at Brigham Young University.

Highly recommended.

Gallica

The Digital Library of the National Library of France (compare with American Memory, Library of Congress)

U.K. National Archives

The National Archives of the United Kingdom (compare with NARA in the U.S.)

Online collection highlight: U.K. Cabinet Papers: 1915-1980

BOOKS: Primary-Source European History Databases

The following databases provide electronic reproductions of full-text primary-source books and other texts. See also the Find Books tab.

Google Books
Open-access, full-text database of thousands of titles published prior to 1930, and many published more recently. The advanced search, while not as flexible as the Diamond catalog or OCLC's Worldcat, nevertheless permits limiting by title (e.g., Berlin) and date published (e.g. 1865-1890).
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG)
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century BCE) and CE 600, as well as the majority of surviving works up to the fall of Byzantium in CE 1453.
Summon Coverage: Unknown.
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A polytonic Greek font must be installed on your computer in order to view some texts. With some browsers, you may also be able to input your search in Greek; with others, you may have to input Beta Code or Latin Transliteration.

PERIODICALS & NEWSPAPERS: Primary-Source European History Databases

The following database index and in most cases provide electronic reproductions of full-text primary source journals and newspapers.

Google News Archive
Paper of Record was a freely accessible database of historical newspaper images from around the world. In January 2009 the site's content disappeared after having been purchased by Google for its Google News Archive, causing much consternation among historians. As it turns out, scholars were right to be concerned. Click "i" for more information.
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Most titles but not all eventually made the transition from Paper of Record to Google News Archive. Unfortunately, as of May 2011 -- and after only 32 months in operation -- Google announced an end to its historical newspaper digitization program. Read more about the program's cessation in this blog post by well-known librarian Gary Price, or this scathing article by Latin American scholar Richard J. Salvucci. As quoted by Price in his post, Search Engine Land received from Google the following information about access to the content currently available: "Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing."

Summon Coverage: Unknown.
ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers (CRL)
"This page highlights and links to past, present, and prospective digitization projects of historic newspapers. The focus is primarily on digital conversion efforts, not full-text collections of current news sources" (Center for Research Libraries).
Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ)
The purpose of this now concluded open-access project was to digitize "substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data".
Summon Coverage: Unknown.
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Made possible through the cooperation of the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford. Twenty-year consecutive runs of six British journals -- three from the 18th century and three from the 19th century -- are available online.

German Archives

Bundesarchiv Berlin
German Federal archives in Berlin; equivalent to NARA (National Archives and Records Administration)
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

More Options

More help locating historical documents online and in libraries and archives throughout the country and world...

Internet History Sourcebooks

From Fordham University. "The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use."

Internet History Sourcebooks Project.

STILL IMAGES: Primary-Source European History Databases

These collections of still photographs and other images constitute an invaluable record of the past.

LIFE Photo Archive via Google
"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

History: Primary Sources - World History