Awesome Digital History

Find primary sources online and learn how to research history digitally.

Finding aids for textual and multimedia primary sources with a focus on the western hemisphere and the 19th and 20th centuries. Courses and learning tools to explore history digitally.

Contents

• Archives and primary sources
  • Austria
  • Europe
  • France
  • Germany
  • Global
  • Great Britain
  • Netherlands
  • North America
  • Switzerland
• Learning
• More Awesome
• Contribute

Archives and primary sources

Austria

• ANNO - Austrian Newspapers online.
• Digitarium - Digital edition of the historical Wiener Zeitung.
• Österreichische Mediathek - The Austrian archive for sound recordings and videos from cultural and contemporary history.
• Wien Geschichte Wiki - It is based on the Historical Dictionary Vienna by Felix Czeike, currently there are 50,156 contributions and 12,510 images.

Europe

• Archives Portal Europe - European archives search engine.
• CENDARI - Search engine for libraries containing resources on the Medieval era and World War One.
• Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique - European History through renewed historiographic objects and major contemporary challenges.
• Europeana - Search engine for European textual and non-textual archival sources.
• Mapire - Interactive historical maps.
• Monasterium - Deeds from all over Europe.
• Project Gutenberg - A library of over 60,000 free eBooks.
• Visual Archive Southeastern Europe - Historical and contemporary visual materials from Southeastern Europe.

France

• Gallica - Digital library of the National Library of France.
• Institut national de l’audiovisuel - INA is a repository of French radio and television audiovisual archives.

Germany

• Archivportal - German archives search engine.
• Bavarikon - Collection of Bavarian maps, places, newspapers etc.
• Computerarchiv Muenchen - South German Muesum for History of Digital Development.
• Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek - Over 12 million objects.
• Digitale Sammlungen - Collections of the Munich Digitization Center.
• Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv - An interactive portal on the history of women’s movements in Germany.
• Docupedia - Terms, methods, and debates in contemporary history research.
• leo bw - Platform of the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg.
• LexM - Encyclopedia of musicians persecuted during the Nazi era.
• MARCHIVUM - Collection of Mannheim newspapers and historical printed matter on the history of Mannheim.
• PICTURA paedagogica - Digital image archive on the history of education with 131’155 objects.
• Projekt Gutenberg - Contains 10’000 works by over 2’000 authors in German.
• SLUB Dresden - Over 1.8 million graphic media (photographs, maps, drawings).
• Spiegel Online - SPIEGEL archive since 1947.
• UB Heidelberg - Manuscripts, documents, maps and literature.
• Uni Frankfurt - Rare prints, manuscripts, bequests and more.
• Zefys - Historical German newspapers.
• ZLB - Collections of the Berlin Central and State Library.

Global

• Bitsavers.org - Computer code, reference manuals, and magazines.
• British Library - Maps, manuscripts and sounds.
• Classic Computer Magazine Archive - Preserving information from early personal computer magazines.
• fxtop.com - Forex rate history since 1953.
• gotpapers.scene.org - Resources on the history of games, cracking, and the demoscene.
• Internet Archive - Non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog - Book search engine for finding hundreds of millions of media in catalogs worldwide.
• Marxist Internet Archive - Everything you ever wanted to know about Marx (and other important socialists).
• Mementoweb - Find archived web pages in Internet Archive, Archive-It, British Library, archive.today, and GitHub.
• OldMapsOnline - Maps, starting in the 17th century.
• OpenCat - Search engine for libraries around the globe.
• OpenHistoricalMap - A time travel map created by a community of mappers and historians.
• Public Books Database - Open access academic literature.
• WayBackMachine - Explore more than 486 billion web pages saved over time.
• World Historical Gazeteer - Collection of content and services that permit world historians to do spatial and temporal reasoning and visualization in a data rich environment at global and trans-regional scales.

Great Britain

• The Proceedings of the Old Bailey - London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913.
• NLS - Data collections from the National Library of Scotland.

Netherlands

• Delpher - More than 100 million pages from Dutch newspapers, books and magazines.

North America

• Ad*Access - Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
• Chronicling America - America’s historic newspapers from 1777-1963.
• Computer Gaming World Museum - Archive of various magazines on gaming.
• David Rumsey Map Collection - Over 94,000 maps and related images.
• Digital Public Library of America - Discovery tool, or union catalog, for public domain and openly licensed content held by the United States’ archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.
• Digital Transgender Archive - An International LGBTQ+ Linked Data Vocabulary.
• Eugenics Archive - Scholars, survivors, students, and community partners in challenging eugenics.
• Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection - More than 250,000 maps.
• Women Working 1800-1930 - An exploration of women’s impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression.
• World Digital Library - WDL is an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress.

Switzerland

• Amtsdruckschriften - Federal Gazette, Administrative Case Law of the Federal Authorities and more documents from the Swiss Federal Archives.
• Année Politique Suisse - Sources on developments in Swiss politics and society.
• Archives Online - Archival search engine for Switzerland.
• chgov - Minutes of the Federal Council (1848-1963).
• arCHeco - Index of economic collections in archives of Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
• COSMOV - COSMOV includes a digital edition of the events of the Zurich summer of 1968.
• DigiBern - Bernese culture and history on the Internet.
• Digithek - A collection of digital finding aids for secondary and vocational schools.
• Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland - Diplomatic documents of Switzerland.
• e-codices - Virtual manuscript library of Switzerland containing 2297 manuscripts from 92 different collections.
• e-gs - Online web portal of the ETH Zurich Graphics Collection.
• e-manuscripta - Manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives.
• e-newspaperarchives.ch - Swiss newspapers.
• E-Periodica - Swiss journals.
• e-rara - The platform for digitised rare books from Swiss libraries.
• histHub - Search engine for all major standardized data APIs.
• Historical Encyclopedia of Switzerland - Encyclopedia on Swiss history.
• HSSO - Historical statistics of Switzerland online.
• impresso - Historical newspaper collections of the Swiss National Library, the National Library of Luxembourg, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Temps, the Valais State Archives and the Swiss Economic Archives.
• Industriekultur - Swiss national inventory of industry artifacts.
• infoclio.ch Edition projects - A database containing current historical edition projects in Switzerland.
• Kartenportal - Search engine for maps.
• Le Temps - Archive of Gazette de Lausanne et du Journal de Genève.
• map.geo.admin.ch - Journey through time via maps of Switzerland.
• MEMOBASE - Provides access to 415’634 audiovisual documents from 67 Swiss memory institutions.
• Schweizerisches Wirtschaftsarchiv - This collection comprises over 500 business archives from the period 1750 to the present day, with a focus on the Basel region.
• swisscollections - Meta search engine for historical and modern collections in Swiss libraries and archives.
• timeSTAT Cubes - The Federal Council reports to parliament on income and expenditure for the past years.

Learning

• AdFontes - An Introduction to Working with Sources in the Archive.
• Clio Guide - A handbook on digital resources for the historical sciences.
• Digital History Guide - Introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.
• Geospatial Historian - Open HGIS Lessons and Resources.
• HIST3814o - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Shawn Graham at Carleton University.
• HIST 7370 - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Cameron Blevins at Northeastern University.
• History Toolkit - You will learn how to critically analyse historical conditions, developments, patterns and ruptures – or, alternatively, how to call these into question.
• Local Linkages - How to frame questions about the past, identify sources to answer those questions, place them in context, and present that historical interpretation online in a digital form.
• The CTP Book - A book for teaching Computational Thinking and Programming skills to people with a background in the Humanities.
• The Programming Historian - Novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.
• UCI Digital History - Overview on the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.
• We think History - News about and innovations from digital history.

More Awesome

• Computer History - An Awesome List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore.
• Data Visualization
• DHTools - Tools, resources, and services supporting the Digital Humanities.
• Research Tools
• Scientific Writing
• Tempopedia - Digital History Directory.

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the CONTRIBUTING.md first.