History Research Guide

Discover over a million images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures digitized from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford College Libraries. The collection includes materials organized by Western and Mesoamerican, Western printed material, Middle East and North Africa, Hebraica and Judaica, South and South East Asia, and East Asia.

The DLD is a searchable database of digital library collections. All sites are open access and digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public.

Central repository for millions of digitized archival, library, and museum collections across the United States. Resource has a faceted browsing system for easy exploration of material.

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. The broad scope of this project includes primary sources focused on Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish, Indian, East Asian, and African history. You will also find many documents especially relevant to women's history and LGBT studies.

LOC's digital collection consists of over 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture. The collections provides free access to manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music.

The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

The Digitised Manuscripts site contains many different kinds of manuscripts, archives and documents. Much of the content available here has been digitised as part of the British Library’s digitisation projects. The highlights of this collection are the library's medieval manuscript collection from England and Europe.

The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology is an international cooperative project to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed information on ancient Egypt. It is a resource in development and will grow steadily. You can search and explore the collection through a Time Map or browse by environment, individual, society, geography, language, time, history, religion, or material culture.

The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. Primary sources are available here primarily for use in high-school and university/college courses.

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. Primary sources are available here primarily for use in high-school and university/college courses.

The Middle English Texts Series is a long-running academic publishing project based out of the University of Rochester’s Robbins Library. The goal of this project is to make relatively unknown or unread medieval texts available to scholars, teachers, and students who may otherwise struggle to find them in the commercial market. Our digital editions, which are free for anyone to view and print, embody this ideal of making ‘fringe’ medieval literature accessible to as many people as possible.

Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library Project has digitized texts, artifacts, and more covering the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. The core of the catalog consists of primary sources from antiquity. TIP: Follow the above link to browse their collections, when there you can also click the "Perseus Catalog" link to search the catalog (still in progress).

A joint project of the Ancient World Mapping Center, the Stoa Consortium, and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places. It publishes authoritative information about ancient places and spaces, providing unique services for finding, displaying, and reusing that information under open license.

The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s. The website includes pamphlets, newsletters, leaflets, buttons, posters, T-shirts, photographs, audio and video recordings, interviews with activists, and an international directory of collections deposited in libraries and archives

Provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources.

The digital African Studies General Collections have been developed and managed to support the past, ongoing and future needs of University of Florida's Center for African Studies. You can browse or search the collection of digitized materials.

Hosted by the New York Public Library, this collection features digital exhibitions, photographs, audio and video streams, historical projects, and external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.

The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology is an international cooperative project to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed information on ancient Egypt. It is a resource in development and will grow steadily. You can search and explore the collection through a Time Map or browse by environment, individual, society, geography, language, time, history, religion, or material culture.

A guide providing links and information to a variety of archives, libraries, and reports. PLEASE BE ADVISED: Not all mentioned collections in the guide are digitized.

The Africana Collections of the Library of Congress include materials produced over the centuries by peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa and by others inspired by the continent. The Library's Africana Collections reflect the complexities of African societies and the efforts to understand and express this knowledge in many forms. This digital resource guide is a curated list of LOC digital collections, online guides, resources, databases, event videos, and external links relating to African Studies.

This website features the LOC's Asian Reading Room's digitized collections, exhibits, and research guides from their Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan, and Asian American Pacific Islander collections. Many items in the digital collections are rare materials, some of which are the most valuable titles and editions dating back to the 11th or 12th century and are the only extant copies in the world. Also included are contemporary materials in the public domain that cover all manner of topics and offer insights into the study of multiple facets of Asian countries and peoples. TIP: The "Collections" and the Research Guides under "Researcher Resources" will be the most useful links to students on this page.

This page contains links to a wide range of primary sources relating to East Asia. NOTE: only the links without a lock icon are freely available to the public.

This page contains links to a wide range of primary sources relating to South Asia. NOTE: only the links without a lock icon are freely available to the public.

This page contains links to a wide range of primary sources relating to Southeast Asia. NOTE: only the links without a lock icon are freely available to the public.

Aggregator of collection items and info from a variety of European libraries, archives, and museums. Features books, music, museum items, artworks, and more.

Guide from BYU of links that connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. Also features links to video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation. The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural).

British History Online is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles.

The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise the British Library's vast collection of newspapers. You can now search hundreds of millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title and watch your results appear in an instant. The collection's current scope is newspapers from the 1700s to 1950s.

Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates. The site also includes curated collections and guides.

AILLA is a digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. The heart of the collection is the recordings, both audio and video, in a wide range of genres: narratives, chants, oratory, conversations, songs, and more. The archive also contains a wealth of language documentation materials: grammars, dictionaries, ethnographies, and field notes. The collection includes teaching materials for bilingual education and language revitalization programs.

The Archivo Mesoamericano is a digital archive of annotated historical and ethnographic video materials created in collaboration with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico, the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA) in Nicaragua, and the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI) in El Salvador.

The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton University’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis. TIP: click the "browse" button to narrow your search by type, region, date, and more.

dLOC is a cooperative of Partners within the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections. Types of collections include but are not limited to: newspapers, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official documents, documentation and numeric data for ecosystems, scientific scholarship, historic and contemporary maps, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature and poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.

Helpful guide that organizes and links digitized library collections from Yale University Libraries.

UNM University Libraries offers digital copies on many Latin American sources in New Mexico's Digital Collections, This public resource contains digitized materials from libraries, archives, and museums throughout New Mexico and in Mexico City. It is hosted by UNM University Libraries.

Scarce and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Digitized collections focused on Latin American history from the University of Texas and other partner institutions.

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world. Please be advised that this resource is functional, but still being developed.

The Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress has long been recognized as one of the world's foremost centers for the study of Hebrew and Yiddish materials. The Library’s collection consists of holdings on all materials of research value in Hebrew and related languages. Today, the section houses works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, and Amharic. The section's holdings are especially strong in the areas of the Bible and rabbinics, liturgy, Hebrew language and literature, responsa, and Jewish history. This digital resource guide is a curated list of LOC digital collections, online guides, resources, databases, event videos, and external links relating to Jewish Studies.

The Near East Section at the LOC has in its custody materials in several formats: from exquisite manuscripts to early printed books; and from historic and contemporary newspapers, on microfilm and microfiche, to political and cultural ephemera-in over 40 languages of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as those of the countries and peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia. This digital resource guide is a curated list of LOC digital collections, online guides, resources, databases, event videos, and external links relating to Middle Eastern Studies.

Contains millions of pages and hundreds of newspapers available to read and search through online: Israeli press, Jewish press, Arabic press of Ottoman and mandatory Palestine, children press and daily press.

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.

The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Hosted by Northeastern University, the collection consists of materials from over 50 other institutions. You can search or browse the archive by topic, genre, collection, or a map.

The GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity. Their archives showcases digital collections, primary source sets, research guides, and exhibitions.

The USC Digital Library contains a wide range of primary sources: visual, textual, and oral. This links to their main page and you can scroll down to their LGBTQ+ Studies collection. This area includes the ONE National Gay (one of the oldest LGBT organizations in the United States) and Lesbian Archives and their 2003 Out West Collection.