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Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

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Historical Research

Definition:

Historical research is the process of investigating and studying past events, people, and societies using a variety of sources and methods. This type of research aims to reconstruct and interpret the past based on the available evidence.

Types of Historical Research

There are several types of historical research, including:

Descriptive Research

This type of historical research focuses on describing events, people, or cultures in detail. It can involve examining artifacts, documents, or other sources of information to create a detailed account of what happened or existed.

Analytical Research

This type of historical research aims to explain why events, people, or cultures occurred in a certain way. It involves analyzing data to identify patterns, causes, and effects, and making interpretations based on this analysis.

Comparative Research

This type of historical research involves comparing two or more events, people, or cultures to identify similarities and differences. This can help researchers understand the unique characteristics of each and how they interacted with each other.

Interpretive Research

This type of historical research focuses on interpreting the meaning of past events, people, or cultures. It can involve analyzing cultural symbols, beliefs, and practices to understand their significance in a particular historical context.

Quantitative Research

This type of historical research involves using statistical methods to analyze historical data. It can involve examining demographic information, economic indicators, or other quantitative data to identify patterns and trends.

Qualitative Research

This type of historical research involves examining non-numerical data such as personal accounts, letters, or diaries. It can provide insights into the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period.

Data Collection Methods

Data Collection Methods are as follows:

Archival research : This involves analyzing documents and records that have been preserved over time, such as government records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and photographs. Archival research is often conducted in libraries, archives, and museums.
Oral history : This involves conducting interviews with individuals who have lived through a particular historical period or event. Oral history can provide a unique perspective on past events and can help to fill gaps in the historical record.
Artifact analysis: This involves examining physical objects from the past, such as tools, clothing, and artwork, to gain insights into past cultures and practices.
Secondary sources: This involves analyzing published works, such as books, articles, and academic papers, that discuss past events and cultures. Secondary sources can provide context and insights into the historical period being studied.
Statistical analysis : This involves analyzing numerical data from the past, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends.
Fieldwork : This involves conducting on-site research in a particular location, such as visiting a historical site or conducting ethnographic research in a particular community. Fieldwork can provide a firsthand understanding of the culture and environment being studied.
Content analysis: This involves analyzing the content of media from the past, such as films, television programs, and advertisements, to gain insights into cultural attitudes and beliefs.

Data Analysis Methods

Content analysis : This involves analyzing the content of written or visual material, such as books, newspapers, or photographs, to identify patterns and themes. Content analysis can be used to identify changes in cultural values and beliefs over time.
Textual analysis : This involves analyzing written texts, such as letters or diaries, to understand the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period. Textual analysis can provide insights into how people lived and thought in the past.
Discourse analysis : This involves analyzing how language is used to construct meaning and power relations in a particular historical period. Discourse analysis can help to identify how social and political ideologies were constructed and maintained over time.
Statistical analysis: This involves using statistical methods to analyze numerical data, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends. Statistical analysis can help to identify changes in population demographics, economic conditions, and other factors over time.
Comparative analysis : This involves comparing data from two or more historical periods or events to identify similarities and differences. Comparative analysis can help to identify patterns and trends that may not be apparent from analyzing data from a single historical period.
Qualitative analysis: This involves analyzing non-numerical data, such as oral history interviews or ethnographic field notes, to identify themes and patterns. Qualitative analysis can provide a rich understanding of the experiences and perspectives of individuals in the past.

Historical Research Methodology

Here are the general steps involved in historical research methodology:

Define the research question: Start by identifying a research question that you want to answer through your historical research. This question should be focused, specific, and relevant to your research goals.
Review the literature: Conduct a review of the existing literature on the topic of your research question. This can involve reading books, articles, and academic papers to gain a thorough understanding of the existing research.
Develop a research design : Develop a research design that outlines the methods you will use to collect and analyze data. This design should be based on the research question and should be feasible given the resources and time available.
Collect data: Use the methods outlined in your research design to collect data on past events, people, and cultures. This can involve archival research, oral history interviews, artifact analysis, and other data collection methods.
Analyze data : Analyze the data you have collected using the methods outlined in your research design. This can involve content analysis, textual analysis, statistical analysis, and other data analysis methods.
Interpret findings : Use the results of your data analysis to draw meaningful insights and conclusions related to your research question. These insights should be grounded in the data and should be relevant to the research goals.
Communicate results: Communicate your findings through a research report, academic paper, or other means. This should be done in a clear, concise, and well-organized manner, with appropriate citations and references to the literature.

Applications of Historical Research

Historical research has a wide range of applications in various fields, including:

Education : Historical research can be used to develop curriculum materials that reflect a more accurate and inclusive representation of history. It can also be used to provide students with a deeper understanding of past events and cultures.
Museums : Historical research is used to develop exhibits, programs, and other materials for museums. It can provide a more accurate and engaging presentation of historical events and artifacts.
Public policy : Historical research is used to inform public policy decisions by providing insights into the historical context of current issues. It can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of past policies and programs.
Business : Historical research can be used by businesses to understand the evolution of their industry and to identify trends that may affect their future success. It can also be used to develop marketing strategies that resonate with customers’ historical interests and values.
Law : Historical research is used in legal proceedings to provide evidence and context for cases involving historical events or practices. It can also be used to inform the development of new laws and policies.
Genealogy : Historical research can be used by individuals to trace their family history and to understand their ancestral roots.
Cultural preservation : Historical research is used to preserve cultural heritage by documenting and interpreting past events, practices, and traditions. It can also be used to identify and preserve historical landmarks and artifacts.

Examples of Historical Research

Examples of Historical Research are as follows:

Examining the history of race relations in the United States: Historical research could be used to explore the historical roots of racial inequality and injustice in the United States. This could help inform current efforts to address systemic racism and promote social justice.
Tracing the evolution of political ideologies: Historical research could be used to study the development of political ideologies over time. This could help to contextualize current political debates and provide insights into the origins and evolution of political beliefs and values.
Analyzing the impact of technology on society : Historical research could be used to explore the impact of technology on society over time. This could include examining the impact of previous technological revolutions (such as the industrial revolution) on society, as well as studying the current impact of emerging technologies on society and the environment.
Documenting the history of marginalized communities : Historical research could be used to document the history of marginalized communities (such as LGBTQ+ communities or indigenous communities). This could help to preserve cultural heritage, promote social justice, and promote a more inclusive understanding of history.

Purpose of Historical Research

The purpose of historical research is to study the past in order to gain a better understanding of the present and to inform future decision-making. Some specific purposes of historical research include:

To understand the origins of current events, practices, and institutions : Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
To develop a more accurate and inclusive understanding of history : Historical research can be used to correct inaccuracies and biases in historical narratives. By exploring different perspectives and sources of information, we can develop a more complete and nuanced understanding of history.
To inform decision-making: Historical research can be used to inform decision-making in various fields, including education, public policy, business, and law. By understanding the historical context of current issues, we can make more informed decisions about how to address them.
To preserve cultural heritage : Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage, including traditions, practices, and artifacts. By understanding the historical significance of these cultural elements, we can work to preserve them for future generations.
To stimulate curiosity and critical thinking: Historical research can be used to stimulate curiosity and critical thinking about the past. By exploring different historical perspectives and interpretations, we can develop a more critical and reflective approach to understanding history and its relevance to the present.

When to use Historical Research

Historical research can be useful in a variety of contexts. Here are some examples of when historical research might be particularly appropriate:

When examining the historical roots of current events: Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
When examining the historical context of a particular topic : Historical research can be used to explore the historical context of a particular topic, such as a social issue, political debate, or scientific development. By understanding the historical context, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the topic and its significance.
When exploring the evolution of a particular field or discipline : Historical research can be used to explore the evolution of a particular field or discipline, such as medicine, law, or art. By understanding the historical development of the field, we can gain a better understanding of its current state and future directions.
When examining the impact of past events on current society : Historical research can be used to examine the impact of past events (such as wars, revolutions, or social movements) on current society. By understanding the historical context and impact of these events, we can gain insights into current social and political issues.
When studying the cultural heritage of a particular community or group : Historical research can be used to document and preserve the cultural heritage of a particular community or group. By understanding the historical significance of cultural practices, traditions, and artifacts, we can work to preserve them for future generations.

Characteristics of Historical Research

The following are some characteristics of historical research:

Focus on the past : Historical research focuses on events, people, and phenomena of the past. It seeks to understand how things developed over time and how they relate to current events.
Reliance on primary sources: Historical research relies on primary sources such as letters, diaries, newspapers, government documents, and other artifacts from the period being studied. These sources provide firsthand accounts of events and can help researchers gain a more accurate understanding of the past.
Interpretation of data : Historical research involves interpretation of data from primary sources. Researchers analyze and interpret data to draw conclusions about the past.
Use of multiple sources: Historical research often involves using multiple sources of data to gain a more complete understanding of the past. By examining a range of sources, researchers can cross-reference information and validate their findings.
Importance of context: Historical research emphasizes the importance of context. Researchers analyze the historical context in which events occurred and consider how that context influenced people’s actions and decisions.
Subjectivity : Historical research is inherently subjective, as researchers interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own perspectives and biases. Researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis.
Importance of historical significance: Historical research emphasizes the importance of historical significance. Researchers consider the historical significance of events, people, and phenomena and their impact on the present and future.
Use of qualitative methods : Historical research often uses qualitative methods such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis to analyze data and draw conclusions about the past.

Advantages of Historical Research

There are several advantages to historical research:

Provides a deeper understanding of the past : Historical research can provide a more comprehensive understanding of past events and how they have shaped current social, political, and economic conditions. This can help individuals and organizations make informed decisions about the future.
Helps preserve cultural heritage: Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage. By studying the history of a particular culture, researchers can gain insights into the cultural practices and beliefs that have shaped that culture over time.
Provides insights into long-term trends : Historical research can provide insights into long-term trends and patterns. By studying historical data over time, researchers can identify patterns and trends that may be difficult to discern from short-term data.
Facilitates the development of hypotheses: Historical research can facilitate the development of hypotheses about how past events have influenced current conditions. These hypotheses can be tested using other research methods, such as experiments or surveys.
Helps identify root causes of social problems : Historical research can help identify the root causes of social problems. By studying the historical context in which these problems developed, researchers can gain a better understanding of how they emerged and what factors may have contributed to their development.
Provides a source of inspiration: Historical research can provide a source of inspiration for individuals and organizations seeking to address current social, political, and economic challenges. By studying the accomplishments and struggles of past generations, researchers can gain insights into how to address current challenges.

Limitations of Historical Research

Some Limitations of Historical Research are as follows:

Reliance on incomplete or biased data: Historical research is often limited by the availability and quality of data. Many primary sources have been lost, destroyed, or are inaccessible, making it difficult to get a complete picture of historical events. Additionally, some primary sources may be biased or represent only one perspective on an event.
Difficulty in generalizing findings: Historical research is often specific to a particular time and place and may not be easily generalized to other contexts. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions about human behavior or social phenomena.
Lack of control over variables : Historical research often lacks control over variables. Researchers cannot manipulate or control historical events, making it difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
Subjectivity of interpretation : Historical research is often subjective because researchers must interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own biases and perspectives. Different researchers may interpret the same data differently, leading to different conclusions.
Limited ability to test hypotheses: Historical research is often limited in its ability to test hypotheses. Because the events being studied have already occurred, researchers cannot manipulate variables or conduct experiments to test their hypotheses.
Lack of objectivity: Historical research is often subjective, and researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis. However, it can be difficult to maintain objectivity when studying events that are emotionally charged or controversial.
Limited generalizability: Historical research is often limited in its generalizability, as the events and conditions being studied may be specific to a particular time and place. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions that apply to other contexts or time periods.

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Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Historical Research

Ai generator.

One of the most significant historical events that changed the world is the invention of written language around 3500-3000 BCE in Sumer. Originally, Sumerians started to use writing to communicate with people from other cities and regions to trade resources. From then on, they did multiple enhancements on the invention to maximize its use. Today, needless to say, this invention has been serving us its purpose in many ways, such as in developing procedure documentation and writing a research paper for historical research.

What Is Historical Research?

Historical research is a research methodology that allows people to study past events that have molded the present. This investigation involves systematically retaking the pieces of information from one or more data sources which can let you, as a researcher or a detective, create a theory of how a phenomenon happened to be in its present situation. Although this type of research usually uses primary sources, such as journals and testimonies in many forms, the data it gets may also come from secondary sources, such as textbooks in the public library, newspapers, etc. Due to the nature of historical research, comparing and preserving historical records can also be good reasons to conduct this kind of research.

Strong Historical Research Design

For effective execution of the data collection and analysis for historical research in education and other fields, you will need a strong research design that includes the following stages.

1. Data Collection

We have mentioned earlier that in gathering the necessary data for historical research, you can use either or both primary and secondary data sources. Additionally, although this research is under the vast category of qualitative research , you can use quantitative data to interpret the facts you use.

2. Data Criticism

One of the advantages of conducting historical research is, aside from the present, you may gather evidence to explain the event that is yet to happen, which can be a delicate piece of information. In coming up with an explanation about a future phenomenon, you must evaluate the reliability of your sources. You can do it through internal and external validity . Through an external validity, you can determine the authenticity of a reference. Meanwhile, with internal validity, you can ensure that the data you gather is reliable by interpreting the content correctly.

3. Data Presentation

Once you have assured that the data you have collected is competent enough, you will analyze it and test the hypothesis of your research. We recommend you to do this step carefully since you will use logical methods instead of statistical tools. Avoid over-simplifying details and incorporating personal observations.

10+ Historical Research Examples

Now, you know the elements to include in your research. Let’s take a look at how researchers write their history research paper.

1. Biography of Historical Research Example

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2. Historical Research in Library Example

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3. Historical Reserch Agenda Example

4. Sample Historical Research Example

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5. Historical Research Information Systems Research Example

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6. Historical Research in Social Work Example

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7. Stndard Historical Research Example

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8. Legal History and Historical Research Example

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9. Methods and Principles of Historical Research Example

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10. Historical Research in Communication Example

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11. Historical Research in Education Example

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Best Practices in Conducting Historical Research

Now that you know almost everything that you need to cover about historical research, strengthen your project by keeping the following guidelines in mind.

1. Narrow Down the Direction of Your Project

Before you start writing your research paper , think of the topic that you choose to research. List down the research questions that you will focus on throughout the research process. Gather useful information and take note of the source information such as the author, etc. Then, decide on the specific type of information that you want to focus on. These steps will ensure that your research will not go astray.

2. Be Mindful of Your Sources

There are many sources available to gather information for your inquiry, especially on the internet. However, the question is, are these contents reliable enough? For historical research, we recommend you to ask assistance to the public librarians or historical consultants before you incorporate the information that you have gathered from the internet and the library.

3. Balance your Searches

Nowadays, you can always find the information that you need through the internet. However, when conducting research, you must do well-balanced data gathering. Meaning, aside from one source like the internet, you can gather data that you can only find in a particular root. A good example is local news.

4. Dig Deeper

It is essential to narrow down the scope of your research. It will be more interesting if you use the information that you have gathered to know more about a particular event or topic. It can also be an excellent way to find new leads that can support your research.

Countless historical events changed the way we perceive things. Among these phenomena, is the invention of written language. It also allows us to know how to deal with the obstacles that we are yet to encounter. Enlighten the people of a significant phenomenon by applying what you learned today to the research project that you are going to conduct.

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Historical Research [without getting hysterical!] In addition to being a scholarly investigation, research is a social activity intended to create new knowledge. Historical research is your informed response to the questions that you ask while examining the record of human experience. These questions may concern such elements as looking at an event or topic, examining events that lead to the event in question, social influences, key players, and other contextual information. This step-by-step guide progresses from an introduction to historical resources to information about how to identify a topic, craft a thesis and develop a research paper. Table of contents: The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Secondary Sources Primary Sources Historical Analysis What is it? Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Choose a Topic Craft a Thesis Evaluate Thesis and Sources A Variety of Information Sources Take Efficient Notes Note Cards Thinking, Organizing, Researching Parenthetical Documentation Prepare a Works Cited Page Drafting, Revising, Rewriting, Rethinking For Further Reading: Works Cited Additional Links So you want to study history?! Tons of help and links Slatta Home Page Use the Writing and other links on the lefhand menu I. The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Back to Top Every period leaves traces, what historians call "sources" or evidence. Some are more credible or carry more weight than others; judging the differences is a vital skill developed by good historians. Sources vary in perspective, so knowing who created the information you are examining is vital. Anonymous doesn't make for a very compelling source. For example, an FBI report on the antiwar movement, prepared for U.S. President Richard Nixon, probably contained secrets that at the time were thought to have affected national security. It would not be usual, however, for a journalist's article about a campus riot, featured in a local newspaper, to leak top secret information. Which source would you read? It depends on your research topic. If you're studying how government officials portrayed student activists, you'll want to read the FBI report and many more documents from other government agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Council. If you're investigating contemporary opinion of pro-war and anti-war activists, local newspaper accounts provide a rich resource. You'd want to read a variety of newspapers to ensure you're covering a wide range of opinions (rural/urban, left/right, North/South, Soldier/Draft-dodger, etc). Historians classify sources into two major categories: primary and secondary sources. Secondary Sources Back to Top Definition: Secondary sources are created by someone who was either not present when the event occurred or removed from it in time. We use secondary sources for overview information, to familiarize ourselves with a topic, and compare that topic with other events in history. In refining a research topic, we often begin with secondary sources. This helps us identify gaps or conflicts in the existing scholarly literature that might prove promsing topics. Types: History books, encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and academic (scholarly) articles are secondary sources. To help you determine the status of a given secondary source, see How to identify and nagivate scholarly literature . Examples: Historian Marilyn Young's (NYU) book about the Vietnam War is a secondary source. She did not participate in the war. Her study is not based on her personal experience but on the evidence she culled from a variety of sources she found in the United States and Vietnam. Primary Sources Back to Top Definition: Primary sources emanate from individuals or groups who participated in or witnessed an event and recorded that event during or immediately after the event. They include speeches, memoirs, diaries, letters, telegrams, emails, proclamations, government documents, and much more. Examples: A student activist during the war writing about protest activities has created a memoir. This would be a primary source because the information is based on her own involvement in the events she describes. Similarly, an antiwar speech is a primary source. So is the arrest record of student protesters. A newspaper editorial or article, reporting on a student demonstration is also a primary source. II. Historical Analysis What is it? Back to Top No matter what you read, whether it's a primary source or a secondary source, you want to know who authored the source (a trusted scholar? A controversial historian? A propagandist? A famous person? An ordinary individual?). "Author" refers to anyone who created information in any medium (film, sound, or text). You also need to know when it was written and the kind of audience the author intend to reach. You should also consider what you bring to the evidence that you examine. Are you inductively following a path of evidence, developing your interpretation based on the sources? Do you have an ax to grind? Did you begin your research deductively, with your mind made up before even seeing the evidence. Historians need to avoid the latter and emulate the former. To read more about the distinction, examine the difference between Intellectual Inquirers and Partisan Ideologues . In the study of history, perspective is everything. A letter written by a twenty- year old Vietnam War protestor will differ greatly from a letter written by a scholar of protest movements. Although the sentiment might be the same, the perspective and influences of these two authors will be worlds apart. Practicing the " 5 Ws " will avoid the confusion of the authority trap. Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Back to Top Historians accumulate evidence (information, including facts, stories, interpretations, opinions, statements, reports, etc.) from a variety of sources (primary and secondary). They must also verify that certain key pieces of information are corroborated by a number of people and sources ("the predonderance of evidence"). The historian poses the " 5 Ws " to every piece of information he examines: Who is the historical actor? When did the event take place? Where did it occur? What did it entail and why did it happen the way it did? The " 5 Ws " can also be used to evaluate a primary source. Who authored the work? When was it created? Where was it created, published, and disseminated? Why was it written (the intended audience), and what is the document about (what points is the author making)? If you know the answers to these five questions, you can analyze any document, and any primary source. The historian doesn't look for the truth, since this presumes there is only one true story. The historian tries to understand a number of competing viewpoints to form his or her own interpretation-- what constitutes the best explanation of what happened and why. By using as wide a range of primary source documents and secondary sources as possible, you will add depth and richness to your historical analysis. The more exposure you, the researcher, have to a number of different sources and differing view points, the more you have a balanced and complete view about a topic in history. This view will spark more questions and ultimately lead you into the quest to unravel more clues about your topic. You are ready to start assembling information for your research paper. III. Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Back to Top Because your purpose is to create new knowledge while recognizing those scholars whose existing work has helped you in this pursuit, you are honor bound never to commit the following academic sins: Plagiarism: Literally "kidnapping," involving the use of someone else's words as if they were your own (Gibaldi 6). To avoid plagiarism you must document direct quotations, paraphrases, and original ideas not your own. Recycling: Rehashing material you already know thoroughly or, without your professor's permission, submitting a paper that you have completed for another course. Premature cognitive commitment: Academic jargon for deciding on a thesis too soon and then seeking information to serve that thesis rather than embarking on a genuine search for new knowledge. Choose a Topic Back to Top "Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them." --Samuel Butler Choosing a topic is the first step in the pursuit of a thesis. Below is a logical progression from topic to thesis: Close reading of the primary text, aided by secondary sources Growing awareness of interesting qualities within the primary text Choosing a topic for research Asking productive questions that help explore and evaluate a topic Creating a research hypothesis Revising and refining a hypothesis to form a working thesis First, and most important, identify what qualities in the primary or secondary source pique your imagination and curiosity and send you on a search for answers. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels provides a description of productive questions asked by critical thinkers. While the lower levels (knowledge, comprehension) are necessary to a good history essay, aspire to the upper three levels (analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Skimming reference works such as encyclopedias, books, critical essays and periodical articles can help you choose a topic that evolves into a hypothesis, which in turn may lead to a thesis. One approach to skimming involves reading the first paragraph of a secondary source to locate and evaluate the author's thesis. Then for a general idea of the work's organization and major ideas read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Read the conclusion carefully, as it usually presents a summary (Barnet and Bedau 19). Craft a Thesis Back to Top Very often a chosen topic is too broad for focused research. You must revise it until you have a working hypothesis, that is, a statement of an idea or an approach with respect to the source that could form the basis for your thesis. Remember to not commit too soon to any one hypothesis. Use it as a divining rod or a first step that will take you to new information that may inspire you to revise your hypothesis. Be flexible. Give yourself time to explore possibilities. The hypothesis you create will mature and shift as you write and rewrite your paper. New questions will send you back to old and on to new material. Remember, this is the nature of research--it is more a spiraling or iterative activity than a linear one. Test your working hypothesis to be sure it is: broad enough to promise a variety of resources. narrow enough for you to research in depth. original enough to interest you and your readers. worthwhile enough to offer information and insights of substance "do-able"--sources are available to complete the research. Now it is time to craft your thesis, your revised and refined hypothesis. A thesis is a declarative sentence that: focuses on one well-defined idea makes an arguable assertion; it is capable of being supported prepares your readers for the body of your paper and foreshadows the conclusion. Evaluate Thesis and Sources Back to Top Like your hypothesis, your thesis is not carved in stone. You are in charge. If necessary, revise it during the research process. As you research, continue to evaluate both your thesis for practicality, originality, and promise as a search tool, and secondary sources for relevance and scholarliness. The following are questions to ask during the research process: Are there many journal articles and entire books devoted to the thesis, suggesting that the subject has been covered so thoroughly that there may be nothing new to say? Does the thesis lead to stimulating, new insights? Are appropriate sources available? Is there a variety of sources available so that the bibliography or works cited page will reflect different kinds of sources? Which sources are too broad for my thesis? Which resources are too narrow? Who is the author of the secondary source? Does the critic's background suggest that he/she is qualified? After crafting a thesis, consider one of the following two approaches to writing a research paper: Excited about your thesis and eager to begin? Return to the primary or secondary source to find support for your thesis. Organize ideas and begin writing your first draft. After writing the first draft, have it reviewed by your peers and your instructor. Ponder their suggestions and return to the sources to answer still-open questions. Document facts and opinions from secondary sources. Remember, secondary sources can never substitute for primary sources. Confused about where to start? Use your thesis to guide you to primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources can help you clarify your position and find a direction for your paper. Keep a working bibliography. You may not use all the sources you record, but you cannot be sure which ones you will eventually discard. Create a working outline as you research. This outline will, of course, change as you delve more deeply into your subject. A Variety of Information Sources Back to Top "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." --Oliver Wendell Holmes Your thesis and your working outline are the primary compasses that will help you navigate the variety of sources available. In "Introduction to the Library" (5-6) the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers suggests you become familiar with the library you will be using by: taking a tour or enrolling for a brief introductory lecture referring to the library's publications describing its resources introducing yourself and your project to the reference librarian The MLA Handbook also lists guides for the use of libraries (5), including: Jean Key Gates, Guide to the Use of Libraries and Information Sources (7th ed., New York: McGraw, 1994). Thomas Mann, A Guide to Library Research Methods (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). Online Central Catalog Most libraries have their holdings listed on a computer. The online catalog may offer Internet sites, Web pages and databases that relate to the university's curriculum. It may also include academic journals and online reference books. Below are three search techniques commonly used online: Index Search: Although online catalogs may differ slightly from library to library, the most common listings are by: Subject Search: Enter the author's name for books and article written about the author. Author Search: Enter an author's name for works written by the author, including collections of essays the author may have written about his/her own works. Title Search: Enter a title for the screen to list all the books the library carries with that title. Key Word Search/Full-text Search: A one-word search, e.g., 'Kennedy,' will produce an overwhelming number of sources, as it will call up any entry that includes the name 'Kennedy.' To focus more narrowly on your subject, add one or more key words, e.g., "John Kennedy, Peace Corps." Use precise key words. Boolean Search: Boolean Search techniques use words such as "and," "or," and "not," which clarify the relationship between key words, thus narrowing the search. Take Efficient Notes Back to Top Keeping complete and accurate bibliography and note cards during the research process is a time (and sanity) saving practice. If you have ever needed a book or pages within a book, only to discover that an earlier researcher has failed to return it or torn pages from your source, you understand the need to take good notes. Every researcher has a favorite method for taking notes. Here are some suggestions-- customize one of them for your own use. Bibliography cards There may be far more books and articles listed than you have time to read, so be selective when choosing a reference. Take information from works that clearly relate to your thesis, remembering that you may not use them all. Use a smaller or a different color card from the one used for taking notes. Write a bibliography card for every source. Number the bibliography cards. On the note cards, use the number rather than the author's name and the title. It's faster. Another method for recording a working bibliography, of course, is to create your own database. Adding, removing, and alphabetizing titles is a simple process. Be sure to save often and to create a back-up file. A bibliography card should include all the information a reader needs to locate that particular source for further study. Most of the information required for a book entry (Gibaldi 112): Author's name Title of a part of the book [preface, chapter titles, etc.] Title of the book Name of the editor, translator, or compiler Edition used Number(s) of the volume(s) used Name of the series Place of publication, name of the publisher, and date of publication Page numbers Supplementary bibliographic information and annotations Most of the information required for an article in a periodical (Gibaldi 141): Author's name Title of the article Name of the periodical Series number or name (if relevant) Volume number (for a scholarly journal) Issue number (if needed) Date of publication Page numbers Supplementary information For information on how to cite other sources refer to your So you want to study history page . Note Cards Back to Top Take notes in ink on either uniform note cards (3x5, 4x6, etc.) or uniform slips of paper. Devote each note card to a single topic identified at the top. Write only on one side. Later, you may want to use the back to add notes or personal observations. Include a topical heading for each card. Include the number of the page(s) where you found the information. You will want the page number(s) later for documentation, and you may also want page number(s)to verify your notes. Most novice researchers write down too much. Condense. Abbreviate. You are striving for substance, not quantity. Quote directly from primary sources--but the "meat," not everything. Suggestions for condensing information: Summary: A summary is intended to provide the gist of an essay. Do not weave in the author's choice phrases. Read the information first and then condense the main points in your own words. This practice will help you avoid the copying that leads to plagiarism. Summarizing also helps you both analyze the text you are reading and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (Barnet and Bedau 13). Outline: Use to identify a series of points. Paraphrase, except for key primary source quotations. Never quote directly from a secondary source, unless the precise wording is essential to your argument. Simplify the language and list the ideas in the same order. A paraphrase is as long as the original. Paraphrasing is helpful when you are struggling with a particularly difficult passage. Be sure to jot down your own insights or flashes of brilliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson warns you to "Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear...." To differentiate these insights from those of the source you are reading, initial them as your own. (When the following examples of note cards include the researcher's insights, they will be followed by the initials N. R.) When you have finished researching your thesis and you are ready to write your paper, organize your cards according to topic. Notecards make it easy to shuffle and organize your source information on a table-- or across the floor. Maintain your working outline that includes the note card headings and explores a logical order for presenting them in your paper. IV. Begin Thinking, Researching, Organizing Back to Top Don't be too sequential. Researching, writing, revising is a complex interactive process. Start writing as soon as possible! "The best antidote to writer's block is--to write." (Klauser 15). However, you still feel overwhelmed and are staring at a blank page, you are not alone. Many students find writing the first sentence to be the most daunting part of the entire research process. Be creative. Cluster (Rico 28-49). Clustering is a form of brainstorming. Sometimes called a web, the cluster forms a design that may suggest a natural organization for a paper. Here's a graphical depiction of brainstorming . Like a sun, the generating idea or topic lies at the center of the web. From it radiate words, phrases, sentences and images that in turn attract other words, phrases, sentences and images. Put another way--stay focused. Start with your outline. If clustering is not a technique that works for you, turn to the working outline you created during the research process. Use the outline view of your word processor. If you have not already done so, group your note cards according to topic headings. Compare them to your outline's major points. If necessary, change the outline to correspond with the headings on the note cards. If any area seems weak because of a scarcity of facts or opinions, return to your primary and/or secondary sources for more information or consider deleting that heading. Use your outline to provide balance in your essay. Each major topic should have approximately the same amount of information. Once you have written a working outline, consider two different methods for organizing it. Deduction: A process of development that moves from the general to the specific. You may use this approach to present your findings. However, as noted above, your research and interpretive process should be inductive. Deduction is the most commonly used form of organization for a research paper. The thesis statement is the generalization that leads to the specific support provided by primary and secondary sources. The thesis is stated early in the paper. The body of the paper then proceeds to provide the facts, examples, and analogies that flow logically from that thesis. The thesis contains key words that are reflected in the outline. These key words become a unifying element throughout the paper, as they reappear in the detailed paragraphs that support and develop the thesis. The conclusion of the paper circles back to the thesis, which is now far more meaningful because of the deductive development that supports it. Chronological order A process that follows a traditional time line or sequence of events. A chronological organization is useful for a paper that explores cause and effect. Parenthetical Documentation Back to Top The Works Cited page, a list of primary and secondary sources, is not sufficient documentation to acknowledge the ideas, facts, and opinions you have included within your text. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers describes an efficient parenthetical style of documentation to be used within the body of your paper. Guidelines for parenthetical documentation: "References to the text must clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited" (Gibaldi 184). Try to use parenthetical documentation as little as possible. For example, when you cite an entire work, it is preferable to include the author's name in the text. The author's last name followed by the page number is usually enough for an accurate identification of the source in the works cited list. These examples illustrate the most common kinds of documentation. Documenting a quotation: Ex. "The separation from the personal mother is a particularly intense process for a daughter because she has to separate from the one who is the same as herself" (Murdock 17). She may feel abandoned and angry. Note: The author of The Heroine's Journey is listed under Works Cited by the author's name, reversed--Murdock, Maureen. Quoted material is found on page 17 of that book. Parenthetical documentation is after the quotation mark and before the period. Documenting a paraphrase: Ex. In fairy tales a woman who holds the princess captive or who abandons her often needs to be killed (18). Note: The second paraphrase is also from Murdock's book The Heroine's Journey. It is not, however, necessary to repeat the author's name if no other documentation interrupts the two. If the works cited page lists more than one work by the same author, include within the parentheses an abbreviated form of the appropriate title. You may, of course, include the title in your sentence, making it unnecessary to add an abbreviated title in the citation. > Prepare a Works Cited Page Back to Top There are a variety of titles for the page that lists primary and secondary sources (Gibaldi 106-107). A Works Cited page lists those works you have cited within the body of your paper. The reader need only refer to it for the necessary information required for further independent research. Bibliography means literally a description of books. Because your research may involve the use of periodicals, films, art works, photographs, etc. "Works Cited" is a more precise descriptive term than bibliography. An Annotated Bibliography or Annotated Works Cited page offers brief critiques and descriptions of the works listed. A Works Consulted page lists those works you have used but not cited. Avoid using this format. As with other elements of a research paper there are specific guidelines for the placement and the appearance of the Works Cited page. The following guidelines comply with MLA style: The Work Cited page is placed at the end of your paper and numbered consecutively with the body of your paper. Center the title and place it one inch from the top of your page. Do not quote or underline the title. Double space the entire page, both within and between entries. The entries are arranged alphabetically by the author's last name or by the title of the article or book being cited. If the title begins with an article (a, an, the) alphabetize by the next word. If you cite two or more works by the same author, list the titles in alphabetical order. Begin every entry after the first with three hyphens followed by a period. All entries begin at the left margin but subsequent lines are indented five spaces. Be sure that each entry cited on the Works Cited page corresponds to a specific citation within your paper. Refer to the the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (104- 182) for detailed descriptions of Work Cited entries. Citing sources from online databases is a relatively new phenomenon. Make sure to ask your professor about citing these sources and which style to use. V. Draft, Revise, Rewrite, Rethink Back to Top "There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." --John Kenneth Galbraith Try freewriting your first draft. Freewriting is a discovery process during which the writer freely explores a topic. Let your creative juices flow. In Writing without Teachers , Peter Elbow asserts that "[a]lmost everybody interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil or typewriter [or word processor] onto the page" (5). Do not let your internal judge interfere with this first draft. Creating and revising are two very different functions. Don't confuse them! If you stop to check spelling, punctuation, or grammar, you disrupt the flow of creative energy. Create; then fix it later. When material you have researched comes easily to mind, include it. Add a quick citation, one you can come back to later to check for form, and get on with your discovery. In subsequent drafts, focus on creating an essay that flows smoothly, supports fully, and speaks clearly and interestingly. Add style to substance. Create a smooth flow of words, ideas and paragraphs. Rearrange paragraphs for a logical progression of information. Transition is essential if you want your reader to follow you smoothly from introduction to conclusion. Transitional words and phrases stitch your ideas together; they provide coherence within the essay. External transition: Words and phrases that are added to a sentence as overt signs of transition are obvious and effective, but should not be overused, as they may draw attention to themselves and away from ideas. Examples of external transition are "however," "then," "next," "therefore." "first," "moreover," and "on the other hand." Internal transition is more subtle. Key words in the introduction become golden threads when they appear in the paper's body and conclusion. When the writer hears a key word repeated too often, however, she/he replaces it with a synonym or a pronoun. Below are examples of internal transition. Transitional sentences create a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph. Iclude individual words, phrases, or clauses that refer to previous ideas and that point ahead to new ones. They are usually placed at the end or at the beginning of a paragraph. A transitional paragraph conducts your reader from one part of the paper to another. It may be only a few sentences long. Each paragraph of the body of the paper should contain adequate support for its one governing idea. Speak/write clearly, in your own voice. Tone: The paper's tone, whether formal, ironic, or humorous, should be appropriate for the audience and the subject. Voice: Keep you language honest. Your paper should sound like you. Understand, paraphrase, absorb, and express in your own words the information you have researched. Avoid phony language. Sentence formation: When you polish your sentences, read them aloud for word choice and word placement. Be concise. Strunk and White in The Elements of Style advise the writer to "omit needless words" (23). First, however, you must recognize them. Keep yourself and your reader interested. In fact, Strunk's 1918 writing advice is still well worth pondering. First, deliver on your promises. Be sure the body of your paper fulfills the promise of the introduction. Avoid the obvious. Offer new insights. Reveal the unexpected. Have you crafted your conclusion as carefully as you have your introduction? Conclusions are not merely the repetition of your thesis. The conclusion of a research paper is a synthesis of the information presented in the body. Your research has led you to conclusions and opinions that have helped you understand your thesis more deeply and more clearly. Lift your reader to the full level of understanding that you have achieved. Revision means "to look again." Find a peer reader to read your paper with you present. Or, visit your college or university's writing lab. Guide your reader's responses by asking specific questions. Are you unsure of the logical order of your paragraphs? Do you want to know whether you have supported all opinions adequately? Are you concerned about punctuation or grammar? Ask that these issues be addressed. You are in charge. Here are some techniques that may prove helpful when you are revising alone or with a reader. When you edit for spelling errors read the sentences backwards. This procedure will help you look closely at individual words. Always read your paper aloud. Hearing your own words puts them in a new light. Listen to the flow of ideas and of language. Decide whether or not the voice sounds honest and the tone is appropriate to the purpose of the paper and to your audience. Listen for awkward or lumpy wording. Find the one right word, Eliminate needless words. Combine sentences. Kill the passive voice. Eliminate was/were/is/are constructions. They're lame and anti-historical. Be ruthless. If an idea doesn't serve your thesis, banish it, even if it's one of your favorite bits of prose. In the margins, write the major topic of each paragraph. By outlining after you have written the paper, you are once again evaluating your paper's organization. OK, you've got the process down. Now execute! And enjoy! It's not everyday that you get to make history. VI. For Further Reading: Works Cited Back to Top Barnet, Sylvan, and Hugo Bedau. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Boston: Bedford, 1993. Brent, Doug. Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge,Persuasion and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gibladi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction , Vol. 17, No. 2, Autum, 1989, pp. 157-167. Republished in the Literature Research Center. Gale Group. (1 January 1999). Klauser, Henriette Anne. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. Philadelphia: Harper, 1986. Rico, Gabriele Lusser. Writing the Natural Way: Using Right Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. Los Angeles: Houghton, 1983. Sorenson, Sharon. The Research Paper: A Contemporary Approach. New York: AMSCO, 1994. Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: MacMillan, 1979. Back to Top This guide adapted from materials published by Thomson Gale, publishers. For free resources, including a generic guide to writing term papers, see the Gale.com website , which also includes product information for schools.

Qualitative study design: Historical

Qualitative study design
Phenomenology
Grounded theory
Ethnography
Narrative inquiry
Action research
Case Studies
Field research
Focus groups
Observation
Surveys & questionnaires
Study Designs Home

Looking at the past to inform the future.

Describing and examining past events to better understand the present and to anticipate potential effects on the future. To identify a need for knowledge that requires a historical investigation. Piecing together a history, particularly when there are no people living to tell their story.

Oral recordings

Can provide a fuller picture of the scope of the research as it covers a wider range of sources. As an example, documents such as diaries, oral histories and official records and newspaper reports were used to identify a scurvy and smallpox epidemic among Klondike gold rushers (Highet p3).

Unobtrusiveness of this research method.

Limitations

Issues with validity – can only use the historical information that is available today.

Primary sources are hard to locate.

Hard to triangulate findings (find other resources to back up the information provided in the original resource).

Example questions

What caused an outbreak of polio in the past that may contribute to the outbreaks of today?
How has the attitude to LGBTQIA+ changed over the past 50 years?

Example studies

Hallett, C. E., Madsen, W., Pateman, B., & Bradshaw, J. (2012). " Time enough! Or not enough time!" An oral history investigation of some British and Australian community nurses' responses to demands for "efficiency" in health care, 1960-2000 . Nursing History Review, 20, 136-161.
Navarro, J. A., Kohl, K. S., Cetron, M. S., & Markel, H. (2016). A tale of many cities: a contemporary historical study of the implementation of school closures during the 2009 pA(H1N1) influenza pandemic. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 41(3), 393-422. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=lhh&AN=20163261834&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Edith Cowan University Library. (2019). Historical Research Method. Retrieved from https://ecu.au.libguides.com/historical-research-method

Godshall, M. (2016). Fast facts for evidence-based practice in nursing: Implementing EBP in a nutshell (2nd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Highet, M. J. (2010). "It Depends on Where You Look": The Unusual Presentation of Scurvy and Smallpox Among Klondike Gold Rushers as Revealed Through Qualitative Data Sources. Past Imperfect, 16, 3-34. doi:10.21971/P7J59D

Saks, M., & Allsop, J. (2012). Researching health: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods (2nd ed.). London: SAGE.

Taylor, B. J., & Francis, K. (2013). Qualitative research in the health sciences: methodologies, methods and processes. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

University of Missouri-St. Louis. Qualitative Research Designs. Retrieved from http://www.umsl.edu/~lindquists/qualdsgn.html

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Library & Digital

Collections

Online Resources

Open and free access materials for research.

In response to libraries and archives being closed during the lockdowns in 2020 the IHR launched this page to steer researchers to freely accessible online research resources. We continue to update the page as part of our remit to help researchers nationally and internationally. We're also asking you for additional recommendations to make this resource as useful as possible.

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Introduction

In response to libraries and archives being closed in 2020 the IHR launched this page to steer researchers to freely accessible online research resources. Below you will find lists of links to these resources, organised, for example, by publication type, chronology and theme. At the start you will also find helpful advice from the IHR Library team on how to make the most of this resource.

So far over 750 resources have been listed but there will be many others known to you. We’re keen to hear about these and encourage you to get in touch. If you would like to recommend a freely accessible online resource please send your suggestions to [email protected] . Alternatively, you can submit your recommendations via an online suggestions box . We will then review the submissions and add them to the portal

About this Guide

How to use this guide.

This webpage contains a selection of curated links to online research resources that can be used for historical research of all kinds. From digitised archives to oral histories, newspapers, maps and printed collections, we hope that there will some material that can help with your work or with supporting your students.

We have organised the material by period. This is always something of an arbitrary exercise, and there will be some duplication. Some key subject or perhaps unexpected formats have also been included, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (why not, for example, visit relevant historical sites around the world via Google Streetview?).

This is of course simply a small selection of the vast amount of material that is out there. You will know more about what is available in your own area of specialism, and Google, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will uncover more. There are also numerous online guides and bibliographies, both general and specialised, that will give further suggestions, these include Wikipedia's list of digitised newspapers . Your library will also be able to advise on what is available for you behind paywalls.

Some of the material has been selected by IHR librarians and colleagues in the institute, while others have been suggested by others. We are pleased to hear about suggestions, either by emailing [email protected] or through a short online suggestions box . The full spreadsheet of suggestions might also be useful to review and search.

Things to think about when using online sources

Like all sources, online materials have their own history and pose challenges and questions for historians and other researchers. How were they collected? Why were they selected? Where did they come from? Who pays for it? What's been left out? What are the differences between the physical records and their online representation? What shortcuts sneak into our methods that may undermine the rigour of our overall argument?

Understanding how archives are created and arranged is an essential part of historical research, and there are similar considerations for their online equivalent. How are archival hierarchies, indexes or catalogues created online? Are they automated, do they use international standards, or their own bespoke thesaurus of terms? Technical understanding of scribal methods, forms of writing, and the purpose for which records were created are important things to understand, an awareness of digital technologies, from the limits of scanning technology to OCR and XML, can be useful, too. Many online archives have also been created from microforms, and digital archives, particularly web archives, may have been migrated from one format to another, losing data or functionality along the way.

Archives also have a range of definitions, with archivists conceptualising them as the materials produced by an individual, family or organisation during the course of their life or work, and archives seen in more general terms as collections of old records. Online 'archives' may also be synthetic creations, gathering both primary and secondary materials together in new ways, perhaps with an attention to rediscover hidden voices . Again, historians will be alert to how this shapes our understanding of the past. For this list, we will be as expansive as possible.

Finally, there are matters of scale and quantity. Your materials may be too vast, or too limited; but what are the opportunities opened up by this? Is close reading of one or two documents as useful as reading thousands of items? What are the opportunities opened up by analysing texts or images at scale, perhaps by using the tools of the digital humanities?

Other School of Advanced Study and Senate House Library Guides

IHR Online Resources		Details of free and paywalled resources with access details for SAS students, etc.
Open Access Research Resources for the Humanities		The School’s physical libraries may be closed for the time being, like libraries across the world, but we’re still working to help researchers access the materials that they need, whether that’s books, journal articles, databases or online tutorials.
Senate House Library A-Z Databases (NB subscription resources for University of London only)		Find the best library databases for your research (for SHL card holders)
Institute of Classical Studies Library Open Access Resources		During the COVID-19 pandemic, more publishers and institutions are making research material available online. We've compiled a growing list of resources for you to use at home during self-isolation.
Warburg Institute Library		Details of resources that can be accessed when the library is closed.

Secondary Works

Your own institution's library.

You will be familiar with the eBooks and other resources made available by your own institution's library. There will be guides to these on the library website, perhaps along with a special guide prepared for the current situation.

Many eBook and online journal providers are extending the amount of materials available at this time, so if you have not found what you needed in the past, it may be worth checking now. Your librarian many need to arrange a trial or access. Jisc has coordinated a list of suppliers now offering extended access.

Some libraries, such as the Bodleian History Faculty Library, have provided useful guides and lists of tips for locating open access and other online texts, such as making use of the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library .

Books, Journals and Institutional Repositories

Access to Research (Open Access directory in partnership with publishers).
Dart-Europe theses
Directory of Open Access Journals .
JStor and ArtStor . JStor now offers individuals access to read 100 articles every 30 days .
Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog Book search interface for more than hundreds of million books and serials in library and book trade catalogs worldwide.
ProjectMuse is hosting a range of free materials , including UVA and University of Pennsylvania Press books and journals during the crisis.
Details of university presses providing temporary access to their collections from PublicBooks.org .
Open Library of the Humanities .
Rian : Pathways to Irish Research Comprehensive libray of Irish Open Access Irish research publications.
Unpaywall , OA Button and CORE Discovery plugins offer help in discovering open access versions of articles. See also the British Library guide to open access tools for research.
Many publishers also provide access to some open access materials, such as Bloomsbury Academic and Cambridge Core

Preprints and other open access collections can be also found in institutional repositories. A list of UK repositories can be found at Sherpa .

Theses Databases and Online Repositories

Below is listed a number of online databases of PhD theses where in many instances you can also download an electronic copy. It is also worth searching general online electronic libraries such as Jisc Library Hub , Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog and Rian : Pathways to Irish Research as well as library catalogues and databases of individual universities.

Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações		IBICT database for Brazilian theses and dissertations.
CiNii		Database of Japanese university theses and dissertations. Use the "本文あり / Full-Text Exists" search option to find electronic copies.
Dart - Europe		The European portal for finding electronic theses and dissertations. DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses.
Ethos		Search over 500,000 theses from UK universities, with download option available for many.
History Theses 1970-2014: Historical research for higher degrees in the universities of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland		A thematic listing of UK theses created by British History Online. Entries are in the process of being linked to their Ethos record where an electronic copy is available.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations		The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). We support electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide. Our website includes resources for university administrators, librarians, faculty, students, and the general public. Topics include how to find, create, and preserve ETDs; how to set up an ETD program; legal and technical questions; and the latest news and research in the ETD community.
PQDT Open		With PQDT Open, you can read the full text of open access dissertations and theses from the ProQuest database free of charge.
Shodhganga		The Shodhganga@INFLIBNET Centre provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access.
TesiOnline		Online database of Italian theses and dissertations. To access an electronic copy, where available, you need to create a free account.
Theses Canada		Theses Canada, launched in 1965 at the request of the deans of Canadian graduate schools, is a collaborative program between Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadian universities. It strives acquire and preserve theses and dissertations from participating universities, provide free access to Canadian digital theses and dissertations in the collection and facilitate access to non-digital theses and dissertations in the collection.
Theses.fr		A service similar to the UK's Ethos service. You can search the database for French completed French doctoral theses and those in preparation and access an online version for those records marked with an "Accéder en ligne" tab.

Catalogues, Bibliographies and Guides

Lists of online archives.

Clio-online Web-Directory		The Clio-online Web-Directory outlines databases and websites for historical research.
IHR Library list of online resources		Includes free and subscription resources, with access details
Free online history archives		Over 1,000 free online resources listed by the Bodleian History Faculty Library
International Council of Archives 'The Archives are Accessible'	www.ica.org/en/the-archives-and-records-are-accessible	To enable the archives and records community to tell ICA what they are doing and what is accessible, we have developed a where you can share information about an online exhibition, digital catalogue, specific digital collections or a crowd-sourcing project that people can do while they are #StayHome.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine		A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Endangered Archives Programme		More than 400 projects in 90 countries worldwide, in over 100 languages and scripts.
Open Education Database '250+ Killer Digital Libraries'		This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.
Hazine: a guide to researching the middle east and beyond		Online Archives, Digitized Collections and Resources for Middle East, North African, and Islamic(ate) Studies
European History Primary Sources		While not claiming to be complete, EHPS contains the major national digital libraries and many smaller series of e-sources and smaller digitization projects in Europe. It thus reflects to a considerable extent the current state of digitization of historical source materials in Europe, as well as those digitized outside Europe pertaining to its history.
Rechtshistorie: A gateway to legal history		An extensive international list of archival resources.
History Online Projects		An archive of the IHR's list of online projects; some links may no longer be current.
Women Also Know History		Free online resource dedicated to promoting the work of women historians.

Thematic Guides

English Monastic Archives		The database, created by the English Monastic Archives project, is a guide to documents generated by medieval monasteries.
LIBRAL		Library of rural and agricultural history
Radical Online Collections and Archives (New Historical Express)		Free to access radical literature from around the world
	ims.leeds.ac.uk/online-resources	Primary and secondary resources covering all aspects of medieval studies to help medievalists connect with each other, develop their research, and find opportunities to present and share their ideas.
Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMSLib)	https://www.memslib.co.uk	MEMSlib is an initiative of the (MEMS) at the University of Kent. This student-led project developed out of our shared desire to support academic peers and colleagues during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vast Early America (Omohundro Institute)		As we all shift to reliance on online materials learning and teaching - and just for exploring - the vast early American past, the OI thought it would be useful to start a central resource. These started with resources from some of our institutional partners and scholars we have worked with, but will also include organizations and scholars we’re just learning about. Please let us know if we can add yours.
Bibliographical Society of America		Online Instruction Resources: Digital Repositories for Book History Teaching, Research, & More
		Transport and mobility history digital sources (crowdsourced)
European Association for Digital Humanities		Links to digital humanities projects and databases
Early Modern France (Dr Sara Barker's blog)		Online resources for sixteenth and seventeenth-century French history – museums, châteaux and institutions
		Aimed primarily at students
		Exploring online and digital resources for history in Higher Education. Distance learning, remote research and accessibility. Run by
Pinakes		Online catalogue of Greek manuscripts from around the world.
		Suggestions and call for contributions of archives and other resources for student projects in the history of medicine.

Online Book Collections

Guides and bibliographies.

Bibliographical Society of America have produced an extensive guide to online resources and digital repositories , which should be your first port of call.

Digitised Printed Books

Google Books
Internet Archive (also includes lending in the National Emergency Library , offered 1.4 million titles to help support emergency remote teaching) [n.b., will close 16 June 2020]
Liberty Fund Library (a collection of 'scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets')
Project Gutenberg
Biblioteca Virtual IFC (digitised collection of the publications of the Institución "Fernando el Católico")
LIBRAL - the Library of Rural and Agricultural Literature

Hebraic and Yiddish

Digital Yiddish Library

Digital Collections

National and regional libraries.

Aberdeen University Library - Open Access Resources		Resource List
Belgica		Digitised material from the Royal Library of Belgium.
British Library Digitised Manuscripts		Use this website to view digitised copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents.
British Library digital collections		Numerous other digital collections. A large corpus is available via Google Books and the former .
Digital Library of the Caribbean		The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.
Goethe Universität - Frankfurt (Digitale Sammlungen)		A large and growing online library of material concentrating on German and Jewish history.
Library of Congress digital collections		A vast range of digitised materials.
National Institute for Newman Studies Digital Collections		Over 250,000 images featuring letters, library records, photographs, maps, manuscripts, music scores, and more.
Vatican Library digital collections		DigiVatLib is a digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections: manuscripts, incunabula, archival materials and inventories as well as graphic materials, coins and medals, printed materials (special projects).
Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB)		The goal of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is to offer everyone unrestricted access to Germany’s cultural and scientific heritage, that is, access to millions of books, archived items, images, sculptures, pieces of music and other sound documents, as well as films and scores, from all over Germany.
BNF Gallica		Nearly 4 million digitised items from the French national library.
Biblioteca de Catalunya (Memòria digital de Catalunya)		Digitised document collection from the Biblioteca de Catalunya.
National Library of Australia		Access to a wide range of collections from across Australia
National Library of New Zealand		Newspapers, magazines, letters and diaries, and political papers, including Maori materials
National Library of Scotland		List of Open Access Resources.
Qatar Digital Library
National Digital Library of India

Research Libraries and Other Organisations

Aceh Books		This digital collection offers full-text access to more than 1200 publications on Aceh, the province located at the northern end of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The books form part of the collection of the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden which is kept at the Leiden University Library. The titles date from the 17th till the turn of the 21th century and are in a variety of languages such as Indonesian, Acehnese, English and Dutch. Due to copyright issues titles published after 1900 can only be accessed from desktop computers situated in the University Library.
Avalon Project		The Avalon Project is a digital library of documents relating to law, history and diplomacy. The project is part of the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library.
Beinecke Digital Collections
Black Central Europe		Site created and curated by the Black Central European Studies Network (BCESN) providing access to a number of document and picture collections highlighting the history of the Black diaspora in Central Europe from 1000 to the present day.
British History Online (IHR)		Brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. These primary and secondary sources, which range from medieval to twentieth century.
Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts		The Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts makes images of over 12,000 texts from throughout Laos easily accessible for study. There is a wide diversity in the manuscript collection, covering a large geographical area and historical timeframe, different literary traditions and schools of scribes, and different languages and scripts. The majority of the texts are from the Lao, Lan Na and Tai Lue traditions, with smaller numbers in Tai Nuea, and Tai Dam, etc.
John Carter Brown Library Digital Collections		High resolution images from the Library's archive of early American images, map collection, and political cartoon collection are available through Luna. Scans of over 10,000 full books are available through Internet Archive.
The Morgan Library Digital Facsimiles		Literary and historical highspots, including the complete MSS of Anne Brontë and Newton's pocket notebook
Neliti - Indonesia's Research Repository		A free and open access collection of over 300,000 books, datasets and journal articles from Southeast Asia, funded by the National Library of Indonesia.
Cornell University Digital Collections		Contains a wide range of archival sources on various themes, including US history, East Asian studies, slavery, race, art and architecture, travel narratives
Delpher		Online archive of Dutch and Indonesian newspapers and periodicals.
Manchester Digital Collections		A new resource for exploring high-quality images of cultural collections and research projects at The University of Manchester, including Peterloo materials. See also .
Newberry Library		Explore the Newberry through online collections, exhibitions, and publications.
Cambridge Digital Library		Includes the Newton Papers and Sassoon Journals.
Digital Bodleian Library		Images of manuscripts, rare books, maps, archives and ephemera from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries.
Ghent University Library online collections		Online collection of coins, manuscripts, periodicals, etc. found in the Ghent University Library.
Huntington Digital Library		Includes the Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History
SOAS Digital Collections		The Archives & Special Collections at the SOAS Library specialises in the collection of archives, manuscripts, and rare books relating to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and beyond.
LSE Digital Library		Digitised material from the London School of Economics Library collections and also born-digital material that has been collected and preserved in digital formats.
Flickr Commons		Photographs from cultural institutions around the world
Harvard Digital Collections	l	Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America	guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=940072&p=6775019	Includes access to a number of portals for digitized collections. These include Susan B. Anthony, Beecher-Stowe Family, Blackwell Family, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Inez Milholland, Alice Paul, and Dorothy West
Wikimedia Commons		a collection of media files
Wellcome Digital Collections		The Library's digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war.
Biodiversity Heritage Library		The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
Center for Research Libraries		CRL has taken measures to allow greater access to portions of its restricted content to support global research and teaching in view of the current circumstances.
Somni: Coŀlecció digital de fons històric		Digitised sources from the Biblioteca Universitaria, Valencia.
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana		Growing collection of digitised manuscripts from the BML, Florence.

Ancestry.com records held by National Archives and Records Administration (USA)		Email registration required for special free access arranged by NARA and Ancestry.com
ARCHIM (France)		Archives nationales digitised materials
St Petersburg Archives		The portal for all the state archives in St Petersburg. Until at least 30 April 2020, it is offering access to digitised content that is usually paywalled, including over quarter of a million images from TSGAKFFD (The Central State Archive of Film, Photographic and Sound Documents)
The National Archives (UK)	https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/digital-downloads/	Temporary access to some digitised materials
SODA (Australia)

Late Antiquity

General resources.

Open Access Classics Resources

List of open-access resources (either temporarily during the pandemic or permanently) produced by the library of the Institute of Classical Studies.

Primary Texts

Bibliotheca Palatina - Digital		Bibliotheca Palatina – digital: A Virtual Reconstruction of the Former Crown Jewel of Germany's Libraries.
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies		The Digital Corpus assembles a wide range of Greek texts and their Arabic counterparts. It also includes a number of Arabic commentaries and important secondary sources. The texts in the corpus can be consulted individually or side by side with their translation.

Epigraphy and Numismatics

Roman Inscriptions in Britain		This website hosts multiple corpora of Roman inscriptions from Britain.
Roman Provincial Coinage Online		Online database of Roman Empire coinage.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index		This online finding-aid covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.
MEMSLib Early Medieval Resource Page		This list contains resources of various types for the study of the history and literature of the early medieval world (c.300 - c.1100).
MEMSLib Late Medieval History Resource Page		Resource list relevant to the study of history in the late medieval world (c. 1100-c.1500)
MEMSLib Manuscript Studies Resource Page		In this resource list you will find suggestions for reading and assistance relating to the wonderful world of handwritten books and documents, both medieval and early modern.

Dictionaries, Biographical and Reference Works

Logeion		Includes The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.
Anglo-Norman Dictionary
Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary
Dictionary of Welsh Biography
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography		May be available through academic or public library subscriptions
Medieval Londoners		Created by Fordham University, this website introduces resources available for research about medieval London and its people, focusing not only on documentary and narrative sources in print, but also archaeological, visual, and cartographic sources that illuminate the physical and material world inhabited by medieval Londoners. An important component of the website is the (MLD), which records the activities of London residents between c. 1100 and 1520, and is searchable by name, gender, citizenship status, location (ward, parish, and street if available), craft, occupation, civic office, and craft office, among other variables.
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England		Structured information relating to all the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the late eleventh century.. based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period.
England’s Immigrants 1330-1550		A fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England in this period.
History of Parliament
Victoria County History		Full text of many of the volumes available on .
Archaeological Data Service Library		Includes British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography.

Library, Archive and Museum Collections

These are a sample of many collections from around the world.

Vatican Library digital collections
FranceArchives: Portail National des Archives
Wellcome Medieval manuscripts
British Cartoon Archive		Artwork for over 200,000 British editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines.
British Museum collection
Gallica		Digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
British Library manuscripts		Can filter by date
Digital Bodleian
Archives Portal Europe
Metropolitan Museum of Art collections
Endangered Archives Programme
Pinakes
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

Documentary Sources

These include digital editions of sources and compilations of sources.

Anglo-American Legal Tradition		Over 9 million images of manuscripts held at the National Archives UK, spanning 1176 to the end of Queen Victoria's reign; of broader interest than purely legal history
British History Online		Many sources for British history, can be filtered by period. Examples include Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Inquisitions Post Mortem, Calendar of Close Rolls, Calendar of Patent Rolls, Calendar of Papal Registers, Parliament Rolls of Medieval England and many local history resources.
Czech Medieval Sources Online
The Electronic Sawyer: Online catalogue of Anglo-Saxon charters
Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa.		Scholarly open access edition of the Arabic text with English translation.
Legal History: The Year Books		An Index and Paraphrase of Printed Year Book Reports, 1268 - 1535.
Legislation.gov.uk		Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents from 1267 to the present day.
Scripta: Database of Norman Medieval documents		A large corpus of medieval Norman charters dating from the 10th to the 13th Century.
Exon: The Domesday Survey of South-West England
Henry III Fine Rolls Project
Inquisitions post mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside: Properties, Places & People
Irish Script On Screen		Digital library of Irish manuscripts.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
Regesta Imperii
The Sherborne Missal		Fully digitised edition of BL. Add. Ms. 74235
York's Archbishops Registers Revealed		Free access to over 20,000 images of Registers produced by the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650.
Epistolae: Medieval Women's Letters		Free online resource from Columbia University. Collection of medieval Latin letters to and from women, with English translation. C4th to C13th.
English Medieval Legal Documents Database		A Compilation of Published Sources from 600 to 1535 from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History		From Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.
Gascon Rolls project		Records relating to the English administration of Gascony in the late middle ages (1317-1467). Includes translations of most if not all of the rolls.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook		.
Archivio digitale della cultura medievale		Temporarily free.
Revised Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani Database		Röhricht’s Regesta Revised is a growing calendar of all the charters, other legal or formal documents and letters that were composed between 1098 and 1291 in the Latin kingdoms of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Cilician Armenia, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, or were addressed to individuals in those settlements. It is based on Reinhold Röhricht’s Regesta regni Hierosolymitani 2 vols (Innsbruck, 1893-1904), the entries in which are signalled by the letters RRH. The revision has reached the year 1244 and will be continued to 1291, but new material is always coming to light and Röhricht’s Regesta Revised will be regularly up-dated. Suggestions for new entries or corrections are welcome.

Other Sources

UK National Historic Environment records	, , ,
Historic England Archive
Gatehouse: A comprehensive gazetteer and bibliography of the medieval castles, fortifications and palaces of England, Wales and the Islands.		A comprehensive gazetteer and bibliography of the medieval castles, fortifications and palaces of England, Wales and the Islands.
The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture
Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources
English place-names
English medieval coins
Portable Antiquities Scheme database

Pipe roll society		Publishes editions of the pipe rolls of the Exchequer and related medieval documents.
Haskins Society		Western Europe and its encounters with the larger medieval world in the early and central middle ages. Website includes documents and other resources.
Canterbury and York Society		Publishes editions of English medieval ecclesiastical records.
Henry Bradshaw Society		Promotes the study of medieval and early modern liturgies.
Richard III Society		Promoting research into the life and times of Richard III.
Selden Society		English legal history.

Resources for Byzantine History

Barbaro, Nicolo.		Selected translations
Berger de Xivrey, Jules. (Paris, 1851)		Digital Copy
Byzantine Sources in Translation		Bibliography
Chalkokondyles, Laonikos.		Digitised copy of BL Add. Ms. 36670
Chinese Accounts of Rome, Byzantium and the Middle East, 91 BCE-1643 CE		Translated excerpts
Chronicon Paschale (translation)		Important source for early Byzantine and Jewish history to the early seventh century
Comnena, Anna.		Online Translation
(selected volumes)		List of volumes that have been digitised and are now available via Google Books
Council of Chalcedon, 451		Translation of the acts, commentaries and selected other sources.
Council of Constantinople, 381: Documents		Digital copy of the relevant extracts taken from, Henry R. Percival, ed. , Vol XIV of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, (reprinted Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1988)
Council of Constantinople, 553		Translation of the acts, commentaries and selected other sources.
Council of Constantinople, 680-1		Translation of the acts, commentaries and selected other sources.
Council of Ephesus, 431		Translation of the acts, commentaries and selected other sources.
Council of Nicea, 787		Translation of the acts, commentaries and selected other sources.
Evagrius Scholasticus.		English translation first published in 1846
The Fourth Crusade: Collected Sources		Selection of translations
George of Pisidia. Works		Works of the 7th century poet including accounts of the military campaign against Persia and the Avar attack on Constantinople
Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Byzantium		A list of extracts curated by the library at Fordham University
Procopius. , Books I-II		English translation first published in 1914 by H. B. Dewing
Procopius.		English translation hosted on the Project Gutenberg site.
Psellos, Michael.		Online Translation
Theodore the Syncellus.		English Translation
Theophanes the Confessor.		Chronicle covering Byzantine history from the late third to the ninth century.
Translated Excerpts from Byzantine History: c. 700-1204		Translations produced by Paul Stephenson and his students.
Zachariah of Mytilene.		Source from early Byzantine and Church History.

Early Modern

Archives Portal Europe

The Archives Portal Europe provides access to information on archival material from different European countries as well as information on archival institutions throughout the continent.

Directory of Open Access Books

A discovery service for Open Access books.

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Early Modern Annotated Books from UCLA's Clark Library

Comprising over 250 early modern printed books bearing handwritten annotations, this collection offers rich evidence for studying the material history of reading. The books collected here range in subject matter (from science and natural history to literature and philosophy), time period (1472–1818), and type of annotation (from scholarly commentary and cross-referencing to printers' notations and polemical criticism).

Ethos

EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses.

MEMSLib Early Modern History Resource List

Resource list relevant to the study of early modern history (c. 1500-c.1800)

MEMSLib Manuscript Studies Resource List

In this resource list you will find suggestions for reading and assistance relating to the wonderful world of handwritten books and documents, both medieval and early modern.

Open Access Publishing in European Networks

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.

SAS Space

SAS-Space is an online library for humanities research outputs, providing a permanent archive for scholars and researchers.

Theatregoing: Eyewitness accounts of going to a show

Documented experiences of theatre visits from the 16th Century to the Modern Day.

Bloomsbury Academic		Search Bloomsbury Academic's open access content.
Brill		Search Brill’s current open access content.
UCL Press		Listed is the UCL Press’s current OA history content.
University of London Press: Humanities Digital Library		The Humanities Digital Library is the open access library and catalogue for books published by the University of London Press at the School of Advanced Study.

Britain and Ireland

1641 Irish Depositions		Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library.
Anglo-American Legal Tradition	http://aalt.law.uh.edu/	Over 9 million images of manuscripts held at the National Archives UK, spanning 1176 to the end of Queen Victoria's reign; of broader interest than purely legal history
Alice Thornton's Books		This AHRC-funded research project, in partnership with Durham Cathedral, will create an online digital edition of all four of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical manuscripts. To date our knowledge of Thornton’s life has largely been dependent on a nineteenth-century edition by Charles C. Jackson that selected materials from some of those manuscripts to produce a single, chronological narrative of her life.
Bess of Harwick’s Letters		Bess of Harwick’s correspondence from c. 1550-1608.
British History Online		Entire content free to all users to 30 September 2020.
British Printed Images to 1700		This website, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, makes available a database of thousands of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain in fully-searchable form.
British Renaissance Plasterwork		Research resource created and maitained by Dr Claire Gapper on British plasterwork and workers in the 16th and 17th century. Includes a gazetteer of London plasterworkers compiled by Dr Gapper and Dr Edward Town.
Broadside Ballads Online		Broadside Ballads Online presents a digital collection of English printed ballad-sheets from between the 16th and 20th centuries.
Casebooks Project (Simon Forman and Richard Napier)		Digitised casebooks of two late Tudor/early Stuart physician-astrologers.
Civil War Petitions		Database containing petitions to the state from veterans and their families for welfare payments as a result of injuries and bereavement sustained during the English Civil Wars.
Clergy of the Church of England database (1540-1835)		Biographical database of Anglican clergy to the early 19th century.
Connected Histories		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.
Court depositions of South-West England, 1500-1700		A digital edition of 80 fully transcribed depositions relating to 20 cases heard in the church courts and Quarter Sessions between 1556 and 1694 across Devon, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire.
Database of Court Officers 1660-1837		Online computer database providing the career histories of every regularly remunerated officer and servant of the English royal household and, now, satellite courts, from the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.
Digital Cavendish		Provides digital editions of the works of Margaret Cavendish.
Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership		EEBO-TCP is a partnership with ProQuest and with more than 150 libraries to generate highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts corresponding to books from the Early English Books Online database.
Early Modern Manuscripts Online		Database provides transcriptions, metadata and images of manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Early Modern Women Research Network		The digital archive of the EMWRN presents online editions of women’s writing that circulated in a variety of forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Early Stuart Libels		A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Text Creation Partnership		ECCO-TCP resulted from a partnership with Gale to produce highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts from among the 150,000 titles available in Gale’s ECCO database.
English Broadside Ballad Archive		Making broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records.
Founders Online		Searchable transcripts of correspondence and other writings by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison; includes visits to Britain
Georgian Papers Online		The Georgian Papers Programme will make available online the historic manuscripts, both official and private, relating to the Georgian monarchy held in the Royal Archives and Royal Library, in addition to relevant collections held by King's College London, by the year 2024.
Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw.		1790 edition published in Edinburgh (hosted on archive.org)
Hearth Tax Digital		Hearth Tax Digital is a platform for the publication and dissemination of research and analysis on hearth tax records and other associated documents.
Legislation.gov.uk		Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents from 1267 to the present day.
Letters of Elizabeth Montagu, 1730s-1780s		The letters can be downloaded as txt and xml files, and they can be browsed and read on this site.
Lewis Walpole		Searchable transcripts of 48 volumes of Horace Walpole's correspondence, plus other items related to the Walpole family.
London Lives 1690-1800: crime, poverty and social policy in the metropolis		A fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names.
Manuscript Pamphleteering in early Stuart England		Only provides pdfs and transcriptions from selected manuscripts.
MarineLives		Collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts from the High Court of Admiralty, 1650-1669 (with some excursions into data from the 1630s and 1640s).
The Newton Project		The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings - whether they were printed or not.
Plantations in Ulster, 1600-41: a collection of documents		A colection of documents edited by R. J. Hunter
Proceedings of the Old Bailey online 1674-1913		A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
Records of London’s Livery Companies online: apprentices and freemen 1400-1900		The aim of ROLLCO is to provide a fully searchable database of Livery Company membership over time.
Records of the Scottish Parliament to 1707		A fully searchable database containing the proceedings of the Scottish parliament from the first surviving act of 1235 to the union of 1707.
Runaway Slaves in Britain		The Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project has created a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped.
Who Were the Nuns?A Prosopographical study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800		The database contains details of 3900 nuns who entered 23 convents and the Mary Ward Institute during the period 1600 to 1800.
Work diaries of Robert Boyle		From this site you can view images and transcripts of the work diaries, search the workdiary texts, and access reference resources on places, people and books.

Rest of Europe

Art et Démocratie		Online collection of writings devoted to the arts of drawing (painting, sculpture and engraving) in the first years of the French Revolution.
Austrian Newspapers Online		Online collection stratching back to the seventeenth century.
Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes		Online collection of 252 chapbooks from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Briefwisseling van Willem van Oranje		Searchable database of William of Orange’s correspondence with pdf images of the manuscript letters.
Circulation of knowledge and learned practices in the 17th century Dutch Republic		The CKCC project built a web application called ePistolarium. With this researchers can browse and analyze around 20,000 letters that were written by and sent to 17th century scholars who lived in the Dutch Republic.
Delpher		Online archive of Dutch and Indonesian newspapers and periodicals from the 17th to the 20th century.
The Electronic Capito Project		The purpose of the Electronic Capito Project is to provide the text of letters from and to Wolfgang Capito which are either unpublished or have been published before 1850 and are therefore difficult to access.
Esclavos en Aragón (siglos XV a XVII)		Collection of documents, pages 69-240.
French Revolution Digital Archive		The is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the 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 and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the .
Hortus Nitidissimis		Online editions of Christoph Trew’s 18th century work on botany.
Letters of Philip II, King of Spain 1592-1597		Online collection of letters from the last decade of Philip II’s reign.
A Literary Tour de France		Publishing and the Book Trade in France and Francophone Europe, 1769-1789
The Montaigne Project		Digital edition of Montaigne’s Essays.
Montesquieu - De l'esprit des Lois		An English translation by Philip Stewart hosted on the site of the Société Montesquieu.
Montesquieu - Lettres Persanes		An English translation by Philip Stewart hosted on the site of the Société Montesquieu.
Münchner Digitalisierungs Zentrum: Digitale Bibliothek		Provides access to a wide variety of collections, including incunabula and sources mainly concerned with German and Bavarian history.
Newberry French Revolution Collection Pamphlets		Over 30,000 pamphlets and more than 23,000 issues of 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810.
Post-Reformation Digital Library		PRDL is a select database of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era.
Rousseau Online		A full-text, fully-searchable online edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings. Included are all of Rousseau's works as published in the Collection complète des Œuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Du Peyrou and Moultou in Geneva (1782-1789).
Sfondrati Family Papers		Contains legal documents, land records, and family papers related to the Sfondrati and associated families in northern Italy between 1494 to c. 1900.
Tout d’Holbach		An on-going project which aims to bring together fully searchable transcriptions of the vast majority of d’Holbach’s works.
Vilnius University Library Digital Collection		Large online collection including material on the history of Poland-Lithuania.

The Middle East, Iran, Central Asia and India

Andros		Database of Ottoman documents (from 1579 to 1821) in the Kaireios Library of the Greek island of Andros. The database offers direct access to facsimiles of the original documents as well as the possibility to search the documents for specific words and phrases.
Database of Ottoman Inscriptions		The Database of Ottoman Inscriptions (DOI) is searchable digital database comprising information about, as well as transliterations and pictures of, all the Turkish, Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions created in the Ottoman lands during Ottoman times.
Digital Persian Archive		An image database of Persian historical documents from Iran and Central Asia.
Hyde Books Project	http://hydebooks.njit.edu	Judicial Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers, 1774-1798, are a unique source of primary historical information for the early years of the Supreme Court and life in India.
National Digital Library of India		To access you will need to create a user account.
Qatar Digital Library		An extensive archive of digitised books and manuscripts covering the history of the Middle East from the pre-Islamic period to the present.

East and South East Asia

Chinese Text Project	.	An open access collection of pre-modern Chinese texts
Korean History Online		Site houses a selection of digitised books and manuscripts.
Ming-Qing Women’s Writings

Americas and the Atlantic

Adams Family Papers
Archives of Maryland Online
Digital Quaker Collection
Dutch Caribbean Digital Platform
Early Americas Digital Archive
Early Haitian Print Culture	http://lagazetteroyale.com/#publications	Included La Gazette royale and officials and almanacs
The Plymouth Colony Archive Project
Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland probate inventories
Freedom on the Move		A database of fugitives from American Slavery.
Georgetown Slavery Archive		A repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery.
Marronnage in Saint-Domingue		A site devoted to fugitive slaves in Saint-Domingue (Haiti).
Runaway Slaves in Britain		A searchable database of over 800 newspaper reports.
Slave Societies Digital Archive		The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies.
Slave Voyages		Comprises of a number of databases concerning the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Thomas Thistlewood Collection		Digitised collection of 61 items from the papers of the 18th century Jamaican slave-holder Thomas Thistlewood, now held in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Massachusetts Historical Society		Includes Adams Family and Thomas Jefferson MSS.
A New Nation Votes		Searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy.
Founders Online		George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Over 183,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.
Vast Early America Resources
Women Writers Online		Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.
Women Writers in Review		is a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and other texts responding to works by early women writers.
Early Caribbean Digital Archive		The ECDA has two primary related, overarching goals: the first is to uncover and make accessible a literary history of the Caribbean written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/or colonized people. Although the first step in this process is digitization, the ECDA is more than a digitization or cataloging initiative. Rather, we aim to enable users—both scholars of the Caribbean as well as students—to understand the colonial nature of the archive and to use the digital archive as a site of revision and remix for exploring ways to decolonize the archive.

Early Modern Culture Online
Early Modern Digital Review

Modern and Contemporary

Anglo-American Legal Tradition		over 9 million images of manuscripts held at the National Archives UK, spanning 1176 to the end of Queen Victoria's reign; contains more than purely legal history
Archive-It		The leading web archiving service for collecting and accessing cultural heritage on the web. Includes a number of collections relevant to contemporary history including the , and .
British Pathé		Large online library of 20th century news reel films.
The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive (CDA)
Chinese Pamphlets: Political Communication & Mass Education		Pamphlets, picture books, and other propaganda issued during the early years of the People’s Republic between 1947 and 1954. This is the “street literature” of the revolution: comic books, leaflets, and other ephemera distributed to the general population of provincial cities and villages.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission Archive Efiles		The CWGC's enquiry files (Efiles) are part of a collection of nearly 3,000 files which have never been made available to the public before. Nearly half have been digitised so far, alongside a previously unreleased collection of more than 16,000 photographs held in negatives in the Commission’s archive.
Digital Transgender Archive		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.
Dziennik Zwiazkowy		The first ten years (1908–17) of founded in Chicago in 1908 by the Polish National Alliance. Representing local, national, and international issues of concern to the Polish community, the paper continues today as the
In Her Own Right: Women Asserting Their Civil Rights, 1820-1920		Showcases Philadelphia-area collections highlighting women’s struggle leading to the passage of the 19th Amendment.
FBI Medgar Evers files		Files held by the FBI on the Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers and his assassination on the 12th June 1963.
Founders and Survivors		Founders & Survivors is a partnership between historians, genealogists, demographers and population health researchers. It seeks to record and study the founding population of 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania.
Forward to Freedom		A history and materials related to the British anti-apartheid movement 1959-1995
Georgian Papers Online		The Georgian Papers Programme will make available online the historic manuscripts, both official and private, relating to the Georgian monarchy held in the Royal Archives and Royal Library, in addition to relevant collections held by King's College London, by the year 2024.
Imperial War Museum collections		Explore around 800,000 items that tell the story of modern war and conflict, collected by the museum since 1917.
Independent Voices		An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
IPUMS		IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge.
A Journal of the Plague Year: an archive of Covid 19		Join us in documenting our uncertain moment. We are acting not just as historians, but as chroniclers, recorders, memoirists, as image collectors. We invite you to and impressions of how CoVid19 has affected our lives, from the mundane to the extraordinary, including the ways things haven't changed at all.
LSE Economic History Digital Collection		Provides access to some recent digitisation of UK statistical publications on an open government license
Marxist Internet Archive		Sites includes information on Marxist thinkers, excerpts of their writing and events in the Left during the 19th and 20th century.
The Palestinian Digital Archive		Illuminates over 200 years of the Palestinian narrative for posterity and those interested in Palestinian history wherever they happen to be with a collection nearing 70,000 endangered objects ranging from photographs and documents to artworks and posters.
Papers Past		Online collection of New Zealand newspapers.
Livingstone Online: illuminating imperial exploration		Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that allows users to encounter the written, visual, and material legacies of the famous Victorian explorer   (1813-73).
The Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (MIDAS)		MIDAS, the Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives ( ), is a crowd-sourced, public access digital archive of historical documents from Mexican intelligence agencies.
Official Gazettes and Civil Society Information		A collection of official gazettes and other key historical government documentation from countries where the integrity of the public record is known to be at risk.
Slavery and Manumission Manuscripts of Timbuktu		Arabic nineteenth-century manuscripts relating to slavery and manumission in Timbuktu provide documentation on Africans in slavery in Muslim societies. From the Bibliothèque Commémorative Mama Haidara in Timbuktu, Mali.
Spare Rib Project		Explore digitised images from this ground-breaking feminist 20th-century magazine.
Theatregoing: Eyewitness accounts of going to a show		Documented experiences of theatre visits from the 16th Century to the Modern Day.
Union Makes Us Strong		Includes the MS of The RaggedTrousered Philanthropists
Queen Victoria's Scrapbook
William Godwin's Diary		Digital edition of the diary of William Godwin (1756-1836)
University of Southampton Special Collections		Includes Duke of Wellington and Palmerston
Williams, Wendy.		Report concerning the UK government's wrongful detention and deportation of British-born subjects and descendents of the Windrush generation.
Wilson Centre Digital Archive		The Digital Archive contains once-secret documents from governments all across the globe, uncovering new sources and providing fresh insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy.
Windrush Stories		Over 60 digitised items
Women Writers in Review		is a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and other texts responding to works by early women writers.

National and International Organisations

Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive. This digital archive mirrors and extends the physical archive that remains preserved in Guatemala as an important historical patrimony of the Guatemalan people.

Eastview Information Services

dlib.eastview.com/login

free access to Pravda and other Russian and Chinese publications until 31 July 2020 (registration required)

European Union: Official Journal of the European Union

Digital copies of the starting in 1952 are available here.

US Government Printing Office

Details of how to access US Gov. Printing Office materials via explore.bl.uk.

NATO Archives Online

Explore the first 10 years of the Alliance’s history through the Committee documents of the North Atlantic Council and its sub-committees, the Military Committee and its working groups, as well as a complete collection of NATO Publications.

CIA Freedom of Information Reading Room

Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart?

League of Nations Digital Archive

Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD) will ensure state-of-the-art free online access and the digital and physical preservation of approximately 15 million pages, or almost three linear kilometres, the entirety of the archives of the League of Nations (1920-1946).

Hansard

Hansard is a “substantially verbatim” report of what is said in Parliament. Members’ words are recorded, and then edited to remove repetitions and obvious mistakes, albeit without taking away from the meaning of what is said. Hansard also reports decisions taken during a sitting and records how Members voted to reach those decisions in Divisions.

UK Legislation 1267-2020

Anglo-American Legal Tradition		Over 9 million images of manuscripts held at the National Archives UK, spanning 1176 to the end of Queen Victoria's reign; contains more than purely legal history.
Baden-Powell Papers		Collection of Lord Baden-Powell's papers held at Bringham Young University.
Boehm-Casement Papers		This collection consists largely of letters from Roger Casement to Captain Hans Boehm, during Casement's stay in Germany in 1915, as well as some associated material (photographs, medals) relating to his first contact with the German authorities in November and December 1914 and the formation of the Irish Brigade in 1915.
Brexit Talks		A collection of videos where a cross-section of people living and working in London reflect on Brexit and its impact on the capital.
Britain and UK Handbooks, 1954-2005		Digitised collection held in the National Library of Scotland.
Britain at Work		Materials related to memories of people at work between 1945-1995.
British History Online		British History Online is a not-for-profit digital library based at the . It brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. These primary and secondary sources, which range from medieval to twentieth century, are easily searchable and browsable online.
British Political Speech		Texts of speeches given by Conservative, Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat Party leaders going back to 1895.
Charles Booth's London (LSE)		Charles Booth's London enables you to search the catalogue of over 450 original notebooks from the (1886-1903), view 41 digitised notebooks and explore the London poverty maps.
Connected Histories		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.
Georgian Papers Online		The Georgian Papers Programme will make available online the historic manuscripts, both official and private, relating to the Georgian monarchy held in the Royal Archives and Royal Library, in addition to relevant collections held by King's College London, by the year 2024.
Gertrude Bell Archive		Digital copies of the diaries, letters and photographs of the archaeologist and explorer Gertrude Bell.
Grace's Guide		Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in the UK.
HistPop: the Online Historical Population Reports Website		The Online Historical Population Reports (OHPR) collection provides online access to the complete British population reports for Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1937.
Kevin Barry Papers		A collection of material relating to Kevin Barry, who was executed for his part in the killing of three British soldiers in 1920. The collection includes material associated with his days at Belvedere College, his year as a medical student in UCD, and his brief time in custody at Mountjoy Prison before execution.
Legacies of British Slave Ownership		Includes data recording compensation paid to slave owners in Britain.
Legislation.co.uk		Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents from 1267 to the present day.
Letters 1916-1923		Extensive online archive of letters highlighting the history of Ireland from the Easter Rising until the end of the Civil War.
Lloyd's Register Foundation: Heritage and Education Centre		This library provides links to a number of digitised works relevant to martime history and the history of marine engineering.
Mass Observation Project (MOP) Database 1981+		Provides potential users of the MOP archive with information about the biographical/demographic characteristics and writing behaviours of individual Mass Observation Project writers.
Moving Here		Moving Here explores, records and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. It offers free access, for personal and educational use, to an online catalogue of versions of original material related to migration history from local, regional and national archives, libraries and museums.
NHS at 70		Since 2017 - supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund – ‘NHS at 70’ has worked across the UK, recording over 1000 interviews from patients, staff, policymakers and the public about experiences of health and the place of the NHS in everyday life and work. In March 2020 we adapted to remote interviews and have recorded over 400 interviews capturing experiences as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded.
Old Bailey Online		A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
Prince Albert Project		Online image and archive collections of Prince Albert (1819-1861)
Queen Victoria's Journals		Browsable by date or name, a collection of Queen Victoria’s journals digitised as well as a interactive timeline and illustrations from the journals. Images of the journals and typed up copies are available.
RTÉ Archives: Easter Rising		Online exhibition by RTÉ radio and television giving access to interviews of witnesses and participants of the 1916 Easter Rising.
The Suffrage Interviews		This is a collection of oral history interviews about the British first wave feminist movement. The interviews were conducted by the historian Brian Harrison between 1974 and 1981, as part of a project funded by the Social Science Research Council (he later extensively used these interviews in his book ' ' Oxford University Press 1987). The recordings were deposited with the Women’s Library in 1981 and the collection consists of 205 interviews with 183 individuals.
UK Web Archive		The UK Web Archive (UKWA) collects millions of websites each year, preserving them for future generations. Use this site to discover old or obsolete versions of UK websites, search the text of the websites and browse websites curated on different topics and themes.
Warwick University Digital Collections: Racism and Xenophobia		Collection includes 54 digitised documents from the late nineteenth century to the late 1960s highlighting the history of racism and xenophobia in Britain.
Williams, Wendy.		Report concerning the UK government's wrongful detention and deportation of British-born subjects and descendents of the Windrush generation.
Windrush Stories		Over 60 digitised items.
(7th Feb. 1920-25th Jun. 1921)		Digitised copies of the publication of the Workers' Committee of Scotland held in the Marx Memorial Library.

America, North

Adams Papers Digital Edition		Provides access to the correspondence of the Adams family, including John and Abigail Adams and John Quincey Adams.
Agents of Social Change: an online exhibition		Includes digitised texts and photographs
American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982		The American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982 collection includes 2,024 reel-to-reel tapes and 2,024 WAV files preserved as part of the Pacifica Radio Archives’ 2013-2016 “American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982” (“American Women”) preservation project. The recordings were selected as an “artificial collection” to document the Women’s movement and second-wave feminism as it was broadcast on the Pacifica network.
American Political Prints 1766-1876		Large collection of early US political cartoons.
Andrew Jackson Papers		Digitised papers held at the Library of Congress
Angela Davis ephemera collection		Collection of 44 items about political activist, academic and author Prof. Angela Davis
Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project		Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s first Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West. The Project, co-directed by Professors Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, coordinates research in North America and Asia to create an online digital archive available to all, along with books, digital visualizations, conferences, and public events.
Chronicling America		Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Civil Rights Digital Library		Resource portal for items on the US Civil Rights Movement.
Civil Rights Oral History Collection		This site focuses on Washington state residents with ties to the Civil Rights Movement.
A Conversation with Betty Friedan		Interview held in 2005 at the Library of Congress.
Cornell Hip Hop Collections		Established in 2007, the Cornell Hip Hop Collection preserves more than 250,000 items across dozens of archives documenting the origins of Hip Hop culture and its spread around the globe.
Digital Public Library of America: Native American collection		Over 500 texts and 10,000 images available.
DocsTeach		DocsTeach is a product of the National Archives education division. Our mission is to engage, educate, and inspire all learners to discover and explore the records of the American people preserved by the National Archives.
Documenting the American South		Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Documents Relating to Indian Affairs		The collection currently includes Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties With Various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869 and the Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
The Equal Rights Amendment: digital source set		Selection of digitised sources hosted by the Digital Public Library of America
FBI W.E.B. Du Bois files		Files held by the FBI on W.E.B. du Bois.
FBI Medgar Evers files		Files held by the FBI on the Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers and his assassination on the 12th June 1963.
Founders Online		Provides access to the published papers of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe.
Freedom on the Move		A database of fugitives from American Slavery.
La Gazette Royale d'Hayti Project		Digitised collection including: 19th century Haitian almanacs. Gazette Officielle de l'etat d'Hayti (1807-11) Gazette Royale d'Hayti (1813-20)
Georgetown Slavery Archive		A repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery.
Ida B. Wells and anti-lynching activism		Small selection of sources and images and links to addtional sources on the life of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaigns.
In Her Own Right: Women Asserting Their Civil Rights, 1820-1920		Showcases Philadelphia-area collections highlighting women’s struggle leading to the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Independent Voices		An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project		Search the published volumes of the for transcribed (sometimes digitisted) copies of his correspondence.
The Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives (MIDAS)		MIDAS, the Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives ( ), is a crowd-sourced, public access digital archive of historical documents from Mexican intelligence agencies.
National Security Archive - the Virtual Reading Room		Makes available over six thousand documents on US foreign relations.
The Niagara Movement Digital Archive		A selection of digitised sources about the Niagara Movements and its influence from 1905 to 1914.
No Safe Space		Transcript of interview with Gloria Steinem.
Presidential Campaign 1972		25 minutes of film clips from the 1972 presidential campaign.
Primary Source Spotlight: Shirley Chisholm		Selection of sources by and about U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.
Public Papers of the Presidents		Digitised papers from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton held by the University of Michigan.
Riots and Rebellions		Online collection created by the National Library of Jamaica bringing together a selection of materials on the Baptist War of 1831-2 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection		Includes thousands of digitised anti-slavery and abolitionist sources.
The Sandino Rebellion, Nicaragua 1927-1934		This Website is envisioned as a comprehensive, interpretive, open-access digital archive on the nationalist rebellion against US military intervention in Nicaragua led by Augusto C. Sandino in the 1920s and '30s.
Schlafly, Phyllis.		Report produced by U.S. conservative Phyllis Schlafly
Slave Societies Digital Archive		The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies.
Toward Racial Equality: reports on Black America, 1857-1874		Image library of illustrations published in on the last years of US slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Treaties Explorer		Part of the larger Indigenous Digital Archive, the IDA Treaties Explorer explains that while treaties between Indigenous peoples and the United States affect virtually every area in the USA, there is as yet no official list of all the treaties. The US National Archives holds 374 of the treaties, where they are known as the Ratified Indian Treaties. Here you can view them for the first time with key historic works that provide context to the agreements made and the histories of our shared lands.
Vision Project		YouTube channel which hosts recorded interviews with African Americans who shaped the history of the 20th century.
Voices of Democracy: the U.S. Oratory Project		Site includes transcripts of speeches, texts and lists of further resources.
Women's Libraration Movement Digital Collection		This collection housed in Duke University Library contains manifestos, speeches, essays, and other materials documenting various aspects of the Women's Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Middle East

Arabic Collections Online		(ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 10,042 volumes across 6,265 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries.
Gertrude Bell Archive		Letters, diaries and photographs from the British archaeologist who travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and Iran.
Institute for Palestine Studies - Digital Projects		The Institute for Palestine Studies has assembled a number of databases and collections of documents on the question of Palestine that constitute a rich source of information for researchers and scholars. (Resources in Arabic and English)
Iranian Oral History Project		The collection consists of the personal accounts of 134 individuals who played major roles in or were eyewitnesses to important political events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s. Of these, 118 narratives have been digitized and are available to researchers through this database.
Israel's Foreign Policy - Historical Documents		Published by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, these are documents (official statements, press conferences, interview, letters, etc.) relating to Israel's foreign relations from 1947-2004.
The Middle East, 1916-2001 : a documentary record		Government documents, transcripts of speeches by government leaders and UN resolutions. Arranged by year.
The Palestinian Oral History Archive		The Palestinian Oral History Archive is a project to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access (through a searchable digital platform) to an archival collection of around 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon.
The Saddam Hussein Sourcebook		Brings together five briefing books previously published by the National Security Archive into one searchable file of primary sources. These include "Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Eyes on Saddam," "Alleged Iraqi War Criminals in 1992," "Operation Desert Storm," and "Shaking Hands with Saddam: U.S. Policy before the Gulf War."
Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran		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.

Garden History

Digital collections and archives.

Biodiversity Heritage Library		Digitised copies of books, journals and papers from a consortium of natural history libraries. Search by author, title or date of publication.
Catena: digital archive of historic gardens and landscapes		The primary mission of Catena, the Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes, is to fill a void in American higher education by assembling a searchable collection of historic and contemporary images that include plans, engravings, paintings, and photographs.
Historic England Archaeological Research Reports		Many archaeological reports available to download here.

Individual Digitised Sources

Blomfield, Reginald. The formal garden in England
Brown, Capability. Account Book
Evelyn, John. Sylva; or, A discourse of forest-trees and the propagation of timer.
Furber, Robert. A short introduction to gardening.
Hill, Thomas. The gardeners labyrinth
Jekyll, Gertrude. Colour in the flower garden.
Marshall, Charles. An introduction to the knowledge and practice of gardening
Meager, Leonard. The English gardener, or, A sure guide to young planters and gardeners
Rea, John. Flora: seu, do florum cultura. Or a complete florilege
Repton, Humphry. Observations on the theory and practice of landscape gardening

Online Reference Works


Parks and Gardens		Extensive database of British and Irish parks and gardens browsable by name, area, period, heritage organisation, etc. Includes former parks and gardens which have now been lost.
Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest		The National Heritage List for England is the only official and up to date database of all nationally protected historic buildings and sites in England. Search by place, post code or listing number, or use the advanced search for more options.

Periods and Styles

Medieval Gardens to c. 1400
Albertus Magnus. De Vegetabilibus		Pdf of the Latin text.
Capitulare des Villis		This decree issued by Charlemage towards the end of the 8th century describes, in an idealised form, the management of royal estates.
Geoponika	Volume 1. Volume 2.	10th cenury compilation of earlier Byzantine works on agriculture, gardening and botany.
Plan of St. Gall		The Plan of St. Gall is the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages. Drawn and annotated on five pieces of parchment sewn together, the St. Gall Plan is 112 cm x 77.5 cm and includes the ground plans of some forty structures as well as gardens, fences, walls, a road, and an orchard.
Strabo, Walafrid. Hortulus		Digital edition with facing English translation of Walafrid Strabo's 9th century poem describing his monastic garden at Reichenau.
Gardens from c. 1400-c. 1700
Alberti, Leon Battista. De Re Aedificatoria		Digitised copy published in 1485 of Alberti's treatise on the ideal villa and garden.
Bacon, Francis. On Gardens		1902 edition of Bacon's essay.
Hill, Thomas. The Profitable Art of Gardening		1579 edition.
Palladio, Andrea. I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura.		Although one of the most influential works on western architecture it also considers garden design.
East Asian Garden History and Design
Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Qing)		The legend of Mount Penglai influenced Chinese garden design from the Qin onwards.
Peng, Y. Zhongguo gudian yuanlin fenxi (1984)		Although a secondary work on classical Chinese design it includes garden plans and illustrations. Digital copy of the 1984 edition.

Local History

United kingdom.


Archaeology Data Service
Atlas of Hillforts in Great Britain and Ireland		Includes 4,147 sites across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (1,224 in England). For each site details of archaeological investigation, secondary literature (including early editions of the VCH, with correct page references) are provided.
British Association for Local History (BALH) including their journal	The Local Historian	Back issues of their excellent journal, , temporarily available for free online. They also publish a [printed] guide to internet sources for local historians.
British and Irish Furniture Makers Online		Online resource for British and Irish furniture makers from the beginning of the 16th century to the onset of the Great War.
British History Online		Entire content free to all users to 30 September 2020.
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure		Population research, techniques and datasets.
Churchwardens' Accounts of England and Wales		A searchable national database of all surviving churchwardens' accounts in England and Wales from the earliest known sets (c.1300) to c.1850.
Commercial Motor Magazine Archive		A useful free resource providing detail of the road transport industry both passenger and freight.
From Great War to Race Riots		Digital project investigating the race riots of 1919 and the murder of Charles Wootton. Includes a digital archive of selected documents.
GENUKI Reference Library		GENUKI provides a virtual reference library of genealogical information of particular relevance to the UK and Ireland.
Grace's Guide		Grace’s Guide is a free-content not-for-profit project dedicated to publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere. Includes trade journals.
Historical Directories of England and Wales, 1760s-1910s		Digitised copies of selected directories held by the University of Leicester library.
Industrial Heritage Online (IHO)		The aim of IHO is to provide free web access to information about Industrial Heritage Sites. IHO is a fully searchable database, that has been developed by a group of Industrial History Societies, and which aims to provide an on-line repository for members' knowledge, photographs research notes, audio, and sound recording of industrial sites, artefacts and processes. It is hoped that, in time, this will become a comprehensive record of our shared Industrial Heritage and an invaluable resource to everyone researching the development of Industry.
Integrated Census Microdata		This purpose-built system can be used to filter the database of over 180 million census records for censuses between 1851 and 1911 based on 20 key variables, then download the resulting data table of individual census records with 100+ variables per record. Note that the county breakdown is for the ‘census’ county and that some communities may not be in the county expected. Especially useful is the availability of occupation data, a great boon for work on economic and social history.
Legacies of British Slave Ownership		Includes data recording compensation paid to slave owners in Britain.
Library of Rural and Agricultural Literature		Over 700 items. Password available on application.
Magic Map (DEFRA)		DEFRA-produced map based on modern OS data with local authority boundaries, aerial photographs, landscape typology and land use. More accurate than Google mapping and can be printed out for use with fieldwork, etc.
Medieval Genealogy		Does far more than the name suggests, including links to online sources, guides to what they contain and primary documents in translation.
Making Britain: discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950		This online database provides information about South Asians in Britain from 1870 to 1950, the organizations they were involved in, their British connections, and the major events in which they participated. Designed as an interactive tool, it offers engaging and innovative search and browsing options, including a timeline, location maps, and network diagrams modelled on social networking sites which demonstrate South Asians' interactions and relationships in Britain at the time. Some entries have extracts from archival sources with explanation of their content and relevance.
Railway Work, Life and Death project		Dataset and analysis of railway worker accidents in Britain and Ireland from the late 1880s to 1939. We’re providing data about who was involved, what they were doing on the railways, what happened to them and why.
Society for all British and Irish Road Enthusiasts (SABRE)		Changes to roads and classifications of them assembled by SABRE are invaluable: useful Wiki with dates of construction, opening and closure with bypass schemes, junctions and other details.
Trade Directories: Open Bibliography		An open bibliography for anyone using trade and local directories in their research or teaching. It is a companion to the collection hosted by University of Leicester Special Collections Online (also included in this guide)
UK Data Service		Explore the UK’s largest collection of social, economic and population data resources.
A Vision of Britain through Time		Population and other statistic with boundaries of parishes and local government units.

Anti-Chinese articles from	27th June 1913 1st May 1914 27th May 1914 12th June 1914	A series of racist articles directed at Chinese communities and workers published in the newspaper of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union between 1913-1914.
England’s Immigrants		A fully-searchable database containing over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.
Extensive Urban Surveys (EUS)		The Extensive Urban Surveys (EUS) project is part of a national programme of surveys of the archaeology, topography and historic buildings of England’s historic towns and cities, supported by English Heritage.
Historic England National List		Interrogate Historic England's database of designation and listing descriptions, along with crowdsourced images.
Know Your Place West		Coverage of the counties of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Wiltshire and Devon (and the unitary authorities in ‘CUBA’ – Counties that Used to Be Avon: North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire) including, for most of the area, georectified Tithe Maps, with overlays of OS and other mapping with information from various local authority and personal local history data interposed.
Moving Here		Moving Here explores, records and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. It offers free access, for personal and educational use, to an online catalogue of versions of original material related to migration history from local, regional and national archives, libraries and museums. (This project is archived but no longer maintained by the National Archives).
Post-Windrush: African Caribbean migration between 1948-1957		Give access to six documents found in Warwick University Library.

National Library of Scotland Digital Resources		To access some resources you may need to join the NLS online.
National Library of Scotland Maps		Home of open access historic mapping from the Ordnance Survey and others with lots of interpretative tools.
Scotland's People		Genealogical databases are free to search. Registration is required and there are fees to downloading digital copies of the documents themselves.
Scottish Economic History Database, 1550-1780		Site provides data on Scottish economic history from 1550-1780 organised by crop yields, demographic data, price series, wage series and weather statistics.
Scottish Post Office Directories		Over 700 digitised directories covering most of Scotland and dating from 1773 to 1911 are available here for you to use.
The Scottish Register of Tartans		Register contains thousands of tartan designs that are free to access and can be searched by date, name, colours and keywords. Free to search without registering.
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736		Database of the 4,000 known to be accused of witchcraft in Scotland. Includes and interactive database and supporting webpages. Provided by the University of Edinburgh.
Women's History Scotland - Resources		Resource List

Stormont Papers		Parliamentary Debates of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972.

The Blue Books of 1847		Series of reports conducted in the mid-nineteenth century on education in Wales.
Cymru 1914: y Rhyfel byd Cyntaf a'r Profiad Cymreig		This digital archive is the output of a large-scale digitization project. Here you will find a collection of primary sources from Welsh libraries and archives. The project provides a digital collection which reveals the hidden history of the First World War and shows how the history affected life, language and culture in Wales. The project has collected scattered and often inaccessible material in one place to create a unique digital archive of interest to researchers, students and the public in Wales and beyond.
Davies, Walter. Board of Agriculture reports		Three digitised volumes of the agricultural reports produced by Walter Davies in the early nineteenth century.
Dictionary of Welsh Biography		This website contains over five thousand concise biographies of individuals who have made a significant contribution to national life, whether in Wales or more widely.
GPM Gogledd Cymru=North Wales BMD		Searchable database of births, marriages and deaths from the nineteenth century.
Welsh Almanac Collection		Gives access to digitial copies of Welsh alamanacs from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
Welsh Journals Online		Welsh Journals provides access to journals relating to Wales published between 1735-2007. Titles range from academic and scientific publications to literary and popular magazines.
Welsh Newspapers Online		is a free online resource from the National Library of Wales where you can discover millions of articles from the Library’s rich collection of historical newspapers.
Welsh Tithe Maps		Search and browse over 300,000 entries and their accompanying apportionment documents using original and present-day maps.

Individual Counties and Metropolitan Districts (England)


Cheshire Tithe Maps Online		Overlay of tithe maps (1836-51) with a selection of OS maps and aerial surveys.
Mapping Medieval Chester		This project brings together scholars working in the disciplines of literary studies, geography, archaeology and history to explore how material and imagined urban landscapes construct and convey a sense of place-identity. The focus of the project is the city of Chester and the identities that its inhabitants formed between c.1200 and 1500.
Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society		Selected volumes available between 1886 to 2013.
VCH Cheshire. Volume 5 (The City of Chester)	Part 1 Part 2	Part 1. General History and Topography. Part 2. Culture, Buildings, Institutions.

Cornish Archaeology=Hendhyscans Kernow		Publication of the Cornish Archaeology Society. Vols 1-49 (1962-2010) available in pdf format.
Cornwall Online Census Project		Although the project ended in 2008 it has useful information on Cornish Census data from 1841 to 1901.

Cumbria Image Bank		Image library including maps.
Otley, Jonathan.		4 edition (1830)

Derbyshire Archaeological Journal		Volumes available 1879-2014.
Derbyshire Heritage Mapping Portal		The portal contains selected historical maps of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site. The maps can be overlaid on a current Ordnance Survey map to see how the area has developed over the past 200 years.
Derbyshire Prisoner Records		A database of Derbyshire prisoners between 1729 and 1913.

Devon's World War One Roll of Honour Project		This project provides access to the World War One Roll of Honour held in the Devon Heritage Centre.
Eighteenth Century Devon: People and Communities		Project provides access to transcribed copies of the Devon and Exeter Oath Rolls, 1723, the Episcopal Visitation Returns of 1749 and 1779 and Devonshire Freeholders 1711-1799.

Archaeologia Aeliana		Volumes available 1822-2014.
Coal Mining Oral History		Oral history archive devoted to County Durham's mining history.
Durham Probate Records 1540-1599		Wills and inventories held by Durham University Library.
Durham University Gazette		Selected issues from 1953 to 1986.
Durham University Journal		Selected issues from 1876 to 1973.
Pictures in Print		A collaborative project to create a union catalogue, with viewable images, of printed maps and topographical prints of County Durham created before 1860.
Surtees Society: selected volumes		Selected volumes hosted on the archive.org site.

Essex Place Names Database		The Essex Place-names database contains names of fields, roads, inns, houses, farms, manors, places, rivers, streams, woods, etc, and names of owners, tenants, landlords, parties to agreements etc, recorded from historic documents such as Tithe Awards, Rental Agreements, Surveys, Maps, Rolls, Inquisitions, Deeds, Charters.

Historical Association (Bristol Branch) Pamphlets		The site gives access to digital copies of historical pamphlets of the HA Bristol branch produced between 1960 and 2007.

Hampshire History Resources Guide		Portal to hundreds of links to local historical societies and resources about the history of Hampshire

MEMSLib Medieval and Early Modern Canterbury and Kent Resource Page		Research portal of resources freely available for the history of Kent and Canterbury from 597 to 1597.

Bolton Worktown: photography and archives from Mass Observation		Primarily a photo library, with a selection of digitised documents.
Liverpool History Projects		Hosts a number of databases on Liverpools history.
Peterloo Digital Collection		Selection of documents digitised by the University of Manchester.
Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society		Selected volumes available between 1886 to 2013.
VCH Lancashire, Volumes 2-8		Available via

Bulletin of the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society		1958-1991

Yellow Belly Index		This database is an index of Lincolnshire people. Unlike the people in the parish records, census or strays this list contains people who appear in any record related to Lincolnshire.

1958 Riots		This page gives access to a number of digitised documents concerning the Notting Hill Riots of August and September 1958.
Black and Asian People discovered in records held in the Manuscripts Section, Guildhall Library		List of Black and Asian people found in London parish registers found in Guildhall Library.
Charles Booth's London (LSE)		Charles Booth's London enables you to search the catalogue of over 450 original notebooks from the (1886-1903), view 41 digitised notebooks and explore the London poverty maps.
Everyday Muslim: Exploring the diversity of Black British Muslim heritage in London		Selected written and oral sources are available through this site.
Grunwick Remembered		Here you can find a number of recorded interviews about the Grunwick Strike of August 1976, including reflections from the strike leader Jayaben Desai.
Jewish East London		This page give access to a handful of digitised documents highlighting the history of Jewish communities in East London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Layers of London		Layered historical mapping and associated collections for all of London’s 36 boroughs (many formerly parts of Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex).
Medieval Londoners		This website introduces resources available for research about medieval London and its people, focusing not only on documentary and narrative sources in print, but also archaeological, visual, and cartographic sources that illuminate the physical and material world inhabited by medieval Londoners. An important component of the website is the (MLD), which records the activities of London residents between c. 1100 and 1520, and is searchable by name, gender, citizenship status, location (ward, parish, and street if available), craft, occupation, civic office, and craft office, among other variables.

Norfolk Archaeology		Journal dates available: 1847-2005
Norfolk Transcription Archive		Includes indexed transcriptions of Norfolk Parish Registers, Archdeacon's Transcripts, Census and many other documents.

Archaeologia Aeliana		Volumes available 1822-2014.
Dukefield Documents		Transcriptions of documents show-casing the history of lead smelting in the North-East.
Early deeds relating to Newcastle upon Tyne		Surtees Society publication, 1924.
Northumberland Communities		Provides information on 77 of Northumberland's towns, villages and hamlets with a selection of online sources for each.
Speeches delivered by Joseph Cowen, as candidate for Newcastle-upon-Tyne a the General Election, 1885		Published: Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Andrew Reid, 1885.
Surtees Society: selected volumes		Selected volumes hosted on the archive.org site.

Staffordshire Past Track		Database makes available maps, documents and photographs on the history of Staffordshire.
Stoke-on-Trent Archaeology: unpublished reports		1995-2017 available to download.
VCH Staffordshire: selected volumes		Volumes 3, 5, 7-9, 14 and 17 available via

Ipswich 1974-1990 Excavation Archive		Interactive map of archaeological excavations in Ipswich between 1974 and 1990 together with downloads of data from the reports they produced.
Ipswich Maritime Trust: Image Archive		Hosted on Flickr, over 2000 photographs show-casing Ipswich's 19th and 20th century maritime history.
Suffolk Archives: Digital Exhibitions		A number of exhibitions show-casing items found in Suffolk Archives.
Understanding Ipswich: Historical Sources		Site discusses the various types of sources that can be used while researching Ipswich's history.

Bradfer-Lawrence Collection		Selections from the collection of the antiquarian Harry Lawrence Bradfer-Lawrence.
From Weaver to Web: online visual archive of Calderdale history		Image library of 23,000 items documenting Calderdale's history.
Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers		The Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index is a database of transcriptions of all entries in the burial registers of the Leeds General Cemetery. The registers hold information on each person buried at the cemetery, covering the period 1835-1992. There are 97,112 entries in the index. Digital images of the registers are available to view alongside the transcribed data.
West Yorkshire Tithe Maps		Created by the West Yorkshire Archive Service, this site currently provides free access to tithe maps of the Bradford district.
Yorkshire Archaeological Journal (selected volumes)		Volumes available: 1885, 1887-95, 1897-1907, 1909-1918, 1920-22, 1924-43, 1945-46, 1948-53, 1955-56, 1958-59, 1962, 1966-67.

Individual Counties and Metropolitan Districts (Scotland)


Mounthooly Smallpox Hospital: list of patients 1872-1875		The register is primarily of interest to those pursuing family history. It provides details of the four hundred inhabitants admitted to the hospital during in the epidemics, including whether or not the patient died. As the register also notes the occupation and place of residence of each patient, it can also be used to trace the progress of the disease through families in the crowded courts of Victorian Aberdeen, the status of those affected and the level of mortality in each outbreak.
Pitsligo School Logbook 1874-1912		The log book provides a detailed account of daily life in a nineteenth-century rural school in north-east Scotland. It gives the names and duties of the headteacher, pupil teachers and monitors, and contains copies of the annual inspection reports from 1875 to 1909.

Smith, James.		A rare journal of a nineteenth century Dundee stonemason

Beattie, Thomas. / edited by Edward J. Cowan		Freely available e-book published by the European Ethnological Research Centre.
Cavan, John. / edited by Peter Didsbury		Freely available e-book published by the European Ethnological Research Centre.
/ transcribed and edited by Lynne J. M. Longmore.		Freely available e-book published by the European Ethnological Research Centre.
/ edited by Willie Waugh		Freely available e-book published by the European Ethnological Research Centre.

Kilsyth Heritors' Minutes 1813-1844		Transcripts of minute book from Kilsyth parish.

Cess book for the county of Lanarkshire 1724-1725		Digital copy of early 18th century Lanarkshire tax records.

Wallace, James. (1684)		Digitised manuscript copy of Wallace's work which would be later published in 1693.

Lieutenancy book, county of Roxburgh, 1797-1802		This volume from Scottish Borders Archive and Local History Centre, includes a list of men, organised by parish, who were ballotted to serve in the militia between 1797-1802 in Roxburghshire.

Mathewson, Thomas. c. 1889-1890		The notes are about local antiquarian matters. They comprise anecdotes about local people and families, and archaeological matters, mainly about Yell, sometimes with a genealogical tinge. The notebook is an important corpus of inforfmation about local antiquarian matters not otherwise dealt with in documents. There is a strong oral tinge to the collections - something that was becoming popular among antiquarians in Shetland in the late nineteenth century.

Individual Counties and Metropolitan Districts (Wales)


Skinner, John.		Digital copy hosted on archive.org
Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society (selected volumes)		Volumes scanned include those from the years 1913-14 and 1920-1930 including

Chartist Trial Documents		This project aims to transcribe more than 3,000 documents that were gathered together shortly after the Chartist uprising that took place in Newport on 3rd and 4th November 1839. Digital images of many of the documents are accesible through this site.


Workhouse Drawings Collection		Collections of plans mainly of the workhouse built in Mallow, County Cork, held by University College Dublin.

County Tyrone Resources		Website with transcriptions useful to genealogists and historians covering not only County Tyrone but also Antrim, Fermanagh and (London)Derry and Donegal.
Ulster Towns Directory		Database created from the Ulster and Belfast Towns Directory (1910)

Wexford County Archive: Digital Projects		List of projects including digitised records, diaries and maps.

United States


Birmingham Public Library: Digital Collections		Digital library of resources about the history of Birmingham, Alabama.

Digital Library of Georgia		The Digital Library of Georgia is a GALILEO initiative based at the University of Georgia Libraries that collaborates with Georgia's Libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions of education and culture to provide access to key information resources on Georgia history, culture, and life.

Logan, Daniel. (1907)		Digital Copy from the collections of the Library of Congress.

New Mexico Digital Collections		New Mexico Digital Collections is the central search portal for digital collections about New Mexico.

1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission		"The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will leverage the history surrounding the events of nearly 100 years ago by developing programs, projects, events and activities to commemorate and inform. We will remember the victims and survivors, and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa."
Parrish, Mary E. Jones.		Digital copy.
Tulsa Race Massacre		Collection of 326 digitised documents from the Greenwood Massacre of 1921.
Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921		Photographic collection curated by Oklahoma State University Library.
Tulsa Race Riot Documents		Documents gathered and digitised by the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.
		Report created in 2001.

Bexar Archive Online		The Bexar Archives are the official Spanish documents that preserve the political, military, economic, and social life of the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahulia y Texas. Both in their volume and breadth of subject matter, the Bexar Archives are the single most important source for the history of Hispanic Texas up to 1836.
Texas Slavery Project		Includes transcriptions of primary sources about slavery in Texas between 1820 and 1850.

LGBTIQ+ History

Digital Transgender Archive		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.
LGBT Religious Archives Network: Oral Histories		This page provides in-depth interviews with more than 40 early leaders of LGBTQ+ religious movements.

European LGBTIQ+ History

Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (rev. ed. 1978)		Transcribed text of the 1978 edition.
Homosexuality in 18th century England: a sourcebook		Compiled by Rictor Norton
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals (Online Exhibition)		Online exhibition curated by the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum.
West Yorkshire Queer Stories		From 2018-2020, West Yorkshire Queer Stories collected more than 200 interviews about LGBTIQ+ life across the region. You can visit the website wyqs.co.uk to listen to these stories, read transcripts and blogs and watch newly commissioned short films.

North American LGBTIQ+ History

Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony		The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony collects and makes available the oral histories of people who presently or at one time identified as same-sex and same-gender attracted women.
Bay Area Reporter		Selected issues (1514 items) of the Bay Area Reporter hosted on Archive.org from 1971 to 2005.
Black Light Online		Includes selected articles from the Black Light publication.
FBI Documents 1953-1956: Mattacine Society
FBI Documents 1971-1976: Gay Activist Alliance
GLBT Historical Society Online Collections		Digitised library of sources from the GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.
Lesbian Herstory Archive Photographic Collection		The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York is home to the largest collections of materials about lesbians in the world. Our photo collection, which we are now starting to digitize, holds tens of thousands of images, and reflects the growth of the Archives since 1974. Many of the 664 items showcased here came to us from women who simply wanted their images saved, their lives remembered. The collection holds snapshots, professional photography, found images and everything in between.
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives: Digitised Collections		ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. A small subset of this material has been digitized and is available online.
Stonewall and its impact of the Gay Liberation Movement		Handful of sources (written, visual and audio)
University of Minnesota Trans, Non-Binary and Gender Fluid Oral History Archive

HIV/AIDS and LGBTIQ+ Communities

ACT UP and the Aids Crisis		Small collection of written and visual sources.
AIDS Posters: Wellcome Collection		Over 3000 digitised public health posters relating to AIDS, from 99 countries, are freely available to view and download.
Oral Histories of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco

Medical History

Library of Congress: Chinese Medical Manuscripts		Small collection of twelve medical manuscripts dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
The Medical Heritage Library		The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to over three-hundred thousand quality historical resources in medicine.
Medicine in the Americas, 1610-1920: a digital library		is a digital library project that makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century.
NHS at 70		Since 2017 - supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund – ‘NHS at 70’ has worked across the UK, recording over 1000 interviews from patients, staff, policymakers and the public about experiences of health and the place of the NHS in everyday life and work. In March 2020 we adapted to remote interviews and have recorded over 400 interviews capturing experiences as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded.
National Library of Medicine Digital Collections		Digitized personal papers and organizational records documenting predominantly American medical practitioners, biomedical research and medical institutions.
National Library of Medicine Oral History Collection		The Archives and Modern Manuscript Program's (AMMP) Oral History Collections cover a broad range of topics, people and institutions from throughout the medical and health sciences. Chiefly from the 1960s to the present, the collections consist of interviews with physicians, scientists, government administrators, medical librarians, and health-business executives.
Qatar Digital Library: Medicine		Digital library of 72 manuscripts touching upon various subjects within Islamic medicine.
Wellcome Library Digital Collections	Arabic Manuscripts	The Library's digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war. Published books, pamphlets, archives, posters, photographs, and film and sound recordings are completely free to view. Digitised materials are released under a variety of Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution and Public Domain licenses.
Yale Medical Library Digital Collections		Digitised collections in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

Image Libraries

Anatomia: anatomical plates 1522-1867		This collection is comprised of more than 4,500 full-page plates and other important illustrations of human anatomy from the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Particularly useful is the “Highlights” section, which provides an introduction to works notable for its scientific or artistic merit.
Historical Anatomies on the Web		Historical Anatomies on the Web is a digital project designed to give Internet users access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the Library's collection. The project offers selected images from NLM's atlas collection, not the entire books, with an emphasis on images and not texts. Atlases and images are selected primarily for their historical and artistic significance, with priority placed upon the earliest and/or the best edition of a work in NLM's possession.
National Library of Medicine Image Collections		Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) in NLM Digital Collections provides online access to images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. IHM includes image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.
Osler Library Prints Collection		McGill University Library’s collection of 2,500 images provides a look at the history of medicine through the lens of popular imagery. The collection, which includes material from the 17th to the 20th century, is largely comprised of prints of portraits, but also contains photographs, cartoons, drawings, and posters.

Disease and Treatment

The American Influenza Empidemic of 1918: a digital encyclopedia		An online reference work which also provides access to 1000s of documents and images detailing the history of the 1918 influenza epidemic in the United States.
Cholera Online: a Modern Pandemic in Texts and Images		Online exhibition from the National Library of Medicine with digital text and image library.
The Discovery and Earlt Development of Insulin		This site documents the initial period of the discovery and development of insulin, 1920-1925, at the University of Toronto. It presents over seven thousand page images reproducing original documents ranging from laboratory notebooks and charts, correspondence, writings, and published papers to photographs, awards, clippings, scrapbooks, printed ephemera and artifacts.
International Leprosy Association - History of Leprosy		Includes reference tools and interviews with those suffering from and treating Hansen's Disease.
John Snow Archive and Research Companion		Presents information on John Snow as well as a number of his works, including his work on cholera and public health.
Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine		Collection of thirteen digitised documents from the Eisenhower Library.
League of Nations Malaria Documents		Presents digitised copies of documents produced by the Malaria Commission between 1924 and 1932.
Lowson, James A.		Published in Hong Kong in 1895
Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection (highlights)		The documents in this collection are of special interest from the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection chosen by the project staff. While the sampling cannot begin to cover the broad sweep of history represented in a compilation whose time period spans 1850 to 1966, it is intended to point out the diverse nature of people and ideas represented in this material.
The Star: radiating the light of truth on Hansen's Disease		The STAR, a world renowned international publication educating the public on Hansen's disease, was created in 1941 by patient Stanley Stein at the National Leprosarium (now the Gillis W. Long Hansen’s Disease (Leprosy) Center) in Carville, Louisiana. Issues available (1941-2011).
Wyler, E. J.		Published in Liverpool in 1915.

Medicine and Empire

Chadwick, Osbert.		Published in London in 1882
Johnstone, Charles.		(Natal, 1860)
Lowson, James A.		Published in Hong Kong in 1895
Medical History of British India		Here you can browse and search over 400 reports which are held at the National Library of Scotland, and which are available for the first time online. These rare documents, from the NLS's , consist of reports related to disease, public health and medical research between around 1850 to 1950.
Wyler, E. J.		Published in Liverpool in 1915.

Individuals (general papers, correspondence, photographs, etc.)

Blackwell, Elizabeth.		Digital archive held in the Schlesinger Library, Harvard.
Freud, Sigmund.		The Library of Congress's digital edition comprises the contents of more than two thousand folders.
Guy de Chauliac.		Digitised manuscript copy of the held in New Academy of Medicine library.
Harvey, William. Digitised works		Digitised copies of many of Harvey's works held in the Wellcome Library including multiple editions of
Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa.		Scholarly open access edition of the Arabic text with English translation.
Ibn-Sīnā (Avicenna) Digitised works		Digitised copies of some of Ibn-Sīnā's works held in the Wellcome Library.
Koch, Robert. Digitised works		Digitised copies of many of Koch's works held in the Wellcome Library.
Nightingale, Florence.		The Florence Nightingale Digitization Project began in 2014 as a collaborative effort between the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, England, the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Royal College of Nursing and the Wellcome Library. (N.B. not all links work, especially those from the Florence Nightingale Museum)
Osler, William.		Page curated for the University of Pennsylvania library with links to many book and articles by William Osler.
Paracelsus.		Includes links to the Karl Sudhoff edition of Paracelsus's works.
Piaget, Jean.		Research society dedicated to the life and works of psychologist Jean Piaget. Includes texts and images in pdf formet.
Sabin, Albert B.		Digitised collection held at the Henry R. Winkler Center, University of Cincinnati.
Winston, Thomas.		Thomas Winston was a physician with Illinois troops during the Civil War. These papers relate primarily to Winston's activities as a surgeon during the Civil War. Includes biographical material, case histories, lists of medical supplies, receipts for effects of soldiers, and various documents relating to individual soldiers. Also contains some material relating to real estate after the Civil War.

Rural and Agricultural History

Digital Archive of Tamil Agrarian History		Digital archive part of the British Library's Endangered Archive Project.
Indian Famine Commission Report 1880	Part 1 - Part 2 -
Mahalanobis, P. C. The Bengal Famine		Digital Reprint of a short article published in 1946.
Planters' Association of Ceylon Publications		Provides digital copies of the PAC publications from the 19th to the 20th century.

BFI Britain on Film: Rural Life		A vast collection of film and TV titles set in the countryside, or dealing with rural life. Many videos available to view for free, searchable .
Davies, Walter. Board of Agriculture reports		Three digitised volumes of the agricultural reports produced by Walter Davies in the early nineteenth century.
The Great Irish Famine Online: Atlas		An interactive atlas giving detailed information charting changes in the social, economic and political landscape of pre- and post-famine Ireland.
LIBRAL		LIBRAL is the library of Rural and Agricultural Literature, a free-of-charge, public, open-access resource provided by the BAHS.
Museum of English Rural Life: Online Exhibitions		Browse past displays from the Museum and exhibitions.
National Library of Scotland: Map Images
Rural History Today		Published by the British Agricultural History Society.

Europe (exl. Britain and Ireland)

Agro-ecosystems Laboratory		Project which offer a number of publications and datasets available to download, mainly on Spanish agricultural history.
The Holodomor Project: atlas		The Harvard Holodmor Project is a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based project, which uses latest technological advances to shed a new light on the history of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33.
Holodomor Survivor Documentation Project		This site has collected a number of interviews of survivors of the Holodomor now living in Canada.

North America

Census of Agriculture Historical Archive		The site provides digital copies the the census taken between 1840 and 2002.
Core Historical Literature on Agriculture		Selected agricultural texts depecting rural life and investigating agricultural technology published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text and searchable.
Farm, Field and Fireside Agricultural Newspaper Collection		Collects historically significant farm weeklies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Searchable and full-text.
Hall Family Papers and Sugar Plantation Records		Records of the slave-owning family, the Halls, and their plantation in Jamaica.
The Homestead Act, 1862		Offers transcripts and pdfs of the original document.
Organic Roots Collection		Assembles historic full-text agricultural journals published before the wide spread use of synthetic chemicals. Includes information on agricultural technology before 1942 and organic farms.
Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin migrant workers collection, 1940-1941		is an online presentation of selections from a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941.

Scientific History

Bibliographic and reference resources.

Biographies of Women Mathematicians		On this site you can find biographical essays or comments on the women mathematicians profiled, as well as additional resources about women in mathematics.
ECHO		Online portal that lists 5,000+ websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry.
History of Physics Finding Aid		Resource directory compiled by the American Institute of Physics.
Hyle		Online Bibliography on the history and philosophy of Chemistry.
MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive		MacTutor is a free online resource containing biographies of nearly 3000 mathematicians and over 2000 pages of essays and supporting materials.
Race-Sci		Directory of resources on the history of race and science.

General Sources

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative		ISMI provides access to a database of thousands on scientific manuscripts in Arabic, Farsi and Turkish. In the browse and search facilities go to "Scanned Codices" to access the text which have been digitised.
Qatar Digital Library - Astronomical Works to 1800		73 astronomical manuscripts and books.
Science History Institute - Digital Collections		Over 8000 digitised items available from the archives and library of the Science History Institute, Philadelphia.
Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online		Includes items from the 10th to the 20th century about not only medicine and pharmacology but also cosmology, astronomy, mathematics, farming and natural history.

To the 8th Century

Aryabhata,		Digitised English translation.
Bede, (excerpt)		Digitised copy of NLW Peniarth MS 540B
Institute of Classical Studies - Open Access Resources		Portal of open access resources created and maintained by the library staff of the Hellenic and Roman Library.

From the 8th Century to the 16th

Digital Averroes Research Environment		DARE makes accessible online digital editions of Averroes’s works, and images of all textual witnesses, including manuscripts, incunabula, and early prints. Averroes’s writings and the scholarly literature are documented in a bibliographical database.
Bacon, Roger. Philosophical Works and Fragments		Digitised edition of BL Royal MS 7 F VIII
Oresme, Nicole.		Online edition hosted on the Hathi Trust.
Sacrobosco, Johannes de,		Digitised manuscript held in the library of the University of Pennsylvania.

From the 16th to the late 19th Century

The Robert Boyle Project		Includes information on Robert Boyle and digitised copies of some of the published editions of his manuscripts.
The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert Translation Project		This site has been designed to make accessible to teachers, students, and other interested English-language readers translations of articles from the Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert in the 18th century.
Galileo Texts		Searchable database of Galileo's texts.
The Complete Correspondence of Carl Friedrich Gauß		Online edition of the mathematicians letters.
Johannes Kepler,		Digitised edition of Kepler's works.
Panopticon Lavoisier		Information on the 18th century chemist and, where digitised, scanned images of mauscripts and works.
The Newton Project		The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not.
Royal Society - Philosophical Transactions		Freely accessible digital editions of the Royal Society's journal from 1665-1886

The History of Science from the late 19th century

W3 Tim Berners-Lee page		Links to interviews, videos and texts by and about Tim Berners-Lee.
The Crick and Watson Papers	Francis Crick Papers James Watson Papers	Digitised copies of the papers held at the Wellcome Library.
Darwin Correspondence Project		Read and search the full texts of more than 12,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and ﬁnd information on 3,000 more. Discover complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1877.
Darwin Online		Includes online editions of some of his works as well as biographical information.
Digital Mathematics Archive		The Digital Mathematics Archive is a digital collection of mathematical sources, with a primary focus on documents from the late 19th century through today.
The Einstein Papers Project		Provides digitised editions to the published volumes of Einstein's papers.
The Eugenics Society Archive		View items from the Society's archive digitised by the Wellcome Library.
The Feynman Lectures		Online edition of Richard Feynman's lectures on physics.
Rosalind Franklin Papers		Includes biographical information and digitised copies of some of Franklin's papers.
Katherine Johnson interview		Interview with Katherine Johnson from February 2017.
Manhattan Project Resources		is a joint collaboration between the Department of Energy’s Office of Classification and Office of History and Heritage Resources. This effort is designed to disseminate information and documentation on the Manhattan Project to a broad audience including scholars, students, and the general public.
NASA Documentary Histories		Online editions of documents on the NASA Space programmes.
The Linus Pauling Research Notebooks		Digitised copy of Pauling's Notebooks.
The papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan		Digitised manuscripts held at Trinity College Cambridge.
The Turing Digital Archive		This archive contains many of Turing's letters, talks, photographs and unpublished papers, as well as memoirs and obituaries written about him. It contains images of the original documents that are held in the Turing collection at King's College, Cambridge.
The Alfred Russell Wallace Page		Site contains digitised texts of some of Wallace's writings.
World Wide Web History Project		The World Wide Web History Project is a collaborative effort to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking.

African History

African Online Digital Library		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.
British Library Endangered Archives Programme: Africa		The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration.
Digital Namibian Archive		Hosted by Namibia University of Science and Technology, this website serves as a portal to a number of collections on Namibian history, and specifically the Digital Namibian Archive, which contains over 13 thousand primary source documents.
UNESCO General History of Africa		Open-access editons of the unabridged volumes of this series.
University of Wisconsin African Studies Collection

European Exploration, Invasion and Colonialism

The Barbary Treaties 1786-1836		A digitised collection of treaties made between the United States and North Africa.
British Documents on the end of Empire	Central Africa Egypt Ghana Nigeria	is the online platform for the British Documents on the End of Empire Project (BDEEP).
Emmergency: an exhibition on the Mau Mau conflict and British Colonial rule in 1950s Kenya.	Exhibition 3D Models	Exhibition curated by the Museum of British Colonialism. It includes testimony from three witnesses of the conflict. Also a number of 3D models from the 'Pipeline' camps have been created in partnership with African Digital Heritage.
The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project		Digitised collections relevant to late 19th and early 20th century travel writing in Egypt as well as the history of Egyptology of this period.
Politics and Society in Eastern Africa		Gives access to a collection of digitised documents about the 20th century history of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, especially the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.
Slave Societies Digital Archive		The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies.
Sources on German Colonial History Online		Frankfurt University Library digitized some of the books and journals originally collected by the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft). The journals , , , , and several books including even a colonial cook-book are available online.

Contemporary Africa

African Activist Archive
Forward to Freedom: the history of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement 1959-1994		A free archive of resources including interviews and digitised text.
President Nasser online resources		Site containing documents and recorded speeches of President Nasser.

Asia, China

Berlin State Library: Chinese Digital Library		Included among the library's digital collections are 1664 items.
Cambridge University Chinese Collections		15 digitised works show-casing the collections housed in Cambridge University Library
Chinese Land Records, 1584-1978		Collection of over 200 documents held in Pittsburg University Library.
Chinese Text Project		Online library of Chinese texts from the pre-Qin period to the early 20th century.
Digital East Asian Collection		Digital collection of Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials found in the Bavarian State Library.
East Asian Library Digital Bookshelf		Collection of 146 titles mainly in Chinese from Princeton University.
National Central Library: Digital Images of Rare Books		Large online library of Chinese titles administered by the National Central Library, Taiwan.
Táiwān wénxiàn cóngkān zīliào kù		Online library of texts concentrating mainly on the history and culture of Taiwan.

China pre c.1800

Chinese Local Gazatteers		Collection of digitised Chinese gazatteers from the Qing period now housed in the library collections of Harvard University.
Endangered Archives Project: China		Digitised images from 10 digitisation projects.
International Dunhuang Project		Global collaborative project providing access to a growing library of artefact images, manuscript fragments and photographs.
Ming Qing Women Writers		Online library of works by women in late Imperial China (1368-1911)
Sīmǎ Qián. Shiji (extracts)		Extracts published on the Project Gutenberg site.
Tōyō Bunko Collection		Part of the Digital Silk Road Project, collection of books, maps and photographs from the Tōyō Bunko library, Japan.

19th and 20th Century China

Chiang Kai-Shek.		Volume 1 (1937-1940) only
China, 1989		This collection features sources on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and other developments in China at the end of the Cold War.
China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1976		Small collection showing how he Cultural Revolution was perceived by foreign leaders.
China's Great Leap Forward 1958-1961		Collection of documents housed in the Wilson Center Digital Archive.
Chinese Maritime Customs		Over 100 works from the Maritime Customs collection in Harvard Library, dating from late Qing through early twentieth century. Links to fully digitized books in Harvard Library catalog, which can be browsed and downloaded in high quality PDFs by any user.
Chinese Marriage Documents		Collection of 25 20th century marriage documents held in Pittsburg University Library.
Chinese Pamphlets		Online collection of Chinese educational pamphlets from the civil war and early years of the PRC.
Conversations with Mao Zedong		This collection brings together conversations held between Mao and foreign leaders from both within and outside of the communist bloc in order to offer insights into Mao's worldview and major developments in China's domestic history and foreign relations.
Conversations with Zhou Enlai		This collection features hundreds of conversations that Zhou held with leaders from dozens of countries.
Historical Photographs of China		Open access archive of 22,000+ photographs of China, c.1850s-1940s, from private and some institutional collections. Digitised by a team at the University of Bristol.
Late Qing and Republican Era Chinese Newspapers		Open access newspaper archive of 69 Chinese newspapers published between 1911 and 1949.
Li Long Women's Magazine		Exhibition about Lin Long Women’s Magazine published in Shanghai between 1931 and 1937. Incudes links to digital copies.
Old Hong Kong Newspapers		Online collection of 19th and 20th century Hong Kong newspapers.
Opium War Collections		Electronic collections of documents found in the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trust site.
PRC History Group		Site run by a global group of academics with research interests in the People’s Republic of China. Includes online copies of .
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping		Works illustrating Deng Xiaoping's ideological viewpoints.

Asia, South

British Library Endangered Archives Projects		The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. Thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, we have provided grants to more than 400 projects in 90 countries worldwide, in over 100 languages and scripts.
Digital South Asian Library		The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia, including books and journals, full-text dictionaries, bibliographies, images, maps, and statistical information from the colonial period through the present.
GRETIL: Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages		Digital library of transliterated texts in a variety of languages (mainly Sanskrit, Pali and Tamil) on religion, epic poetry and chronicles.
National Digital Library of India		To access you will need to create a user account.
Panjab Digital Library		The Panjab Digital Library is a voluntary organization digitizing and preserving the cultural heritage of Panjab since 2003. With over 23 million digitized pages, it is the biggest resource of digital material on Panjab.

South Asian History to c.1526

Sarit: Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts

Collection of 60 documents, mainly in Sanskrit. Topics include religion, philosophy, literature and history.

South Asia during the Mughal hegenomy c.1526 to the mid-18th century

Aurangzeb, as he was according to Mughal Records		Online exhibition showcasing documents and artworks from and about the reign of Aurangzeb.
Aurangzeb.		1908 digital English edition.
Fazl, Abu'l.	Vol 1. Vol. 2. Vol. 3.	Digital copies of an early 20th century English edition held on archive.org.
Jahangir.		1909 edition and English translation of the Emperor Jahangir's autobiography.

South Asia during the period of British Invasion and Occupation c.1757-1947

1947 Partition Archives		Growing oral history database of witness interviews about the Partition.
Amritsar Massacre 1919: British Parliamentary Debate		Debate in the House of Commons on the Amritsar Massacre of the previous year.
Amritsar Massacre 1919: Evidence taken before the Disorders Inquiry Committee		, Volume 5 (so far the only volume tracked down so far which is freely available online)
Amritsar Massacre 1919: Punjab disturbances compiled from the Civil and Military Gazette		Digital copy of the 2nd edition.
Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum		Digital library of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction.
Gandhi Heritage Portal		Site provides information, digitised texts and links to other relevant sites.
Hyde Books: Judicial Notebooks		The Judicial Notebooks of John Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers, 1774-1798, are a unique source of primary historical information for the early years of the Supreme Court and life in India. The court notebooks do not tell a single story but are a dense repository of legal and social action over time.
Indian Famine Commission Reports 1880	Part 1 - Part 2 -
Iqbal Cyber Library		Open access library concentrating on the work and thought of Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)
Ker, James Campbell.		1960 edition of Ker's 1917 work.
Mahalanobis, P. C.		Digital Reprint of a short article published in 1946.
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library: Digital Archives		Digital collections of Nehru's papers.
Planters' Association of Ceylon Publications		Provides digital copies of the PAC publications from the 19th to the 20th century.
Rai, Lala Lajpat.		Digital copy of the 1916 edition.
Ram Mohan Roy resource page		Page on archive.org listing 79 works on or about Ram Mohan Roy.
Sedition Committee Report 1918		Report, headed by Sidney Rowlatt, whose recommendations, including the stringent control of the press, the summary trial of political offenders by judges without trial, and the internment of persons suspected of subversive aims, led to the Rowlatt Act of 1919.
South Asian Open Archive		Open Access collection of 19th and early 20th century publications.

Contemporary South Asia since 1947

Muktijuddho e-Archive		Muktijuddho e-Archive, also known as Bangladesh Liberation War e-Archive, is a 'Library, Archive & Research' organization, founded in 2007, working with collection, preservation & distribution of historical documents & research on the Liberation War of Bangladesh and Genocide of Innocent Bengali People in 1971. (Site in Bengali)
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library: Digital Archives		Digital collections of Nehru's papers.

South Asian Diaspora History Resources

Bangla Stories		Site includes information on the Bengal diaspora and eight interviews.
Indian South Africans		General site about the history of South Asian communities in South Africa. Includes a number of digitised documents.
Making Britain: discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950		This online database provides information about South Asians in Britain from 1870 to 1950, the organizations they were involved in, their British connections, and the major events in which they participated. Designed as an interactive tool, it offers engaging and innovative search and browsing options, including a timeline, location maps, and network diagrams modelled on social networking sites which demonstrate South Asians' interactions and relationships in Britain at the time. Some entries have extracts from archival sources with explanation of their content and relevance.
South Asian American Digital Archive		Site provides information and source material on the history of South Asian communities in the US.
South Asian Oral History Project		Site gives access to interviews from individuals from the South Asian communities of the Pacific Northwest.
Uganda Stories		Interview with artist Sunil Shah was was expelled, with her family, from Uganda in 1972.

Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

Australia: general resources.

AIATSIS Digital Collections		Digital collections from the Australian Institute Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Australian Dictionary of Biography		The is Australia's pre-eminent dictionary of national biography. In it you will find concise, informative and fascinating descriptions of the lives of significant and representative persons in Australian history.
Immigration Museum: Online Resources and Tools		A selection of projects and items from the Immigration Museum, Melbourne.
Library of Australiana		Portal of online texts from the 18th to the first half of the 20th century.
National Archives of Australia		An increasing number of items have been made available online. In the search tick the "Digital Only" box to see what is available.
National Library of Australia		An increasing number of items in the NLA have been digitised and are available online.
Trove		A national discovery service run by the National Library of Australia with details of items over 1000s of Australian libraries, archives, galleries and museums. To drill down to see what is available online tick the "Free access" option where applicable.
University of Sydney Digital Collections		Collections of various aspects of Australian history and literature and much more.
Women Australia		Online biographical reference work.

Australia to c. 1901

Assisted Immigrants Shipping List		Digitised shipping lists to New South Wales from 1828 to 1896.
Australian Explorers, Discoverers and Pioneers		Portal links to free texts about the exploration and invasion of Australia.
Bonwick, James.		Nineteenth century account of the British genocide of Tasmania's indigenous population. For context and suggestions for further reading see the by Dr. Kristyn Harman.
Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia 1788-1930		Site devoted to Australian colonial massacres. Includes an interactive map.
Convict Records of Australia		This website allows you to search the British Convict transportation register for convicts transported to Australia between 1787-1867. Information available includes name of convict, known aliases, place convicted, port of departure, date of departure, port of arrival, and the source of the data.
eGold: Electronic Encyclopedia of Gold in Australia		Online reference work, especially strong Australia's Gold Rush.
First Fleet Online		First Fleet OnLine is a resource for students and teachers of any age, professional historians, family tree enthusiasts, descendants of the First Fleeters, and amateur researchers, anywhere in the world.
Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie Archives		Provides access to growing number of transcriptions and digitised images.
		Digitised copy of the register covering the years 1868 to 1972.
Phillip, Arthur.		Digitised 1790 edition held in the Wellcome Library.
Ryan, Lyndall. 'List of multiple killings of Aborigines in Tasmania: 1804-1835' (5 Mars, 2008)		Article published online about the British genocide of Tasmania's indigenous population.

Australia since c. 1901

100 Stories Project		Hosted on YouTube, Monash University has produced a number of interviews about the experience of Australians during the First World War.
Anzac Portal		Extensive portal sight about the military history of 20th century Australia.
Australian Federation Full Text Database		Database give access to documents from the 1890s and early 1900s concerning Australia's federation.
Bringing them Home		Site explores the Stolen Generations of indigenous Australians taken from their mothers and fathers and fostered to white familes. Includes testimonies, the text of the report produced by the Australian government in 1997 and an interactive map.
Federal Government Records: Historic Hansard		Records from the Senate and House of Representatives from 1901 to 1980.
Federal Government Records: Journals of the Senate		Journals available from 1901.
The Mabo Decision: Keon-Cohen, B. A. 'The Mabo litigation: a personal and procedural account' 893 (2000)		Account by the junior counsel representing Eddie Mabo against the state of Queensland.
The Mabo Decision: Mabo vs. Queensland (No. 1) 1988 and (No. 2) 1992	1988 1992	Text from the High Court of Australia of the decision.
The Mabo Decision: The Native Title Act 1993		Text from the High Court of Australia.
Queensland Legislature: Acts Passed		Pdf copies of acts passed from 1963.
The Redfern Park Speech		Video of Paul Keating's speech of the 10th December 1992 delivered at Redfern Park.
Right Wrongs - The 1967 Referendum		Online exhibtion on the 1967 referendum which sought to change the way the indigenous peoples of Australia were referred to in the constitution. Includes iinterviews.
WhitlamDismissal.com		Site exploring the government of Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s. Includes document excerpts and links to related resources.
The Whitlam Institute		The Institute's large collection has been largely digitised.

New Zealand

AtoJs Online		Digitised copies of the appendices of the House of Representatives from 1854 to 1950.
New Zealand Electronic Text Collection		The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection comprises significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials held by Victoria University of Wellington Library. This encompasses both digitised heritage material and born-digital resources.
New Zealand Heritage List : Rārangi Kōrero		Search the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero (formerly the Register) for information about New Zealand's significant heritage places, including Ngā Manawhenua o Aotearoa me ōna Kōrero Tūturu/National Historic Landmarks.
Papers Past		The Papers Past content is divided into 4 sections — all containing digitised primary source materials. These include: Newspapers, Magazine and Journals, Letters and Diaries, and Parliamentary Papers.
		Site gives access to this Maori periodical published between 1952 and 1976.
Te Ara		Online encyclopedia on all aspects of New Zealand's histories and cultures.
		Volumes available, 1868-1961.
Turnbull Archive Photographic Archive		Extensive photographic archive.
Women and the Vote		Online history on the women's sufferage movement in New Zealand. Includes links to digitised sources.

Pacific Ocean

Arbousset, Thomas. (1867)		Digital copy of a 19th century travel account.
Marsden, J. B.		Digital copy of 19th century edition.
National Archives of Fiji Online		Includes selected digitised items from the NAF.
South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760-1800)		The South Seas Project documents the history of European voyaging and cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific between 1760 and 1800. It features full texts of James Cook's Endeavour Journal, as well as journals kept by Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson. It also features digitised engravings and related images. Hosted by the National Library of Australia.

Audio Visual and Oral History, 3D, AR and Internet Archives

3d and augmented reality.

Many museums and libraries have created 3D scans of their collections. Notable resources include the British Museum on Sketchfab (257 models). Sketchfab's Cultural Heritage and History filter can also surface useful models.

Europeana, which brings together collections in a host of European and international repositories, can also be searched for 3D models .

Google for Education provides a list of over 100 'Augmented Reality' expeditions .

Computer Games and Software Archives

The Internet Archive provides a good place to start for the history of software or the uses of history and heritage in the games industry.

Internet and Web Archives

Internet Archive
UK Web Archive
National and other archives constituting the International Internet Preservation Consortium .
Some international organisations also manage their own institutional web archives, such as UNESCO .

Digital Humanities and Digital Tools

The Programming Historian		We publish novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.
Digital Archives Austria	https://digital-humanities.at/en/dha/projects

Oral History

Oral History Society advice on remote oral history interviewing		Includes ethical considerations and lists of tools
British Library Sound Archive		The oral history collections at the British Library cover a wide range of subject areas.
Essex Sound and Video Archive		You can find material by searching for ‘oral history’. To find only material that’s available online, you can refine the search by ‘Audio visual’ material.

Art and Photography

Many of the collections listed elsewhere in this guide, such as the Library of Congress or Europeana , will point to extensive photographic and visual arts collections.

TimePix		This collection of almost 46,000 post-war geo-located street photos of Greater Manchester. Free for non-commercial use.
Artstor		Includes public collections and community collections as well as subscription-only content.

Newspapers and Maps

Austrian Newspapers Online		Online collection stretching back to the seventeenth century.
The Belgian War Press		introduces you to hundreds of Belgian newspapers that were written, printed and distributed clandestinely during the two World Wars.
Belgica Press		Online archive of nineteenth and twentieth century Belgian newspapers.
Chronicling America		Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Delpher		Online archive of Dutch and Indonesian newspapers and periodicals from the 17th to the 20th century.
Deutsches Zeitungsportal		Digital library of German newspapers from 1671 to 1950.
Dziennik Zwiazkowy		The first ten years (1908–17) of founded in Chicago in 1908 by the Polish National Alliance. Representing local, national, and international issues of concern to the Polish community, the paper continues today as the
Europeana Newspapers
&		Digital Belgian newspaper archive: (from the 3rd November 1891), (1896-1953)
La Gazette Royale d'Hayti Project		Digitised collection including: 19th century Haitian almanacs. Gazette Officielle de l'etat d'Hayti (1807-11) Gazette Royale d'Hayti (1813-20)
List of Online Newspaper Archives (Wikipedia)
Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata		A project exploring the metadata of digitised newspapers
Online Kranten		Online portal of sites of digitised European newspaper collections hosted by the Flemish Heritage Library.
Papers Past		Online collection of New Zealand newspapers.
Trove
National Library of Scotland: Map Images

David Rumsey Historic Maps Collection
BL Maps Collections		See also the project
British History Online
Library of Congress Maps
National Library of Scotland Maps
New York Public Library Maps and Atlases
New York Public Library Map Warper		The NYPL Map Warper is a tool for digitally aligning ("rectifying") historical maps from the NYPL's collections to match today's precise maps. Visitors can browse already rectified maps

British History Online

British History Online is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland.

Explore an A-Z list of eResources available through the Wohl Library

Research Resources. Support for historians

The IHR creates resources to encourage, support and facilitate new research by historians.

IHR Library & Digital provides a wealth of services and resources, both in person and online, to all those interested in history.

Introduction to Historical Research : Primary Sources

Archival sources
Multimedia sources
Newspapers and other periodicals
Biographical Information
Government documents

Ask a Librarian

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What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources were either created during the time period being researched or were created at a later date by a participant in the events being examined (as in the case of memoirs). They often reflect the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer. Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period and can serve as evidence in making an historical argument.

Examples include:

Artifacts

Audio recordings (e.g. radio programs)
Diaries
Interviews (e.g., oral histories, telephone, e-mail)
Journal articles published in peer-reviewed publications
Letters
Newspaper articles written at the time
Original Documents (i.e. birth certificate, will, marriage license, trial transcript)
Patents
Photographs
Proceedings of Meetings, conferences and symposia
Records of organizations, government agencies
Speeches
Survey Research (e.g., market surveys, public opinion polls)
Video recordings (e.g. television programs)
Works of art, architecture, literature, and music
Web sites
How to read a primary source
Why Study History Through Primary Sources?
Using Historical Sources
Primary Sources Research guide

Primary Source Databases

Below are sample library subscription databases with digitized primary sources. More can be found on the Historical/Primary Sources page.

American West Contains manuscript materials, broadsides, maps, and printed items documenting the history of the American West from the 18th century to the early 20th century.
Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830–1863 15,000 articles and documents written by Black abolitionists during the antebellum period in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The contents include correspondence, speeches, sermons, lectures by African-American leaders; articles and essays published in African-American, abolitionist, and reform newspapers; and related documents.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries 1500 - 1950 A vast collection of British and Irish women's diaries and correspondence, spanning more than 300 years, it brings the personal experiences of nearly 500 women.
Caribbean Views Caribbean Views draws from the British Library's collection of maps, manuscripts, printed books and newspapers relating to the British West Indies to conjure up a vivid picture of life in the English-speaking Caribbean during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Library's holdings of material relating to the English slave trade and slavery are particularly strong.
Defining Gender 50,000 images of original documents from five centuries of advice literature and related material, from diaries, advice and conduct books, as well as articles from medical and other journals, ballads, cartoons, and pamphlets, all from Europe. Much of the material is British in origin.
Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800) The Evans collection is a definitive resource for all aspects of American life in the 17th and 18th centuries. Based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans and Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography. With these bibliographies, Evans and Bristol attempted to identify all works published in America through 1800.
Early Encounters in North America--Peoples, Cultures and the Environment Contains 1,482 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters.
Early English Books Online Early English Books Online (EEBO) provides full-text images of almost all the books printed in England and her colonies from the beginning of printing to 1700 (about 125,000 titles). more... less... You can search for books on your topic by author, title,and keyword, or search just for illustrations from these books if you wish. EEBO includes the items listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661), and additional supplementary materials. Gradually, searchable electronic text versions of a selection of these books are being added to the project. These searchable texts are called: EEBO-TCP, the Early English Books Online Text Creation Project. Eventually both EEBO and EEBO-TCP will be combined into one database. For now, in addition to using using Early English Books Online (EEBO), check EEBO-TCP if you want to do want to do keyword searching within an individual work.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online An online library of over 180,000 titles published between 1701 and 1800, and printed in English-speaking countries, or countries under British colonial rule. Includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. more... less... The majority of works in ECCO are in the English language but there are also works printed in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish and Welsh. Based on the English Short Title Catalogue Works published in the UK during the 18th century plus thousands from elsewhere
Electronic Enlightenment Contains correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. It is an aggregation of 53,000 primary source letters from more than 6,000 writers and numerous presses. more... less... An ongoing scholarly research project of the University of Oxford and other universities and organizations, Electronic Enlightenment offers access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. EE is an aggregation of 53,000 primary source letters from more than 6,000 writers and numerous presses. Readers can explore writer's views on history, literature, language, arts, philosophy, science, medicine, and personal, social and political relations.
Everyday Life and Women in America c.1800–1920 Hundreds of monographs illuminating all aspects of family life. Also includes periodicals and pamphlets. more... less... Fully-searchable access to 75 rare periodicals ranging from Echoes of the South (Florida) and the Household Magazine (North Carolina) to Lucifer the Lightbearer (Chicago), The Heathen Woman's Friend (Boston) and Women's Work (Georgia). * A rich collection of rare pamphlets. * Hundreds of monographs illuminating all aspects of family life all of which have been screened against Gerritsen, Shaw-Shoemaker, and other relevant projects to avoid needless duplication. * Insightful contextual essays by leading scholars that will help to point students at valuable resources. * Strong coverage of prescriptive literature and manuals for domestic management telling us much about the organisation of the home.
Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online The Gerritsen Collection includes books and periodicals from around the world which document the condition of women, the evolution of feminist consciousness, and women's rights. more... less... The Gerritsen Collection includes books and periodicals from around the world which document the condition of women, the evolution of feminist consciousness, and women's rights. More than 4,000 books and 265 periodicals in the collection are primarily in English with German, French, and Dutch-language materials strongly represented. Other languages included are Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Scandinavian.
Library of Latin Texts Contains 3,200 works that are attributed to approximately 950 authors. more... less... The texts which are incorporated are selected by virtue of their having been edited according to best contemporary scholarly practice. Independent research is undertaken to verify facts relating to the text, such as the veracity of the authorial attribution or the dating.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online Nineteenth Century Collections Online unites multiple, distinct archives into a single resource, including a wide variety of previously unavailable primary sources ranging from books and monographs, newspapers and periodicals, diaries and personal letters, manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, and maps. more... less... Initial archival modules include: British Politics and Society; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; and British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives. more... less... In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. The collection will be particularly useful to researchers, because much of the original material is difficult to find, poorly indexed, and unpublished; most bibliographies of the immigrant focus on secondary research; and few oral histories have been published.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries (Colonial to 1950) Provides a collection of published and unpublished women's diaries and correspondence, drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings.
Oxford African American Studies Center Over 1,000 images, primary sources with specially written commentaries, and over 100 maps have been collected to enhance this reference content related to the African American experience.
Past Masters Provides access to searchable full text databases of primary works, letters, journals, and notebooks from important philosophers and women writers. All titles are in the English language, either original as written or in translation.
Sixties The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America. more... less... The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America vividly conveying the zeitgeist of the decade and its effects into the middle of the next. Alongside 70,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories, there are more than 30,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare audio and video materials. The collection is further enhanced by dozens of scholarly document projects, featuring richly annotated primary-source content that is analyzed and contextualized through interpretive essays by leading historians.
Twentieth Century Advice Literature This collection includes how-to books and guides; employee manuals, sorority and fraternity pledge manuals; scouting manuals; textbooks; commercial literature; and government manuals. more... less... Twentieth Century Advice Literature focuses on gender roles and relations, American consumerism, views of democratic citizenship, character development for children, changes in reaction to each major war (including World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam), class relations, and adjustments to new technology (such as proper manners when using the telephone, point-and-shoot camera, or e-mail). Included are how-to books and guides; employee manuals, sorority and fraternity pledge manuals; scouting manuals; textbooks that deal with home economics, health and hygiene, and sex education; teacher-training and course manuals; commercial literature that promotes specific behaviors; and government instruction manuals for a variety of workplaces and industries.
Women and Social Movements in the United States Document projects that interpret and present materials, many of which are not otherwise available online, in U.S. history and U.S. women's history.

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Last Updated: Mar 4, 2024 12:48 PM
URL: https://researchguides.library.wisc.edu/introhist

Handbook for Historians Research Guide

Choosing a Paper Topic
Thesis Statement
Find Primary Sources
Find Secondary Sources
Formatting References
Writing an Annotated Bibliography

Sample History Papers

Sample title pages, outlines, & citations.

Resources for Writing

These are examples of well written, properly cited history papers.

Sample Paper with Outline
Judge and Langdon Book Review/Research Paper - Example 1
Judge and Langdon Book Review/Research Paper - Example 2
citation presentation
HST 302 Paper Example example of a paper for upper division History courses
HST 302 Title Page
Outline Example Example of an outline for a first year level history paper.
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Neag School of Education

Educational Research Basics by Del Siegle

Historical research.

Historical research answers the question, “How did things use to be?” When examining documents, historical researchers are faced with two key issues: primary versus secondary sources and external versus internal criticism.

A was prepared by someone who was a participant or direct witness to an event. A was prepared by someone who obtained his or her information about an event from someone else.

refers to the authenticity of the document. Once a document has been determined to be genuine (external criticism), researchers need to determine if the content is accurate ( ).

We conduct historical research for a number of reasons:

Del Siegle, Ph.D. University of Connecticut [email protected] www.delsiegle.info

updated 2/01/2024

Harvard Library

Research Guides

Faculty of Arts & Sciences Libraries

Library Research Guide for History

Outline of primary sources for history.

Newsletter September 2024
Exploring Your Topic
HOLLIS (and other) Catalogs
Document Collections/Microfilm
Finding Online Sources: Detailed Instructions
Religious Periodicals
Personal Writings/Speeches
Oral History and Interviews
News Sources
Archives and Manuscripts
Government Archives (U.S.)
U.S. Government Documents
Foreign Government & International Organization Documents
French Legislative Debates/Documents
State and City Documents
Historical Statistics/Data
GIS Mapping
Public Opinion
City Directories
Policy Literature, Working Papers, Think Tank Reports (Grey Literature)
Technical Reports (Grey Literature)
Country Information
Corporate Annual Reports
US Elections
Travel Writing/Guidebooks
Missionary Records
Reference Sources
Harvard Museums
Boston-Area Repositories
Citing Sources & Organizing Research
Newsletter January 2011
Newsletter June 2012
Newsletter August 2012
Newsletter December 2012
Newsletter June 2013
Newsletter August 2013
Newsletter January 2014
Newsletter June 2014
Newsletter August 2014
Newsletter January 2015
Newsletter June 2015
Newsletter August 2015
Newsletter January 2016
Newsletter June 2016
Newsletter August 2016
Newsletter January 2017
Newsletter June 2017
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Newsletter January 2018
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Newsletter December 2019
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Newsletter October 2021
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Newsletter February2023
Newsletter October 2023
February2024
Exploring Special Collections at Harvard

This page serves as an index to the Library Research Guide for History and other research guides. It lists major general tool types and kinds of primary sources, giving links to major resources, links to further information in the guide and to sample HOLLIS searches.

Four tactics for finding primary sources . They are best used together.

Find them cited in reference works and secondary sources . Valuable especially in that it gives you context. But you are limited to what your author has found, and a slight difference in perspective from your own may lead to very different sources. An essential starting point. See: Library Research Guide for History: Exploring Your Topic .
Direct search in catalogs and databases, for example in HOLLIS, HathiTrust, Early English Books Online.
Find them in bibliographies (and their equivalents for archives and manuscripts ) which are lists of printed (or manuscript sources) sometimes annotated. A less used but often very fruitful method. They are often produced contemporary with the era of interest. Example. Using them is a two-step process: find your source in a bibliography, then look it up in HOLLIS ; or ASK US .
Research guides. Guides prepared by Harvard librarians and by librarians from other institutions

General -- Kinds of Primary Sources

General Catalogs

For finding primary sources at Harvard and for finding copies of primary sources in other repositories. A database of catalog records. Not (generally) full text searchable). HOLLIS Library Catalog searches not only books but also archives/manuscripts (including a full text search of digitized finding aids (not all are digitized), films, images, and other material ( Example ). Any pertinent item produced during your era may be a primary source, but certain kinds of primary sources, including originally unpublished sources such as letters and diaries published later, have particular terms attached to their Subject terms in a HOLLIS record. Change Any field to Subject for cleanest results.

--Caricatures and cartoons (just search Caricatures)
--Correspondence
--Description and travel
--Interviews
--Manuscripts
--Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
--Oral history
--Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
--Pictorial works (Books consisting mostly of pictures)
--Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)

Example : Algeria AND Archives OR Correspondence OR Diaries OR Manuscripts OR Sources OR Narratives OR Interviews OR "Oral history" (as Subject)

More on HOLLIS in the HOLLIS page of this guide and in the HOLLIS User Guide .

For finding original and digitized primary sources outside of Harvard. A database of catalog records with links to finding aids or full text where available. WorldCat (the OCLC Union Catalog) includes catalog records from over 70,000 libraries worldwide but largely U.S. Includes books, periodicals, archives and manuscripts, maps, images, videotapes, computer readable files, etc. More on searching WorldCat . Techniques for using WorldCat to find various types of sources are included under Kinds of Primary Sources , below.

Digital Libraries/Collections. Often full text searchable

General full text searchable databases:

HathiTrust Digital Library is a huge collection of digitized books and periodicals. Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. Most items pre-1925 will be full text viewable. After 1925, a much smaller number will be full text viewable. You can search within non-full text viewable works and obtain the pages numbers where your search terms occur. Most US, and some state, government documents will be full text viewable. More information on searching HathiTrust .

Internet Archive offers full text for a variety of digitized print materials and archived web pages (Wayback Machine), as well as manuscripts (a few), digitized microfilm, films, audio files, TV News, and more. Many recent books are full text viewable if you set up a free account. You can use a Google password. More information on using Internet Archive .

Google Books , which contains all sorts of books and periodicals.

There are many other less general digital libraries specialized by language and/or era ( Early English Books Online ) or geographically ( Gallica , Digital Commonwealth ).

More specialized digital collections:

There are numerous subject-specialized digital collections (example: Travelers in the Middle East ). There is no one method for finding them. Try WorldCat, Research Guides, and Advanced Google Searches.

Harvard's Databases

Europeana: Cultural collections of Europe ( More information ) and The Digital Public Library of America ( More information )

WorldCat includes records for many digital collections, but due to the lack of standardized tagging, they can be hard to isolate from the very numerous ebooks.

Methods for searching WorldCat for digital collections

Advanced Google Searches

Library Research Guide for History: Finding Primary Sources Online: Finding Primary Sources on the Open Web

Research guides: Next

Digital libraries and lists of digital collections are listed in Library Research Guide for History: Finding Primary Sources Online: Digital Libraries/Collections by Region or Language

Harvard general research guide page
Online Primary Source Collections for History lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic
Online Primary Source Collections for the History of Science lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic

Selected Harvard guides

Format: Library Research Guide for History: Outline of Primary Sources for History Geographical: Library Research Guide for History: Other Subject Guides Subject: Library Research Guide for History: Other Subject Guides

Finding research guides at other institutions: Google Advanced Search

Document collections (Print and Microfilm)

Primary source documents are often gathered up and published as printed books or in microfilm (reels of 35 mm film viewed through a machine). They may consist of books, archival material, oral histories, in fact most of the kinds listed below. Vast resources exist in microfilm.

Find them in HOLLIS and WorldCat by using special Subject terms . Example .
Tools for finding them listed in this guide .
More on microfilm
When you find a microfilm collection, ask us to be sure it isn't digitized. More information .

Bibliographies

Find lists of publications (primary and/or secondary) on your topic in HOLLIS . Bibliography must be searched as a Subject. Bibliographies may be contemporary or retrospective.

If you find an older article or book in a bibliography, you can use the Cited Reference Search in Web of Science find more recent articles by seeing who has cited it. If you have a bibliography of primary sources, then the Web of Science can be used both to find secondary sources that cite a specified primary source and the response in the 20th century periodical literature. See Searching the Citation Indexes (Web of Science) .

Kinds of Primary Sources

Contemporary Language
Country, State, and Local information
Government Documents
Gray Literature

Literary Works

Periodicals
Personal Accounts

Sound Recordings

Archives and Manuscripts comprise originally unpublished writings or records produced by an individual (personal papers) or an organization in their activities. Organizations producing archives may be governments (national, state, local), NGOs, corporations, universities. They may reside with their producing bodies or may have been added to an archival repository. You typically have to go to the repository to use them.

We give instructions for finding them at Harvard, the Boston area, nation and world-wide in the Library Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections .
Sometimes full or partial copies are published as printed books , microfilm , or online (see Digital Libraries and Document Collections, above)
Many US Government archival collections, including much State Department material, has been digitized or microfilmed. Tools for finding them listed in this guide

Books . Find books (and other resources) in HOLLIS and WorldCat

Remember to use the proper Subject terms (Library of Congress and Medical) as well as your keywords
You can limit by date range. The Subject term Early Works to 1800 retrieves old books republished post-1800 (new editions): Sample HOLLIS Library Catalog search .
You can limit to anything published in a country or a US state in HOLLIS and WorldCat
Instructions for using HOLLIS and WorldCat

Broadcast s . Much news is distributed via radio and TV. Tools for finding broadcast news , radio and TV listed in this guide and in the Kennedy School's News & Media guide .

Contemporary language

Dictionaries indicate contemporary understanding of a word. Sample HOLLIS search .
Subject dictionaries and encyclopedias can show how terms were understood at a certain time. Sample HOLLIS search .
Major American English dictionaries listed in the Library Research Guide for American Studies .

Country, State, and Local Information . Information about a particular country, state or city/town at a particular time is available via a variety of sources including:

Annual country reference publication series
State and Local Government documents ,
Travelers’ writings, and guidebooks .
City directories which, besides the alphabetical listing of residents, usually have a terminal section with a government directory and listing of local businesses and agencies by activity.

Data The Digital Scholarship Support Group offers faculty, students, and staff interested in incorporating digital methods into their teaching and research a single point of entry to the many resources available at Harvard. Beginner's Guide to Locating and Using Numeric Data .

Film/Video . As well as entertainment films, there are documentary films and newsreels. Tools for finding films listed in this guide . For newsreels . The Library has a guide for streaming video .

Internet Archive Put your search term in Any field. Adjust Mediatype is : to Audio

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Search for your topic. Select Type: Sound on the left.

WorldCat Open Access Advanced Search. Adjust Databases from WorldCat to OpenAccessContent . Open Options (upper right). Change Record list size from 10 to 100.

Search: Keyword: [your search term(s) AND Genre/Form: video OR audiovisual

WorldCat OAIster (Union catalog of digital resources) Advanced Search. Adjust Databases : from WorldCat to OAIster . Open Options (upper right). Change Record list size from 10 to 100.

Search: Keyword: [your search term(s) AND Keyword: ge=video

Government Documents (National, State, Local) are publications produced for public distribution (unlike archival sources). We give instructions on finding them in this guide United States , US foreign relations , US state and local , and foreign government documents .

Many US government publications are available full text in HathiTrust . In Advanced Catalog search put Author: "United States" and a department/agency name if desired.
Bibliographies of government documents for your time period are often useful guides. HOLLIS Library Catalog (Note Subject term: Government publications .

Gray Literature refers to reports produced and published by governmental or non-governmental agencies (think tanks, research institutes) but not published via the usual commercial or academic channels. Think tank publications often offer the views of particular ideological groups. They may be studies of policy (often called working papers) or technical studies (called technical reports)

Images . Harvard has numerous collections of images which are best searched via HOLLIS Images . Countless images have been digitized. Tools for finding them listed in this guide .

Law: Legal sources include:

Laws: Foreign, US national and state, city ordinances -- HOLLIS Library Catalog search (Note OR)
Case law: Appeals court opinions -- HOLLIS Library Catalog search
Trial transcripts or accounts -- HOLLIS Library Catalog search

The Law School librarians are the experts ( Law School Library guides ), be we have a legal history guide to get started . It covers the legal periodical literature (Law reviews), court cases, and legislation for the United States and, to a lesser extent Britain.

In HOLLIS the following terms are found on literary works and works of literary scholarship.

American literature -- Korean American autho rs.
Authors, Korean
Korean American literature -- United States .
Korean Americans – Fiction (or Drama, or Poetry) refers to literary works
Korean Americans -- In literature refers to literary scholarship
Korean Americans -- Literary Collections

Sources for literary scholarship are listed in the research guide: Literary Research in Harvard Libraries .

Maps . The Harvard Map Collection contains one of the world’s finest collections of maps. Although their atlases are in HOLLIS, many of their individual maps are not, so a visit is useful. As well as political and topographic maps, they have numerous thematic maps of demographic, social, and economic other features. More information in this guide .

Material . Much historical evidence resides in material objects. Find what Harvard has with a form/genre search in HOLLIS ( HOLLIS Library Catalog Example - note that we exclude Visual in the search). We have a draft (unfinished) guide to American material culture which includes landscaps, gardens, cities, consumer goods, etc. Links to Harvard museums .

News Sources . Important for giving a sense of events and opinion at a particular time and place. Abundantly digitized pre-1923 and post 1980s.

Tools for finding newspapers and newspaper articles listed in the Guide for Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes .
Tools for finding broadcast news and newsreels in this guide

Pamphlets are useful primary sources in that they are often responses to a particular event or situation.

Collections and series of pamphlets often have the word Pamphlets in the title. Narrow with additional keywords, e.g., “ Middle East ”

Individual pamphlets often, by no means always, have the term Pamphlets in the Form/genre or Subject fields in Hollis and WorldCat - both searched together in the Advanced Search Subject search .

Sometimes series-level groups in archival collections are composed of pamphlets. In Hollis for Archival Discovery searching Pamphlets isolates these series. This search can be focused with topic keywords or by repository.

Find bibliographies of pamphlets in HOLLIS Library Catalog Advanced Search: Subject contains: pamphlets bibliography

A catalogue of pamphlets on economic subjects published between 1750 and 1900 and now housed in Irish libraries , by R. D. Collison Black. Belfast, Queen's University Belfast, 1969, 632 p. HOLLIS Record

An incomplete list of major pamphlet collections is available here .

Periodicals come in the following types:

Magazines: Aimed at a popular audience ( Tools for finding them listed in this guide )
Academic -Disciplinary: Aimed at a academic/scientific audience ( Tools for finding them listed in this guide )
Professional/Trade: Aimed at particular trades or professions ( Tools for finding them listed in this guide ; Try Internet Archive ) ( HOLLIS Library Catalog Example, note Resource type: Journals )
Newspapers: See News Sources .

Tools are available for finding the circulation figures, audiences and political orientations of many newspapers and other periodicals , and the histories and characteristics of magazines .

Personal accounts . These are first person narratives recalling or describing a person’s life and opinions. These include diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and when delivered orally and recorded: Oral histories and Interviews.

Tools for finding them listed in this guide: Personal Accounts -- Oral History .
The lists of digital libraries by US state have many collections with oral histories.
HOLLIS Library Catalog search example

Public Opinion. Surveys are available that gauge public opinion on numerous topics. Instructions for finding them in this guide . Sample HOLLIS Library Catalog search . For the opinion of a particular group of people use the Subject term: Attitudes - Sample HOLLIS Library Catalog search .

Search: Keyword: [your search term(s) AND Genre/Form: recording OR sound OR audio

Search: Keyword: [your search term(s) AND Subject: recording OR sound OR audio

Categories of sound recordings.

Music. Music Research Guide
Broadcast News
Interviews Tools listed in this guide .
Literary readings
Oral histories Tools listed in this guide .
Speeches. Tools listed in this guide .
Radio Tools listed in this guide .
Television Tools listed in this guide .
Sound effects, animal sounds.

Sample search in HOLLIS

Sound recordings are often available, physically or online, only via local repositories. To find these, search in WorldCat Advanced Search. For Limit type to : choose Sound Recordings. If there are too many musical recordings, enter mt:nsr (code for non musical recordings) in a Keyword field, add NOT audiobooks. Thus,

Keyword: Poliomyelitis AND Keyword: mt:nsr NOT Keyword: Audiobooks

Document type Sound Recordings can be further refined by placing, for example, Speeches in a Subject field. For a list of these genre/form terms .

Statistics . Most countries publish series of demographic, economic and other statistics. Statistics are also gathered by non-governmental agencies, including international organizations. Tools for finding them . Sample HOLLIS Library Catalog search

Textbooks Tools for finding them .

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Last Updated: Sep 27, 2024 2:08 PM
URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/history

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

How it works

Historical Research – A Guide Based on its Uses & Steps

Published by Alvin Nicolas at August 16th, 2021 , Revised On August 29, 2023

History is a study of past incidents, and it’s different from natural science. In natural science, researchers prefer direct observations. Whereas in historical research, a researcher collects, analyses the information to understand, describe, and explain the events that occurred in the past.

They aim to test the truthfulness of the observations made by others. Historical researchers try to find out what happened exactly during a certain period of time as accurately and as closely as possible. It does not allow any manipulation or control of variables .

When to Use the Historical Research Method?

You can use historical research method to:

Uncover the unknown fact.
Answer questions
Identify the association between the past and present.
Understand the culture based on past experiences..
Record and evaluate the contributions of individuals, organisations, and institutes.

How to Conduct Historical Research?

Historical research involves the following steps:

Select the Research Topic
Collect the Data
Analyse the Data
Criticism of Data
Present your Findings

Tips to Collect Data

Step 1 – select the research topic.

If you want to conduct historical research, it’s essential to select a research topic before beginning your research. You can follow these tips while choosing a topic and developing a research question .

Consider your previous study as your previous knowledge and data can make your research enjoyable and comfortable for you.
List your interests and focus on the current events to find a promising question.
Take notes of regular activities and consider your personal experiences on a specific topic.
Develop a question using your research topic.
Explore your research question by asking yourself when? Why? How

Step 2- Collect the Data

It is essential to collect data and facts about the research question to get reliable outcomes. You need to select an appropriate instrument for data collection . Historical research includes two sources of data collection, such as primary and secondary sources.

Primary Sources

Primary sources are the original first-hand resources such as documents, oral or written records, witnesses to a fact, etc. These are of two types, such as:

Conscious Information : It’s a type of information recorded and restored consciously in the form of written, oral documents, or the actual witnesses of the incident that occurred in the past.

It includes the following sources:

Records Government documents Images autobiographies letters

Constitiutions Court-decisions Diaries Audios Videos

Wills Declarations Licenses Reports

Unconscious information : It’s a type of information restored in the form of remains or relics.

It includes information in the following forms:

Fossils Tools Weapons Household articles Clothes or any belonging of humans

Language literature Artifacts Abandoned places Monuments

Secondary Sources

Sometimes it’s impossible to access primary sources, and researchers rely on secondary sources to obtain information for their research.

It includes:

Publications
Periodicals
Encyclopedia

Step 3 – Analyse the Data

After collecting the information, you need to analyse it. You can use data analysis methods like

Thematic analysis
Coding system
Theoretical model ( Researchers use multiple theories to explain a specific phenomenon, situations, and behavior types.)
Quantitative data to validate

Step 4 – Criticism of Data

Data criticism is a process used for identifying the validity and reliability of the collected data. It’s of two types such as:

External Criticism :

It aims at identifying the external features of the data such as signature, handwriting, language, nature, spelling, etc., of the documents. It also involves the physical and chemical tests of paper, paint, ink, metal cloth, or any collected object.

Internal Criticism :

It aims at identifying the meaning and reliability of the data. It focuses on the errors, printing, translation, omission, additions in the documents. The researchers should use both external and internal criticism to ensure the validity of the data.

Step 5 – Present your Findings

While presenting the findings of your research , you need to ensure that you have met the objectives of your research or not. Historical material can be organised based on the theme and topic, and it’s known as thematic and topical arrangement. You can follow these tips while writing your research paper :

Build Arguments and Narrative

Your research aims not just to collect information as these are the raw materials of research. You need to build a strong argument and narrate the details of past events or incidents based on your findings.

Organise your Argument

You can review the literature and other researchers’ contributions to the topic you’ve chosen to enhance your thinking and argument.

Proofread, Revise and Edit

After putting your findings on a paper, you need to proofread it to weed out the errors, rewrite it to improve, and edit it thoroughly before submitting it.

Are you looking for professional research writing services?

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Whether you want a full dissertation written or need help forming a dissertation proposal, we can help you with both.
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In this world of technology, many people rely on Google to find out any information. All you have to do is enter a few keywords and sit back. You’ll find several relevant results onscreen.

It’s an effective and quick way of gathering information. Sometimes historical documents are not accessible to everyone online, and you need to visit traditional libraries to find out historical treasures. It will help you explore your knowledge along with data collection.

You can visit historical places, conduct interviews, review literature, and access primary and secondary data sources such as books, newspapers, publications, documents, etc. You can take notes while collecting the information as it helps to organise the data accurately.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Historical Research

Advantages	Disadvantages
It is easy to calculate and understand the obtained information. It is applied to various time periods based on industry custom. It helps in understanding current educational practices, theories, and problems based on past experiences. It helps in determining when and how a specific incident exactly happened in the past.	A researcher cannot control or manipulate the variables. It’s time-consuming Researchers cannot affect past incidents. Historical Researchers need to rely on the available data most excessively on secondary data. Researchers cannot conduct surveys and experiments in the past.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the initial steps to perform historical research.

Initial steps for historical research:

Define research scope and period.
Gather background knowledge.
Identify primary and secondary sources.
Develop research questions.
Plan research approach.
Begin data collection and analysis.

Chapter 16. Archival and Historical Research

Introduction.

The British sociologist John Goldthorpe ( 2000 ) once remarked, “Any sociologist who is concerned with a theory that can be tested in the present should so test it, in the first place; for it is, in all probability, in this way that it can be tested most rigorously” ( 33 ). Testing can be done through either qualitative or quantitative methods or some mixture of the two. But sometimes a theory cannot be tested in the present at all. What happens when the persons or phenomena we are interested in happened in the past? It’s hardly possible to interview the people involved in abolishing the slave trade, for example. Does this mean social scientists have no role to play in understanding past phenomena? Not at all. People leave traces behind, and although these traces may not be exactly as we would like them to be had we ordered them (as, in a way, we do when we construct an interview guide or a survey with the questions we want answered), they are nevertheless full of potential for exploration and analysis. For examining traces left by persons, we turn to archival methods, the subject of this chapter.

Things happening in the past are not the only reason we turn to archival methods. Sometimes, the people we are interested in are inaccessible to us for other reasons. For example, we are probably not going to be able to sit down and ask Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos a long list of questions about what it is like to be wealthy. And it is even more unlikely that we can get into the boardrooms of Facebook (Meta), Microsoft, or Amazon to watch how corporate decisions are made. But these men and these companies still leave traces, through public records, media reportage, and public meeting minutes. We can use archival methods here too. They might not be quite as good as face-to-face interviews with billionaires or deep ethnographies of corporate culture, but they are nevertheless valid forms of research with much to tell us.

This chapter introduces archival methods of data collection. We begin by exploring in more detail why and when archival methods should be employed and with what limitations. We then discuss the importance of special collections and archives as potential gold mines for social science research. We will explain how to access these places, for what purposes, and how to begin to make sense of what you find.

Disciplinary Segue: Why Social Scientists Don’t Leave Archives to the Historians

One might suppose that only historians look at the past and that historical archives are no place for social scientists. Goldthorpe ( 2000 ) even suggested this. But it would be a mistake to leave historical analyses entirely to historians because historians “typically do not understand our [social science] intellectual and organizational projects.…Social scientists must learn to use the materials that historians have staked out traditionally as their own” ( Hill 1993:4 ). The key difference for our purposes between history and social science is how each discipline understands the goals of its work and how to understand social life. Historians are (mostly) committed to an idiographic approach, where each case is explored to understand itself (this is the “idios” part, where ιδιοs is Ancient Greek for single self). [1] As an example of an idiographic approach, a historian might study the events of January 6, 2021, to understand how a violent mob attempted to stop the electoral count. This might mean tracing motivations back to beliefs in fanciful conspiracies, measuring the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the violence, or any number of interesting facts and circumstances about that day and what led up to it. But the focus would remain on understanding this case itself. In contrast, social scientists are (mostly) committed to nomothetic research, in which generalizations about the social world are made to understand large-scale social patterns. [2] Whether this generalization is statistical, as quantitative research produces (e.g., we can predict this outcome in other cases and places based on measurable relationships among variables), or theoretical, as qualitative research produces (e.g., we can expect to find similar patterns between conspiratorial belief and action), the point of (most) social science research is to explain the world in such a way that we can possibly expect (if not outright predict) what will happen or be believed in a different place and time . Social scientists are engaged in this “scientific” project of prediction (loosely understood), while historians are (usually) not. It is for this reason that social scientists should not leave archival research to the historians!

When to Use Archival Materials

As mentioned above, sometimes the people we want to hear from or observe are simply not available to us. This may be because they are no longer living or because they are unwilling or unable to be part of a research study, as in the case of elites (e.g., CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, political leaders and other public figures, the very wealthy). In both cases, you might wonder about the ethics of studying people who have not given written consent to be studied. But using archival and historical sources as your research data is not the same thing as studying persons (“human subjects”). When we use archival and historical sources, we are examining the traces that people and institutions have left. Institutional review boards (IRBs) do not have jurisdiction in this area, although we still want to consider the ethics of our research and try to respect privacy and confidentiality when warranted.

In addition to using archival and historical sources when people are inaccessible, there are other reasons we might want to collect this data. First, we may want to explore the generalized discourse about a phenomenon. [3] For example, perhaps we want to understand the historical context of the 2016 US presidential election, so we think it is important to go back in time and collect data that will more vividly paint a picture of how people at the time were evaluating and experiencing the election. We might use archives to collect data about what people were saying about the third presidential debate in 2016 between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There are many ways we could go about doing that. We could sample local and national newspapers and collect op-eds and letters to the editor about the debate. Perhaps we can get Twitter feeds #thirddebate , or perhaps some librarian in 2016 collected oral histories of people’s reactions the day after. Unlike previous person-focused qualitative research strategies, where we carefully create a research design that allows us to construct data through questioning and observing, we will spend our time tracking down data and finding out what possibly exists.

A second (or third) reason to employ these archival and historical sources is that we are interested in the historical “record” as the phenomenon itself. We want to know what was written down by Acme Company in letters to its shareholders from 1945 to 1960 about its Acme Pocket Sled (which had the unfortunate habit of accelerating and hurling its bearers off cliffs). [4] Our interest here is not in any particular human subject but in the record left by the company. If we were forced to employ interviews or observational methods to get this record, we could interview current and former employees of Acme or shareholders who received letters from the company, but all of this would actually be second best because what the employees and shareholders remember would probably be nowhere near as accurate as what the records reflect. I once did a study of the development of US political party platforms over the course of the nineteenth century, using a huge volume I randomly found in the library ( Hurst 2010b ). The volume recorded each party’s platform by election year, so I could trace how parties talked about and included “class” and “class inequality” in their platforms. This allowed me to show how third parties pushed the two major parties toward some recognition of labor rights over time. There was obviously no way to get at this information through interviews or observations.

Finally, archival and historical sources are often used to supplement other qualitative data collection as a form of verification through triangulation. Perhaps you interviewed several Starbucks employees in 2021 about their experiences working for the company, particularly how the company responded to labor organizing attempts. You might also search official Starbucks company records to compare and contrast the official line with the experience of workers. Alternatively, you could collect media coverage of local organizing campaigns that might include quotes or statements from Starbucks representatives. The best and most convincing qualitative researchers often employ archival and historical material in this way. In addition to providing verification through triangulation, supplementing your data with these sources can deepen contextualization. I encourage you to think about what possible archival and historical sources could strengthen any interview or observational-based study you are designing. [5]

How to Find Archival and Historical Sources

People and institutions leave traces in a variety of ways. This section documents some of those ways with the hope that the possibilities listed here will inspire you to explore further.

It might help to distinguish between public and private sources. Many public archives have dedicated web addresses so you can search them from anywhere. More on those below. Private individuals are more likely to have donated personal information to particular archives, perhaps the archival center associated with the college they attended. Famous and not-so-famous people’s diaries and letters are often searchable in particular university archives. Each former US president has his (!) own dedicated national archive. Towns and cities often house interesting historical records in their public libraries. Archivists and librarians at special archives have often done monumental work creating and curating collections of various kinds. Oregon State University’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) is no exception. In addition to a ton of material related to the history of the university, including private diaries of students, financial aid records, and photographs of carpentry classes from the nineteenth century, the librarians have documented the experiences of LGBTQ people within OSU and Corvallis, the history of hops and brewing in the Northwest, and the history of natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, especially around agriculture and forestry.

Oregon State University’s Special Collections and Archives, The Douglas Strain Reading Room.

It can be overwhelming to think about where to start. Being strategic about your use of archival and historical material is often a large part of an effective research plan. Here are some options for kinds of materials to explore:

Public archives include the following:

Commercial media accounts . These are anything written, drawn, or recorded that is produced for a general audience, including newspapers, books, magazines, television program transcripts, drawn comics, and so on.
Where to find these: special collections, online newspaper/magazine databases, collected publications [6]
Examples: Time Magazine Vault is completely free and covers everything the magazine published from 1923 to today; Harper’s Magazine archives go back to 1859; Internet Archive’s Ebony collection is a wealth of historically important images and stories about African American life in the twentieth century and covers the magazine from 1945 to 2015.
Actuarial and military records . These include birth and death records, records of marriages and divorces, applications for insurance and credit, military service records, and cemeteries (gravestones).
Where to find these: state archives/state vital records offices, US Census / government agencies, US National Archives
Examples: USAgov/genealogy will help you walk through the ordering of various vital records related to ancestry; US Census 1950 includes information on household size and occupation for all persons living in the US in 1950; [7] your local historical cemetery will have lots of information recorded on gravestones of possible historical use, as the case where deaths are clustered around a particular point in time or where military service is involved.
Official and quasi-official documentary records . These include organization meeting minutes, reports to shareholders, interoffice memos, company emails, company newsletters, and so on.
Where to find these: Historical records are often donated to a special collection or are even included in an official online database. More recent records may have been “leaked” to the public, as in the case of the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016 or the Panama (2016) and Pandora (2021) Papers leaks. The National Archives are also a great source for official documentary records of the US and its various organizations and branches (e.g., Supreme Court, US Patent Office).
Examples: The Forest History Society’s Weyerhauser Collection holds correspondences, director and executive files, branch and region files, advertising materials, oral histories, scrapbooks, publications, photographs, and audio/visual items documenting the activities of the Pacific Northwest timber company from its inception in 1864 through to 2010; the National Archive’s Lewis and Clark documents include presidential correspondences and a list of “presents” received from Native Americans.
Governmental and legislative documentary records
Where to find these: National Archives, state archives, Library of Congress, governmental agency records (often available in public libraries)
Example: Records of the Supreme Court of the United States are housed in the National Archives and include scrapbooks from 1880 to 1935 on microfilm, sound recordings, and case files going back to 1792.

Private archives include the following:

Autobiographies and memoirs . These might have been published, but they are just as likely to have been written for oneself or one’s family, with no intention of publication. Some of these have been digitized, but others will require an actual visit to the site to see the physical object itself.
Where to find these: if not published, special collections and archives
Example: John Adger McCrary graduated from Clemson University in 1898, where he received a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. After graduation, he was stationed at the Washington Navy Yard as senior mechanical engineer. He donated a 1939 unpublished memoir regarding the early days of Clemson College, which includes a description of the first dormitory being built by convict labor.
Diaries and letters . These are probably not intended for publication; rather, they are contemporaneous private accounts and correspondences. Some of these have been digitized, but others will require an actual visit to the site to see the physical object itself.
Where to find these: special collections and archives, Library of Congress for notable persons’ diaries and letters
Examples: Abraham Lincoln’s Papers housed in the Library of Congress; Diary of Ella Mae Cloake , an OSU student, from 1941 to 1944, documenting her daily activities as a high school and college student in Oregon during World War II, located in OSU Special Collections and Archives
Home movies, videos, photographs of various kinds . These include drawings and sketches, recordings of places seen and visited, scrapbooks, and other ephemera. People leave traces in various forms, so it is best not to confine yourself solely to what has been written.
Where to find these: special collections and archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian
Example: The McMenamins Brewery Collection at OSU SCARC includes digitized brew sheets, digital images, brochures, coasters, decals, event programs, flyers, newspaper clippings, tap handles, posters, labels, a wooden cask, and a six-pack of Hammerhead beer.
Oral histories . Oral histories are recorded and often transcribed interviews of various persons for purposes of historic documentation. To the untrained eye, they appear to be qualitative “interviews,” but they are in fact specifically excluded from IRB jurisdiction because their purpose is documentation, not research.
Where to find these: special collections and archives; Smithsonian
Examples: Many archivists and librarians are involved in the collecting of such oral histories, often with a particular theme in mind or to strengthen a particular collection. For example, OSU’s SCARC has an Oregon Multicultural Archive, which includes oral histories that document the experiences and perspectives of people of color in Oregon. The Smithsonian is another great resource on a wide variety of historical events and persons.

How to Find Special Collections and Archives

Although much material has been “digitized” and is thus searchable online, the vast majority of private archival material, including ephemera like scrapbooks and beer coasters, is only available “on site.” Qualitative researchers who employ archival and historical sources must often travel to special collections to find the material they are interested in. Often, the material they want has never really been looked at by another researcher. It may belong to a general catalog entry (such as “Student Scrapbooks, 1930–1950”). For official records at the city or county level, travel to the records office or local public library is often required to access the desired material. You will want to consider what kinds of material are available and what kinds of access are required for that material in your research plan.

The good news is that, even if much material has not been digitized, there are general searchable databases for most archives. If you have a particular topic of interest, you can run a general web search and include the topic and “archives” or “special collection.” The more public and well known the entity, the more likely you will find digitally available material or special collections dedicated to the person or phenomenon. Or you might find an archive housed one thousand miles away that is happy to work with you on a visit. Some researchers become very familiar with a particular collection or database and tend to rely on that in their research. As you gain experience with historical documents, you will find it easier to narrow down your searches. One great place to start, though, is your college or university archives. And the librarians who work there will be more than happy to help answer your questions about both the particular collections housed there and how to do archival research in general.

What to Do with All That Content

Once you have found a collection or body of material, what do you do with that? Analyzing content will be discussed in some detail in chapter 17, but for now, let’s think about what can be made of this kind of material and what cannot. As Goldthorpe ( 2000 ) suggested, using historical material or traces left by people is sometimes second best to actually talking to people or observing them in action. We have to be very clear about recognizing the limitations of what we find in the archives.

First, not everything produced manages to survive the ravages of time. Without digitization, historical records are vulnerable to a host of destroyers. Some vital records get destroyed when the local registry burns down, for example. Some memoirs or diaries are destroyed from mildew while sitting in a box in the basement. Photographs get torn up. Boxes of records get accidentally thrown in the garbage. We call this the historical-trace problem. What we have in front of us is thus probably not the entire record of whatever it is we are looking for.

Second, what gets collected is itself often related to who has power and who is perceived as being worthy of recording and collection. This is why projects like OSU’s multicultural archives are so important, as librarians intervene to ensure that it is not only the stories (diaries, papers) of the powerful that are found in the archives. If one were to read all the newspaper editorials from the nineteenth century, one would learn a lot about particular White men’s thoughts on current events but very little from women or people of color or working-class people. This is the power problem of archives, and we need to be aware of it, especially when we are using historical material to build a context of what a time or place was like. What it was like for whom always needs to be properly addressed.

Third, there are issues related to truth telling and audience. There are no at-the-moment credibility checks on the materials you find in archives. Although we think people tend to write honestly in their personal journals, we don’t actually know if this is the case—what about the person who expected to be famous and writes for an imagined posterity? There could be significant gaps and even falsehoods in such an account. People can lie to themselves too, which is something qualitative researchers know well (and partly the reason ethnographers favor observation over interviews). Despite the absence of credibility checks, historical documents sometimes appear more honest simply by having survived for so long. It is important to remember that they are prone to all the same problems as contemporaneously collected data. A diary by a planter in South Carolina in the 1840s is no more and often less truthful to the facts than an interview would have been had it been possible. Newspapers and magazines have always targeted particular audiences—a fact we understand about our own media (e.g., Fox News is hardly “fair and balanced” toward Democrats) but something we are prone to overlook when reading historic media stories.

Whenever using archival or historical sources, then, it is important to clearly identify and state the limitations of their use and any intended audience. In the case of diaries of Southern planters from the 1840s, “This is the story we get told from the point of view of relatively elite White men whose work was collected and safeguarded (and not destroyed) for posterity.” Or in the case of a Harper’s Magazine story from the 1950s, “This is an understanding of Eisenhower politics by a liberal magazine read by a relatively well-educated and affluent audience.”

Collecting the data for an archival-based study is just the beginning. Once you have downloaded all the advertisements from Men’s Health or compiled all the tweets put out on January 6 or scanned all the photographs of the childcare center in the 1950s, you will need to start “analyzing” it. What does that analysis entail? That is the subject of our next several chapters.

History Research Paper

This sample history research paper features: 5800 words (approx. 19 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 25 sources. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Introduction

Diachronic anthropology, the radical left as an intellectual tradition, anthropology of advocacy, rise of fascism, elite theory, conflict approach to history, ideology, revolution, and reaction in history, where is science now, more history research papers:.

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History is both a structured and a dynamic process. The history of history begins with the proposition that it is the telling of history that is important. Objectivity is a specific interpretation that is related to a specific subjective reference point. The social facts a historian deals with are related to dominant but changing social forces that appear dissimilar to people with different points of reference. These social facts and forces are defined in terms of historical trends that are interpreted differently by different historians of the same time period. Historical trends then presuppose that a transformation is happening with these social facts. Changes in the social life of a nation are reflected in the changes in the class structure, and ultimately changes in the productive techniques and social environment.

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Human knowledge as expressed by individual psychology develops collectively through growing up and interacting in a social setting in concert with a changing social environment. Even the language that a people speaks is learned through communication within social groupings. The world as we experience it is created out of the way we see our lives and think about our personal active participation in the events of our lives. This, in turn, is at every point a social creation.

We are products of our social upbringing. Our thoughts and ideas are the invention of a specific set of social, cultural, and historical conditions. We learn through the exchange of ideas in the social setting we participate in.

Each culture within its own historical setting develops a unique worldview. Every culture develops along its own path, with its own thought patterns that are created out of a shared but changing worldview and narration. This is reflected in the way a people responds to events in their world.

Within each society and each ethnic group in that society, different classes often develop different, and sometimes competing, belief arrangements and points of view. Even within classes, different genders and generations develop competing convictions and perspectives. This is true even if people are employing the same symbols and unifying ideologies. These distinctive occurrences in the collective beliefs and attitudes are built on historical paradigms. New sets of assumptions that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community are forged from what is left over from past worldviews, creating an acknowledged understanding that becomes recognized as real. This change develops continuously because life is always changing. Altered circumstances that are lived in the present stand in contrast with past interpretations of life. Because people are active within their social environment, their environment reflects that activity. People interact consciously with their environment. While reacting to their immediate needs, they often create outcomes that have long-term effects. This is in part the nature of social evolution. The result is largely the consequences of our collective actions that are, in fact, unpredicted. This leads to a need for a people to come up with new strategies to come to terms with the changes brought about in the societal ecosystem. History at this point is the story of important modifications.

History reflects recurrent adjustment to a continuously changing environment. There is constant engagement between communities, between individuals within communities, and between people within their larger environment. This alteration also coaxes a persistent reinterpretation of the conventional cardinal philosophy. This is the essence of the enduring human condition.

To understand these changes by using both diachronic anthropology and historical sociology, we begin by observing just how situational truth is. It is not enough to describe a social fact objectively. The historical sociologists/ anthropologists need to also look at the cultural understanding of the fact in the context of the larger society. This includes the careful examination of the motives, values, and interpretations of the participating actors in their lived social drama. In the social sciences, objective explanations are in fact trite, dispassionate accounts, and without cultural understandings, they are basically dull.

Because changes in people’s attitudes reflect changes in their existential reality, a people’s beliefs and point of view are part of any scientific study of society. The actual experience of existence is filtered through a shared worldview that is culturally and historically specific. Each cultural-historical epoch has its own unusual and salient worldview. The historical artifacts of socially created worldviews are the tense interaction between differing worldviews of the historian and the subject matter being studied. The actual threat of domestic communism during the post–World War II era is going to be told differently by historians who came of age in the turmoil of the 1960s and those who came of age in the post– Cold War era, 30 years later. The second set of historians does not have the same sense of moral indignation leveled against the U.S. government’s antisubversive programs.

Along similar lines, particular sociological theories are set in specific historical settings. Established social theories correspond to the position and point of view of the individual who initially set up the theory. The devotees inhabit a distinctive point in the tiered social structure. Each theory, then, has a legitimate perspective given the social site of the researcher.

Any serious study of anthropology or sociology would require that at some point students carefully read the classics while examining the historical context in which they were written. Because the contemporary code of beliefs and philosophies is created out of elements of past theories, the classics remain important to any dynamic study of sociology. Through anthropology, we can better understand the historical and social-cultural context that gives rise to any theory.

For example, the idea that a society is like an integrated organism requires that the writer be living in a modern industrial nation-state. British structural functionalism is set in the early 20th century and is intellectually reflective of the British Empire. The incorporated essence of this society bears a resemblance to an organism. This analogy is derived from the structure of a society in which different institutions, like different organ systems of a living individual, tend to specialize in function. Functionalism reflects the development of a modern industrial society following the French Revolution in Europe. In these societies, because of an integrated market economy, the society moves in the direction of a more centralized and efficient economic and political amalgamation.

A modern industrial society cooks up a multitude of theories developed to explain the same or similar phenomena. The anthropologist or sociologist or historian is a product of this environment. The opposing theories represent conflicting social positions in the same society.

History and 19th-Century Evolutionary Thought

Evolutionary thought began to take root during the 18th-century European Enlightenment. By the second half of the 19th century, evolutionary anthropologists were developing evolutionary thought even before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). Biblical scholars looked on non-European societies as being an erosion of a basic humanity that monotheism, and specifically Christianity, had generated. The evolutionist developed an alternative view by hypothesizing that nonwhites (i.e., nonEuropeans) were a more primitive type of human subspecies. Monotheism was superior to either polytheism or animism. Science was superior to religion and rationalism superior to mysticism. Consequently, European civilization was at the apex of evolutionary development. All other cultures were somewhere along the evolutionary trajectory from early apelike hominids to modern Europeans.

In reaction to universal evolution, Franz Boas became a founding spirit of historical particularism, which claimed that the universal or unilinear evolution, in which Europe was the apex, was teleological and therefore not scientific. British structural functionalism also became antievolutionary in how it saw the separate parts of a society interact to form a cooperating whole as being the focus of their studies; this synchronic theory characterizes the most important goal of any cultural element as being the harmony of the society as a whole. In doing so, history is not the core in these studies. However, history could not be ignored. Change is a constant in all social settings. Therefore, societies must be studied in their historical context. Cultural evolution reemerges as a fact of life.

Historical sociology as a part of diachronic anthropology demonstrates the continuous development of groups, classes, nations, and social institutions in which one set of social organizations replaces earlier examples. In doing this, we learn how each small part interacts with the others in order to establish ever-larger units until we define a global economy.

In the study of the mixture of discrete elements, we learn that these parts come together to provide an interrelated whole. The world is made up of a combination of millions of local communities that are always in a process of transformation. Because of the increasing tempo of change following World War II and the degree of external intrusion in local affairs, process theory developed as a sharp criticism of functionalism by a younger anthropologist hostile to colonialism.

Cultural motifs form themes that condition the evolution of future national designs. A modern way of looking at the world would not have been possible before the advent of the Industrial and Liberal Revolutions. The modern mind-set develops a way of looking at things along the lines of a concept that holds that both the past and the future are real units of time and that this linear time frame is real and related to an ever-changing present. This liberal worldview is a noticeable departure from the previous age in which people saw truth as both absolute and unchanging.

Capitalism, liberal government, industrial technology, and scientific development mutually feed one another. Liberal society began being defined during the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the Market Economy, its rough outline was delineated. Along the same lines, feudal privilege and the power of religion was being challenged. Science developed in this environment. Modern rational philosophy was the expression of a revolutionary, capitalist bourgeoisie in its assent to power. Empiricism and science became the practical expression of the empowered capitalist class. The growing capitalist economy required the quantitative analysis of market possibilities, production expenses, and technological innovation.

With a market economy, production grows in importance, replacing local subsistence economy. The new market economy was founded on an exchange of values and prices that defined the relationship among production units and thus among individuals. Previously, production and production units were embedded in social obligations. Thus, the expansion of market relations within a society changed the established social relations.

Because liberalism became the dominant worldview, the political changes that followed were revolutionary. Natural law and human nature became the cornerstones of the new philosophy. National identity creates a general spirit of the time and outlook, going beyond local distinctiveness and native uniqueness. “The rights of man” and resistance against tyranny replaced theocratic absolutes. Through revolution in Europe and America and colonialism everywhere else, liberal ideas spread throughout most of the world. As the liberal bourgeois society spread, it destroyed much of the time-honored social organization in traditional society. The ideas of John Locke, Jean Rousseau, Adam Smith, and others helped to define much of the liberal thought, which gained a definition.

History and Conservative Philosophy

The reaction to the spread of liberal society was the expansion and fruition of conservative philosophy. Conservatism came into existence with the advent of liberal capitalism. Because there is a specific connection between beliefs, attitudes, values, and the social circumstances of a particular group, it can be seen that the conservative ideology appeals to those most threatened by the spread of capitalism. By putting an end to the ancient order, a call for its return is likely to follow.

Because of the rise of liberal society and its corresponding worldview, conservative philosophy would be characterized by its way of following and countering an opposition to liberalism. Conservative philosophy was born after and not before liberal philosophy. Because it was a reaction against capitalism, it was a dream of a return either to feudalism in Europe or to a traditional society everywhere else. Because science, empiricism, rationalism, and modern technology coevolved with capitalism, conservatives find a lot to fight against. Because this progressive market economy undermines the ancient order and the saga of heroes—to free both people and resources for production for profit—those who did better under a traditional society will oppose both free enterprise and science. To the conservative, liberalism, capitalism, and modernism were seen as the destruction of all that was decent in life to the conservative thinker.

The conservative movement was a romantic attempt to reestablish traditional communities that existed before capitalism. The capitalist and the working class are a product of capitalism, and both stand to gain nothing by a return to the antique civilization. Thus, both the capitalist and the working class are very much underrepresented in the ranks of the conservative thinker.

Those elements utterly damaged by the development of bourgeois-capitalist society are the small-property owners, such as small farmers, peasants, urban small-business owners, independent artisans, and the self-employed. These factions join forces with the natural leaders of the conservative movement, the large-landed aristocracy with ties to their feudal or traditional past.

With the robust formation of a romantic-conservative movement, a milieu is set up in which some intellectuals, who feel alienated from both bourgeois liberalism and the socialism of the revolutionary working class, can find a home within the setting of the romantic folklore, that is, a vision of what the traditional society was like before the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, and the modern global capitalism of the 20th century. Community is defended against society. The spiritual is seen as preferable to science. Family and kinship are understood as favored over contracts and professional qualifications. The conservatives such as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling or Joseph de Maistre believed that society must be governed by divinely inspired internal principles that are embedded in deep traditional roots, which are culturally embedded and long established within deep historical roots.

With the advancement of the market economy and the Industrial Revolution, a new industrial working class is formed from the disrupted elements of the previous society. These detached fragments come together to form a distinct organic class unique to capitalism. Wage labor is the minimum requirement for the further development of industrial capital. The working class has lost its connection to traditional society and can now be fashioned into an original class within capitalism. Because the very nature of wage labor is creating a surplus for the capitalist, the defining characteristic of the proletariat is exploitation. It is only the natural workers who develop an alternative perspective in opposition to liberal philosophy. Socialism stands in marked opposition to both liberals and conservatives. Because of shared common experiences, socialism can be neither liberal nor conservative.

Along similar lines, many anthropologists see their roles not only as researchers but also as advocates for the people they study. In 1968, anthropologist Helga Kleivan formed the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs as a human rights support organization to help indigenous peoples define their rights, maintain control over their lands, and maintain their independent existence. Science has served capitalism well by creating this worldview of objectivity in which truth is independent of ethics. Now, these anthropologists claim that they must offer whatever assistance they can to help the surviving indigenous peoples to resist becoming the victims of someone else’s progress.

Fascism is the effect of failed liberalism and the excessive remains of conservatism that has come to nothing. As fascism goes, it absorbs disempowered liberals and disenchanted socialists. Fascism is both activist and irrational. Militant engagement and the intuitive sentiments are glorified over reason and caution. Leadership is virtually made sacred. Elite theory states that history is made by elites, and everyone else simply follows. The acting without regard to science or reason, placing the act of conquest above ethical principles, negates the need for careful analysis or an interpretation of history.

Fascists believe that history at the simplest level, while an intellectually coherent and understandable method of knowledge, disappears. Fascism is the irrational exaltation of the deed, and the antihistorical myth takes priority over history as the imaginative symbols provide the edifice for the simple rendition of a future golden age based on a newly created folklore of the past that is envisioned by the leader. History becomes a lie, and the myth is a creative fiction become real in the hearts of the masses. Only the leader has the vision, and the rest of the population is only glad for the prophet to lead them out of the wilderness.

In the beginning, Fascism was anticapitalist and antisocialist. While destroying socialism by its strong hostility to equality, democracy, and all socialist ideology, it borrows from the people’s socialism in order to make the claim that it speaks to the masses. While being anticapitalist, fascism can never come to power without making peace with the very largesse of capitalists who not only support but also finance it in the quest for power.

Fascism makes an extremely patriotic use of platitudes, catch phrases, flags, symbols, songs, and strong emotions to rally crowds of people into the frenzy of a unifying mania of patriotism. Xenophobia and a passionate love of one’s “country” rally large groups of people against the treat of a common foe, that is, anyone or anything that is different. Because of a perceived need for national security, basic civil liberties and human rights are seen as a luxury that needs to be suspended for the greater need for security. The military, our protector, is given top priority in government funding until social programs must be cut to pay for the swollen military budgets. Life in the military is glorified, while human rights and peace activists are vilified. Sexism is commonplace. Opposition to abortion is a high priority, as is homophobia and antigay legislation. Religion is central to fascism. Government backing for the dominant religion receives support from many in the church hierarchies. The industrial and business upper crust support the government leaders, creating a mutually beneficial business-to-government relationship and strengthening the position of the power elite. In spite of a popular appeal, ordinary working people are treated like expendable resources. Workers in their labor unions are severely suppressed. There is encouragement of an open hostility to higher education. Intellectuals are dismissed as irrelevant. Professors who are competent are sometimes censored or fired for taking a political stand. Openness in the arts is blatantly harassed either in the public media or by the government, which refuses to fund the arts. Either the mass media are directly controlled or their range of opinions are limited through a control of funding.

Elite theory is based on the idea that a small, powerful ruling elite rules all societies. Politics is but the tool by which this elite maintains control. Leaders govern because the masses are too weak to rule themselves. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) claimed that the ruling elite was in fact an association of superior individuals having the will to power. Because of this, history is the “circulation of elites.” As one group of elites becomes weak, it is replaced by another group of elites in a violent revolution. Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) added that the superiority of the political elite was based on the fact that the elites have the virtues needed to rule. Often proponents of this theory looked on fascism as a necessary corrective force.

The conflicts among classes, ethnic groups, and classes within ethnic groups reflect larger social contradictions. The long-lasting results are the deployment of reciprocally contradictory explanations for social reality in capitalist societies. Sociology gives us the tools to study the complex interactions of a whole society within a global context. Anthropology adds a cross-cultural and historical component within which to better understand the relational connections among social interactions. But there is more than one kind of sociology, and social or cultural anthropology is often found in a separate department at a college or university. Competing groups use the sociological method in mutually antagonistic ways.

Critical historical sociology is the basis of scientific socialism. What is largely a cultural subconsciousness of competing groups within a larger society is exposed through historical sociology. This is why Marxism defines the rest of sociology as either a debate with the ghost of Marx or an attempt at trying to disprove or defend or reform Marxism.

Historical studies are embedded in a rigorous theory that can be used to examine the data. Radical social scientists use the critical methods in the demanding engagement of social activism. This is analyzed in the context of power relationships to determine the possibilities of collective vigorous action as a means of achieving radical political and economic change. By becoming aware of one’s social, cultural, political, and economic situation, the activists become aware of the real conditions. From this awareness, one can begin to see the possibilities in terms of strategies to strengthen one’s class or group’s position in society.

Intellectuals exist in all classes, and many, for personal reasons, transcend class lines by strongly identifying with another class. Because many intellectuals identify so closely with a class other than the one of their origin, they bring fresh insights into their adoptive class. Communication among intellectuals of antagonistic classes is easy. This allows for the intellectual in each of the major classes to develop counterarguments to any and all criticisms of the intellectuals’ theories. This creates a cross-fertilization of ideas. Intellectuals are strongly influenced by their opponents. Departmental divisions and specializations at the university only weaken this trend.

At one level, a group of intellectuals representing themselves as professionals structurally becomes its own class, both in and for itself. With the increasing specialization and growth of bureaucracy since the end of the 19th century, the modern nation-state saw the rise of a new class to challenge the capitalists for dominance. Not the industrial working class but the professional class is next in line to be the ruling class.

With increasing specialization, the expanding bureaus or departments are staffed with educated professionals. The importance of the expert means that democracy is continuously being undermined. Both capital and labor become increasingly dependent on the expert, and the professionals progressively take on more responsibility for all aspects of life. The overall working class is kept permanently disempowered. At the top levels of the major universities and research institutes, a small group of professionals form a power block that can be seen as a real threat to the most powerful capitalists. Because of the capitalists’ dependence on these intelligentsia, there is a monopoly of expert knowledge.

With experts in a class of their own, the two power blocks, capitalists versus professionals, begin to compete for dominance in the larger capitalist society. The prize is control over the economy and politics. A small elite versus a not-quite-as-small elite means the serious rivalry between capital and expertise, suggesting that the majority of the population is left out of the preponderance of decisions affecting their lives. Add to this a highly industrialized military, and the total domination of society by these twin oligarchies is complete. Most people, because of the quality of their education, are kept ignorant of the process that allows a small group of autocrats to dominate their lives.

The anxiety of the powerless is intensified because of their inability to gain any substantive insight into their lives. Personal shrewdness replaces political understanding. Because rebellion becomes undirected, the repressed assert themselves through irrational outbursts. Leaders of the nation count on this and manipulate the influence of management in order to control the population. Either crime for the individual or fascism for the many allows people to avoid the worst aspects of this perfidious class structure. Crime and fascism is preferred to revolution.

For the proletarian intellectual, the challenge is to gain an understanding of these social facts in order to direct social change by influencing people to take the actions that will strengthen their choices. If a proletarian mental laborer and cultural worker carefully examine the current social situation and its historical background, the iron cage can be unlocked. The essential major thinking is the hopeful knowledge of objective opportunity making it likely to coordinate tangible circumstances and capability. Since each of the competing factions within society use their own sociological theories and have a drastically different understanding and analysis of what is going on, it is important to understand that the opposing theories are of the social environment and must be carefully studied. The more complete the study, the more likely the activist will come up with a successful program.

If a psychological explanation fails to take into account changing goals, values, and beliefs that are socially defined, we will know nothing about how changing social and cultural circumstances mold the personality. Every judgment includes values of good and evil, beauty and unattractiveness, or just better or worse. All knowing or learning is a group project. Individual knowledge is born in this group process, and each person influences that process. This is what we study in our struggles with the opposition. Combined achievement of conflicting groups establishes daily habits while defining the struggle.

Different cultures have their own evolutionary trajectories. Individuals experience similar events differently, and the significance of events is viewed differently by different classes. Elites and the dispossessed live in different universes. Each segment within the larger group has unique standards and deciphers the ordinary contents and knowledge of daily life and life experiences differently. Unless an individual has a real break with the past, his or her experiences generally confirm what is already believed to be true. Only when the external world comes in direct conflict with established beliefs does conversion become likely.

While knowing is interpreted through the living experiences of a personal biography, it is set in a social and historical context. Social position and life situations influence the particular character of this world and the encounters of real people. Through the active creation of their technology, their material culture, and the process of survival, people reproduce and change their social relations, resulting in a particular way of thinking and responding to their environment.

Meaning is related to the general ideas that bring together a combination of culturally unique processes and purposes for a historically explicit episode. When a person fails to understand the long-term consequences of an immediate action, it can be viewed as an example of false consciousness. Because knowledge is set in a historical context, it is not relative because some statements are incorrect. Knowledge is dependent on historical and social relationships to be correct. However, values and goals of the observer are as important as the subject in any study. The interaction between theory and the social setting points to a relation between various elements in the social setting.

Science has grown with the advent of the university’s independence from the church. Science by the mid-19th century was closely allied with industry, finance capital, and the rising power of the nation-state. During the prior 200 years, science had to fight against the feudal theocratic monopoly of political domination over the rest of society. With the establishment of the liberal state, science as an intellectual movement became the new symbol of hope or official creed. The romantic-conservative reaction fought a pitched battle, retreating into idealistic reconsideration of a venerated fable of history. It established a historical tradition creating an antirational folklore of the way things should remain. However, socialists, both utopian and scientific, would steal science in support of a revolutionary transformation of society and its eventual management. This world-shattering overhaul and ultimate organization would develop but not replace science.

Science is a method of studying events and objects around us and produces a history of ideas developed using an evolving scientific method. What is chosen to be researched is entrenched in the history that the researcher is part of. These research priorities are in turn affected by and effect our living concepts of nature. The ever-changing result is that discoveries are embedded in political, social, and economic historical forces. Social science follows a similar path.

In point of fact, the economic base only sets the limits of what is possible, as the environmental and technological bases set the limits for the economy. The economy in turn is limited by the possibilities of the rest of the sociocultural environment. All parts of the social and cultural whole have a profound effect on each of the other parts of the historically changing whole. Science is no exception. The history of science is the investigation of associations. Now, although the arrow of causality goes both ways, it more often than not travels from existence to consciousness. This complicates social science research, making the break between science and philosophy less clear.

The philosophy of social science, like science itself, is set inside a moving history that reflects a set of values or reflects a point of view that is overloaded with cultural biases. Theory is necessary to understand anything, and theory reflects both ideologies and their underlying worldviews. These basic culturally derived assumptions saturate our scientific thinking. This in turn establishes what we consider to be facts. This becomes the foundation of our scientific theories, and an established theory sets up research priorities and delineates adequate scientific discoveries.

Historical sociologists such as Weber, Mannheim, and Merton (and their current counterparts) find a way of rooting the history of science in society without risking tenure or promotion in the academic world by believing that they are objective scholars. Theory and practice are forever separated in their cowardice. While attempting neutrality, these scholars studied in detail the historical and social context of the development of science while avoiding the moral context of scientific research. These brilliant intellectuals carried on excellent scholarship. They even studied the close relationship between technology, economic class, and a global economy within the evolution of science, but what is lacking is the ethical consequences of scientific research. Much has been done in the way of research into the class origins of scientists. The culture of scientific communities, patronage of individual research projects, commercial and political investments in grants to researchers, scientific accountability and to whom have been carried out in detail without asking the difficult question of ethical responsibility. The honors given to top scientists along with accolades, the ethos of laboratory analysis, and scientific lack of responsibility to the powerless, poor, and dispossessed is left unstudied.

Chronological storytelling would have us believe that scientific insight develops progressively in the path of a superior gathering of more and more factual knowledge. This myth is at the present time generally ridiculed as a history that is overly simple and highly subjective of a romanticized fantasy of fulfillment (Mannheim, 1936, p. 205). This fairy tale is founded on the illusion of a universal scientific method, similar to the economic fable of marginal utility. This literary fiction would have us believe a body of scientific knowledge is allegedly expanded by generalizing from the gathering of information from meticulous observations and experiments rather than to the articulation of universal laws presented as fact.

There are convincing points of view that there are many acceptable methods in any research. We need to subject all research to rigorous assessments because it is possible to chip away at the complete scheme of a single scientific method by arguing that human action cannot be comprehended as a simple process of following general rules applicable to any research project. It may be that working scientists are not constrained by any of the rules of method that are universally applicable.

The conflicting total worldview of an entire class in contemporary society is molded by the existential condition of history. This existential moment of choice is the focus of the external manifestation of a way of life. Each particular mind-set identifies itself as the psychology of an individual. What lies behind a personal set of beliefs is born out of that person’s social and historical location. Ultimately, the total social and cultural origin of the psychology lies in a changing historical setting.

All philosophy or science or religion is a social product that is created out of a very real living history shared differently by different groups. Each person is the product of a specific social environment. Because different classes experience life differently, they develop conflicting interests and opposing values. The oppressed want change that will end their oppression. The oppressed look to the future with their utopian dreams. The liberal looks to preserve the current social inequality by allowing only those reforms that will safeguard the status quo. The romantic looks longingly at the existing conditions of the past in the hope of reestablishing those golden days of yesteryear.

The predominant patterns that are socially arranged provide the raw resources for shared culture. Thinking, accepted wisdom, reasoning, imagining, judgment, conclusions, opinions, and beliefs can be radically transformed through ever-changing social conditions. However, the new patterns of thought are formed out of the obsolete and altered outlines of previous thought.

In every historical period, knowing is given birth from genuine existing phenomena. All elements of meaning in a given situation are interconnected causally and have reference to each part and to the whole. When a shared, collective set of circumstances changes, the arrangement of norms, customs, and values ceases to be in harmony with real life and a rupture arises with reference to traditional beliefs.

A crisis arises within the traditional philosophy of wisdom and its corresponding historical perspective. This forms a new reciprocal interrelated framework of thought. People themselves change as does basic human nature, both of which are culturally distinct. People are always adapting and regenerating through the awareness of a new body of knowledge and are consequently generating innovative factions. There are new compositions of groupings of intellectual categories, leading to changes in patterns of social stratification in the larger society and ever-changing debates between antagonistic segments of society and their differing views of that society.

Competing social theories are always being redefined and reinforced to offset potential criticism. The theories once articulated directly inform the participants of what needs to be done. Then, they act in ways that change the social environment and the corresponding political culture.

The statement of any scholar may be true or false, valid or invalid, but it is so only in the context of a specific social, cultural, and historical context. Because of continuously changing social environments, categorical forms of knowledge are always changing. What is right in any one period of time will be wrong in another. Validity is determined within the context in which categories themselves are changing. Consequently, theory must continuously be updated to be valid.

Bibliography:

Boas, F. (1963). The mind of primitive man. NewYork: Macmillan.
Ehrenreich, J., & Ehrenreich, B. (1979). The professionalmanagerial class. In P.Walker (Ed.), Between labor and capital (pp. 213–278). Boston: South End Press.
Engels, F. (1975). The origin of the family, private property and the state. New York: International.
Engels, F. (1976). Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s revolution in science. New York: International.
Francisconi, M. J. (1998). Kinship, capitalism, change: The informal economy of the Navajo, 1868–1995. NewYork: Garland.
Harris, M. (1968). The rise of anthropological theory: A history of theories of culture. New York: Crowell.
Harris, M. (1974). Cows, pigs, wars and witches: The riddles of culture. New York: Vintage Books.
Harris, M. (1977). Cannibals and kings: The origins of cultures. New York: Vintage Books.
Harris, M. (1980). Cultural materialism: The struggle for a science of culture. New York: Vintage Books.
Harris, M. (1998). Theories of culture in postmodern times. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Lenin, V. I. (1970). Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press.
Lewellen, T. C. (1983). Political anthropology. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
Lukacs, G. (1971). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Luxemburg, R. (1951). The accumulation of capital. New York: Monthly Review.
Luxemburg, R. (1977). The industrial development of Poland. New York: Campaigner.
Malinowski, B. (1961). A scientific theory of culture and other essays. London: Oxford University Press.
Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German ideology. NewYork: International.
Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation: The political economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1965). Structure and function in primitive society. New York: Free Press.
Rose, H., & Rose, S. (Eds.). (1976). The radicalisation of science. London: Macmillan Press.
Steward, J. H. (1955). Theory of culture change: The methodology of multilinear evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Szymanski, A. (1978). The capitalist state and the politics of class. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.
Trotsky, L. (1993). Fascism: What it is and how to fight it. NewYork: Pathfinder Press.
Zeitlin, I. M. (1990). Ideology and the development of social theory (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Examples of Research in History Courses

In addition to the research course offerings in History, many instructors include research papers or optional research papers in their courses. Following is a sample of such assignments. For more information, be sure to check the UHO Course Listings booklet (available on the main undergraduate page and in hard copy in Dulles 106) every semester.

398=2800; 523=3641; 530.03=3460; 530.04=3465; 542.01=3351; 546=3410; 557.01=3011; 566=3016; 568.01=3070; 598=4000-level Research Seminars.

Research Seminars

History 2800 introduction to historical thought.

Reconstruction of life in a particular place and time using newspapers as sources

History 3641 Women in the Western World (Prof. Robertson, Columbus campus)

Were Roman women liberated?
How did gender affect women's contributions to cultural life during the Renaissance?
Why were women still the ones mostly persecuted as witches during the 17th century?

History 3460 European Jewish History (Prof. Judd, Columbus campus)

Topics on 19th and 20th century Jewish life.

History 3465 American Jewish Experience (Prof. Judd, Columbus campus)

Oral histories of Jewish people in the Columbus community.

History 3351 Intellectual and Social Movements in the Muslim World (Prof. Prior, Columbus Campus)

Role of the Arab Conquest in the Spread of Islam Throughout Central Asia
Sufism: Philosophical Islam
Islamic Resurgence in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union
Radical and Political Islam in Central Asia

History 3410 Topics in Chinese History

Analysis of a literary work focused on Shanghai in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Various topics on Chinese business history in the Late Imperial and Republican Periods.

History 3011 American Revolution (Prof. Newell, Columbus campus)

Using newspapers, research social, political, and economic life in two towns or two regions; analyze responses to epidemic diseases, debates over the ratification of the Constitution, life of soldiers in the Continental Army.

History 3016 U.S. Since 1963 (Prof. Lerner, Newark and Columbus campuses):

Community Action Programs and the Great Society
Jazz and the African-American Community
Daniel Ellsberg and the Vietnam War
Origins of the Black Panther Party

History 3070 Native American History from European Contact to Removal (Prof. Newell, Columbus campus)

Research assignments include using Native American newspapers and/or oral history.

Recent research topics in 400-level Research Seminars include

American Material Culture (Prof. Newell) 19th c. Women's Fashions; the Deaf School; Vaudeville and Circus designers.

History and Hollywood (Prof. Childs) Compare two historical films on the basis of their historical accuracy and historical authenticity.

American Legal History (Prof. Stebenne) Research Senate confirmation hearings on nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

COMMENTS

Historical Research
Archival research is often conducted in libraries, archives, and museums. Oral history: This involves conducting interviews with individuals who have lived through a particular historical period or event. Oral history can provide a unique perspective on past events and can help to fill gaps in the historical record.
Historical Research
Historical research is a research methodology that allows people to study past events that have molded the present. This investigation involves systematically retaking the pieces of information from one or more data sources which can let you, as a researcher or a detective, create a theory of how a phenomenon happened to be in its present ...
A Step by Step Guide to Doing Historical Research
This step-by-step guide progresses from an introduction to historical resources to information about how to identify a topic, craft a thesis and develop a research paper. Table of contents: The Range and Richness of Historical Sources. Secondary Sources. Primary Sources.
Historical
Strengths. Can provide a fuller picture of the scope of the research as it covers a wider range of sources. As an example, documents such as diaries, oral histories and official records and newspaper reports were used to identify a scurvy and smallpox epidemic among Klondike gold rushers (Highet p3). Unobtrusiveness of this research method.
Introduction to Historical Research : Home
Overview. This guide is an introduction to selected resources available for historical research. It covers both primary sources (such as diaries, letters, newspaper articles, photographs, government documents and first-hand accounts) and secondary materials (such as books and articles written by historians and devoted to the analysis and ...
Open and Free Access Materials for Research
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world's leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to over three-hundred thousand quality historical resources in medicine. Medicine in the Americas, 1610-1920: a digital library.
PDF What is Historical Research?
What is Historical Research? Stephen Petrina May 2020 History— Few methods reduce to cliché as readily as history: ... p. 69). If conceptual history is a study of "conceptual change," then perceptual history is a study of "perceptual change" or how and why phenomena are encountered, entangled, and experienced differently (Taylor ...
Introduction to Historical Research : Primary Sources
They often reflect the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer. Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period and can serve as evidence in making an historical argument. Examples include: Artifacts. Audio recordings (e.g. radio programs) Diaries
Sample Papers
Guide to writing research papers for the History Department at Le Moyne College
PDF Historical Research in Social Work
Abstract. Historical research which is applied in social work is one of the methods to describe how and where social work started, how it developed during time and where it stands today. Results of historical studies can form blueprints for contemporary social services programs or models for community developments.
(PDF) Types of Historical Research -An Overview
The study of history has both a practical and educational value. It help us to develop an active enquiring mind, promotes the use of critical skills in the handling and evaluation of various types ...
Historical Research
We conduct historical research for a number of reasons: - to avoid the mistakes of the past. - to apply lessons from the past to current problems. - to use the past to make predictions about the present and future. - to understand present practices and policies in light of the past. - to examine trends across time.
Library Research Guide for History
This page serves as an index to the Library Research Guide for History and other research guides. It lists major general tool types and kinds of primary sources, giving links to major resources, links to further information in the guide and to sample HOLLIS searches. Four tactics for finding primary sources. They are best used together.
PDF Formulating a Research Question
Formulating a Research Question. Every research project starts with a question. Your question will allow you to select, evaluate and interpret your sources systematically. The question you start with isn't set in stone, but will almost certainly be revisited and revised as you read. Every discipline allows for certain kinds of questions to be ...
PDF Methods of Analysis Historical Case Study
data from participants giving "first-hand accounts." Strangely, the Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, the volume that includes this entry, excludes historical case study as an entry (Mills, Durepos & Wiebe, 2010). With just a few exceptions, so taken for granted is historical case study that most contemporary
PDF They Said "Yes!": The Research Proposal
The Research Proposal. They Said "Yes!": The Research ProposalA research proposal, also known as a research prospectus, describes a project's. intended course and its intellectual merit. In the process, you are expected to explain its historiographica. context and how you intend to complete it. A well-written proposal should demonstrat.
(Pdf) Historical Research Design
Abstract. The steps in historical research design include gathering data from primary and secondary sources, formulating an idea (hypothesis), analyzing source material, analyzing data to reject ...
PDF Guidelines for Historical Research and Writing
In A Short Guide to Writing About History Richard Marius outlines fourteen steps that every student should follow in writing a historical research paper. 1. Identify your audience. All writing assignments are intended to be read, and the intended audience should always determine what is written. History is no different. An entry on Napoleon in
Historical Research
Step 2- Collect the Data. It is essential to collect data and facts about the research question to get reliable outcomes. You need to select an appropriate instrument for data collection. Historical research includes two sources of data collection, such as primary and secondary sources.
Chapter 16. Archival and Historical Research
Chapter 16. Archival and Historical Research Introduction. The British sociologist John Goldthorpe once remarked, "Any sociologist who is concerned with a theory that can be tested in the present should so test it, in the first place; for it is, in all probability, in this way that it can be tested most rigorously" ().Testing can be done through either qualitative or quantitative methods ...
History Research Paper
This sample history research paper features: 5800 words (approx. 19 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 25 sources. Browse other research paper examples ... Historical studies are embedded in a rigorous theory that can be used to examine the data. Radical social scientists use the critical methods in the demanding engagement of social ...
Home
Historical research involves the following steps: Identify an idea, topic or research question. Conduct a background literature review. Refine the research idea and questions. Determine that historical methods will be the method used. Identify and locate primary and secondary data sources. Evaluate the authenticity and accuracy of source materials.
Historical Research
The new virtual issue from Historical Research shines a light on some of the classic articles from the journal's recent archive. It features some of the most read and most cited articles from the journal's archives and covers a wide range of topics of perennial interest to both historians and to a wider readership. Browse the virtual issue.
Examples of Research in History Courses
In addition to the research course offerings in History, many instructors include research papers or optional research papers in their courses. Following is a sample of such assignments. For more information, be sure to check the UHO Course Listings booklet (available on the main undergraduate page and in hard copy in Dulles 106) every semester.398=2800; 523=3641; 530.03=3460; 530.04=3465; 542 ...
140 Good Research Topics for History Papers
25 Good Research Paper Topics for History: 1950-1970. General Eisenhower: Critical Actions of His Presidency. Stalin's Death and its Effect on the Political Landscape. The Team that Conquered Mt. Everest for the First Time. The Conditions of the Military Aid Pact between China and Pakistan.
Historical Design in Research
An example of historical research design is the study of primary and secondary sources, such as historical documents and archives (diplomatics) in researching an event from the past.

Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Historical Research

Types of Historical Research

Descriptive Research

Analytical Research

Comparative Research

Interpretive Research

Quantitative Research

Qualitative Research

Data Collection Methods

Data Analysis Methods

Historical Research Methodology

Applications of Historical Research

Examples of Historical Research

Purpose of Historical Research

When to use Historical Research

Characteristics of Historical Research

Advantages of Historical Research

Limitations of Historical Research

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

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Historical Research

What Is Historical Research?

Strong Historical Research Design

1. Data Collection

2. Data Criticism

3. Data Presentation

10+ Historical Research Examples

1. Biography of Historical Research Example

2. Historical Research in Library Example

3. Historical Reserch Agenda Example

4. Sample Historical Research Example

5. Historical Research Information Systems Research Example

6. Historical Research in Social Work Example

7. Stndard Historical Research Example

8. Legal History and Historical Research Example

9. Methods and Principles of Historical Research Example

10. Historical Research in Communication Example

11. Historical Research in Education Example

Best Practices in Conducting Historical Research

1. Narrow Down the Direction of Your Project

2. Be Mindful of Your Sources

3. Balance your Searches

4. Dig Deeper

Qualitative study design: Historical

Limitations

Example questions

Example studies

Library & Digital

Online Resources

Introduction

About this Guide

Things to think about when using online sources

Further Reading

Other School of Advanced Study and Senate House Library Guides

Secondary Works

Books, Journals and Institutional Repositories

Theses Databases and Online Repositories

Catalogues, Bibliographies and Guides

Thematic Guides

Online Book Collections

Digitised Printed Books

Hebraic and Yiddish

Digital Collections

Research Libraries and Other Organisations

Late Antiquity

Primary Texts

Epigraphy and Numismatics

Dictionaries, Biographical and Reference Works

Library, Archive and Museum Collections

Documentary Sources

Other Sources

Resources for Byzantine History

Early Modern