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HIS 103: World History to 1500 (Fall 2020): Primary Sources (Online)

Primary Sources (Online)

  • British Museum
    The Museum’s collection online offers everyone unparalleled access to objects in the collection. This innovative database is one of the earliest and most extensive online museum search platforms in the world. There are currently 2,335,338 records available, which represent more than 4,000,000 objects. 1,018,471 records have one or more images.
     
  • Euro Docs: History of Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Primary Documents
    Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. In addition you will find video or sound files, maps, photographs or other imagery, databases, and other documentation. The sources cover a broad range of historical happenings (political, economic, social and cultural). The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.
     
  • Internet History Sourcebooks Project
    A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. Primary sources are available here primarily for use in high-school and university/college courses. From the outset the site took a very broad view of the sources that should be available to students and as well as documents long associated with a "western civilization" approach to history also provides much information on Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish, Indian, East Asian, and African history. You will also find many documents especially relevant to women's history and LGBT studies.
     
  • Early English Books Online
    Contains digital facsimile images of nearly 100,000 books in English printed between 1473 and 1700 - virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, plus works in English printed elsewhere. Texts range from the first book printed in English by William Caxton through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the English Civil War. Included are works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell; novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources.
     
  • The Library of Original Sources edited by Oliver J. Thatcher.
    From the preface: "It is the purpose of this work to present the ideas that have influenced civilization in the words of the men or the documents that developed them."  The books (10 volumes) are located on the library's 3rd floor under call number AC1 .T4.  (Furthermore, all volumes are available as PDF files at the Internet Archive.  Below are links to volumes pertinent for this class.)
  • ARTstor
    ARTstor Digital Library provides over 1.5 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, with a suite of software tools for teaching and research. Includes material from international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.
     
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls
    The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) is very proud to present the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, a free online digitized virtual library of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hundreds of manuscripts made up of thousands of fragments – discovered from 1947 and until the early 1960’s in the Judean Desert along the western shore of the Dead Sea – are now available to the public online. The high resolution images are extremely detailed and can be accessed through various search options on the site.

Librarian

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Jeff Jenson
Contact:
You can find me in the College and Lutheran Church Archives, the offices above the library's main entrance.
Website
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License