LibGuides: HIST 238: War and Peace: 20th Century Europe, 1914-Present: Primary Sources

Definitions & Guides

Recommended Primary Sources

General European:

EuroDocs is an online directory of primary documents in Western European history compiled by Richard Hacken, librarian at Brigham Young 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. http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/index.asp

France:

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

United Kingdom:

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

Germany:

Bundesarchiv Berlin

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

More Useful Sites

Finding Primary Sources Online

Large searchable sites including freely available online resources from a variety of collections.

OAIster
Materials (including primary sources) that libraries have digitized and made available online.
Internet Archive
More than 300,000 texts, as well as audio, moving images, software and archived web pages.
Archives Portal Europe
Access to information on archival material from different European countries as well as information on archival institutions throughout the continent.
Europeana
Provides access to 6 million digital items, including books, art work, photographs, newspapers, films and other cultural objects from European museums, galleries, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections including the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
American Memory
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of primary-source collections on American history and culture, including photographs, documents, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
Digital Public Library of America
Search millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider's website.

Example Full-Text Subscription Databases with Primary Sources Available to Guilford students:

	African-American Newspapers : the 19th Century Provides full text of the entire collection of five African-American newspapers published in the 19th century.
	America's Historical Newspapers via NewsBank Early American Newspapers features cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. For students and scholars of early America, this unique collection -- based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820" -- offers an unprecedented look back into the extraordinary history of the United States -- the story of its people, ideals, commerce and everyday life.

	European Views of the Americas: 1493-1750 via Ebscohost The database 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. The original bibliography was co-developed by John Alden and Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books at The John Carter Brown Library. The John Carter Brown Library, founded in 1846, is a foremost repository of rare books and materials and is a center for advanced research in history and the humanities.

	Historical Statistics of the United States The standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. Downloadable and customizable to suit individual areas of interest. Includes statistics from over 1000 sources last updated in the distant 1975.
	New York Times Historical Newspaper via ProQuest Company This database offers nearly three million pages of digitized full-text and full-image newspaper articles covering the entire publishing history of the newspaper, from 1851 to 2007. The full-text articles can be viewed in its original context. Researchers can locate news stories, editorials, photos, graphics, and advertisements. Also, researchers can use basic keyword, advanced, guided, and relevancy search techniques to pinpoint the information they are seeking. They can browse through issues page by page, as one would browse a printed edition. Search results lists provide bibliographic information, including date, issue, article headline, page number, and byline (where given).
	Sanborn Maps North Carolina via NCLive Sanborn Maps for the state of North Carolina provides digital access to 11,173 large-scale maps of 158 North Carolina towns and cities. Users have the ability to easily manipulate the maps, magnify and zoom in on specific sections, and compare maps from different years.
	Wall Street Journal Historical Newspaper via ProQuest Company This database provides full-text articles from the world's leading financial newspaper dating back to 1889 to1993. The database contains more than half a million pages and more than five million articles that can be viewed in its original context. Researchers can locate news stories, editorials, photos, graphics, and advertisements. Also, researchers can use basic keyword, advanced, guided, and relevancy search techniques to pinpoint the information they are seeking. They can browse through issues page by page, as one would browse a printed edition. Search results lists provide bibliographic information, including date, issue, article headline, page number, and author name (where given).

[Go to Databases (Alphabetical) for direct links and a full list of online databases at Guilford]

Subject Based Open Access Sites:

Digital Library on American Slavery
The Digital Library offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.

Prague Spring Archives
Partnership between the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies to digitize archival materials from the LBJ Presidential Archive’s collections and make them accessible.