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Primary Sources on British & European History
- Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (ca. 800s-ca. 1400s)A searchable database of illuminated manuscripts from Britain. An excellent resource for Medieval history. As of Sept. 2024, may be temporarily unavailable.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) (1475-1700)Resource providing access to some of the oldest published materials available in Europe. Topics such as theater, English culture, literature, and religion may find useful sources here.
- European Views of the Americas (1493-1750)Free database of citations to European books and other works related to the Americas. Due to the age of sources found in this database, it is especially useful for topics further removed from contemporary times.
- Medieval Family Life (1400-1500)Primary source material for medieval England drawn from the collections of five notable families: Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor and Armburgh.
- Victorian Britain (1760-1919)Collection containing articles, pamphlets, posters, newspapers, illustrations, and much more illustrating the conditions of life in Victorian Britain. Click "collection items" in order to browse sources, or search by keyword.
- London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform, and the Victorian Underworld (1700s-1900s)Contains color digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 19th and early 20th century London. Also includes secondary sources such as maps and essays.
- Victorian Popular Culture (1800-1930s)Resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain and the U.S. Sources in this database cover the topics of spiritualism, circuses, theater, cinema, music, and sideshows.
- Popular Culture in Britain & America, 1950-1975: Rock and Roll Counterculture, Peace, and Protest (1950-1975)Explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975 in Britain and the U.S. Full-text of documents, images, and video.
- World's Fairs (1851-Present)Full-text of primary source material from hundreds of fairs, including London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, American fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries and 21st century EXPOs.
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
Digitized UK newspaper collection covering the period 1672-1737. The collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into seventeenth and eighteenth century England.
- British Library Newspapers
Full-text collection of both national and regional British newspapers. Digitized with full article images.
Coverage from 1732 to 1950.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online
A fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects published during the 18th Century in the United Kingdom with digitized images.
- Eighteenth Century Journals
British newspapers and periodicals, published from 1685-1820, from several US and British Libraries.