Subject Guides: European Studies: Primary Sources

Primary Sources Online

Full-Text Primary European Historical Sources Online

AM Explorer This link opens in a new window Search millions of pages of primary sources spanning the 15th – 21st centuries.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (ASP) This link opens in a new window A Historical Primary Source database. This database includes diaries and letters from British and Irish women. All types of women's diaries are included. Features the writings of famous as well as "ordinary" women of the time period. Covers 300 years of personal writings.
Cold War Intelligence Online (Brill) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains over 125,000 titles published between 1475-1700. Combining the listings of the major short-title catalogs, EEBO includes publications in all subjects: literature, religion, government, medicine, science, and music. EEBO provides the facsimile of each work, so researchers can study these publications as they appeared: books printed by William Caxton, the earliest editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Book of Common Prayer (1549), The King James Bible (1611), Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), and works by Erasmus, Sir Isaac Newton, Bacon, Sir Thomas More, Galileo, as well as acts of Parliament, government documents on the early slave trade, and musical exercises by Henry Purcell.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) - Texts This link opens in a new window 2,400 searchable and readable editions of EEBO documents that link immediately to the corresponding image files.

Eisenhower Communiques From BYU Digital Collections: WWII Daily Battle Communiques searchable by personal and city names
EuroDocs
Includes Medieval primary historical documents in facsimile, transcription, or translation.

First World War: Personal Experiences This link opens in a new window This digital resource brings to life the reality of the First World War for the men and women who experienced it firsthand. Containing digital images of a wide range of original documents, including diaries, letters, personal narratives, trench journals, scrapbooks, objects, and a wealth of visual sources, this resource provides a rich seam of information on personal experiences of war. From Adam Matthew Digital.
First World War: Visual Perspectives and Narratives This link opens in a new window This collection from Adam Matthew showcases an array of primary source material sourced from the Imperial War Museum in London. Main themes include the role of women during the war, the Home Front and international perspectives conveyed through a rich selection of visual and documentary material.

French Political Pamphlets

Holocaust Collection This link opens in a new window From primary documents of the National Archives and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum...

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
Thousands of sources indexed by country, by time period, and by topic. From Fordham University.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook Internet Modern History Sourcebook is one of series of history primary sourcebooks. It is intended to serve the needs of teachers and students in college survey courses in modern European history and American history, as well as in modern Western Civilization and World Cultures. Although this part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project began as a way to access texts that were already available on the Internet, it now contains hundreds of texts made available locally.

The Making of the Modern World (Gale) This link opens in a new window Understand the development of the modern, western world through the lens of wealth, commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport.
Olms Online This link opens in a new window Es handelt sich um Nachdrucke, die von Herausgebern mit Vor-, Nach- oder Geleitworten, Registern oder Indizes versehen wurden. Hier finden Sie etwa 400 Bande mit den Schwerpunkten Philosophie und Germanistik. Die Buchhandelskataloge, auch als Messkataloge bezeichnet, bieten einen einzigartigen Uberblick uber die deutsche und auch europaische Buchproduktion von fast 300 Jahren (1594-1860).
Oral History Online (ASP) This link opens in a new window Oral History Online provides in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections of Oral Histories in English from around the world. The collection also provides keyword searching of more than 329,400 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to over 4,200 audio and video files and almost 19,000 bibliographic records.
Shoah Visual History Archive This link opens in a new window USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA) contains more than 55,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide, crimes against humanity, and related persecution, including the Holocaust. The largest archive of its kind, history is preserved as told by the people who lived it, with each testimony offering unique insight and knowledge rarely available in traditional content.
Testaments to the Holocaust (Gale) This link opens in a new window Electronic holdings of the Wiener Library in London, England. These holdings also include publications of the Wiener Library. The collection includes Nazi propaganda materials; Hitler Youth materials; pamphlets, books; and a rare encyclopedia of anti-Semitism. The core of the collection is 1,200 eyewitness accounts dealing with the pogrom of 1938 through the scope of the Holocaust. Also included are photographic materials.

World War I Document Archive
World War I document archive of primary documents from World War I has been assembled by volunteers of the World War I Military History List (WWI-L). The archive is international in focus and intends to present in one location primary documents concerning the Great War.

U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995 (Brill) This link opens in a new window

Literary Sources & Concordances

Online Literary Works

ABU: la Bibliothèque Universelle ABU is a corpus of literature, mainly French, searchable by author, text, or words.

ARTFL This link opens in a new window Alternate title: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). A French Studies database. A collaborative project from the University of Chicago and other publishers this database provides a wide range of resources. Sources include French texts, articles, encyclopedias, images and dictionaries. Many of the resources are full-text. Coverage includes many classical texts ranging from the 12th to the 20th century.

Austrian Literature Online Alternate title: ALO. Over 15,000 literary facsimiles of Austrian authors from Austrian libraries ranging from women's literature to Tyrolian Latin texts to cookbooks, from postcards to novels to manuscripts.

Corvey Collection of European Literature (Gale) This link opens in a new window Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO): European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry and more with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.

Ebooks libres et gratuits Free public domain e-books from French literature and other realms. Do check any "note sur le droit d'auteur" for copyright status, since it varies from country to country. Click on "Ebooks" for a search or browse menu.
Italian Women Writers Project The University of Chicago has organized this full-text collection of critical editions for Italian women writers through the ages. Multiple search and browse options.

Olms Online This link opens in a new window Es handelt sich um Nachdrucke, die von Herausgebern mit Vor-, Nach- oder Geleitworten, Registern oder Indizes versehen wurden. Hier finden Sie etwa 400 Bande mit den Schwerpunkten Philosophie und Germanistik. Die Buchhandelskataloge, auch als Messkataloge bezeichnet, bieten einen einzigartigen Uberblick uber die deutsche und auch europaische Buchproduktion von fast 300 Jahren (1594-1860).

Project Runeberg Over 300 works of Nordic literature on the Internet. These include vernacular texts in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Swedish, with the preponderance in Swedish.

Sophie: A Digital Library of Early German Women's Writing This link opens in a new window Online texts in German, some English translations, bibliographies, music, images. This is a site you shouldn't miss if your interest is in German women's literature through 1923. Webmistress is Dr. Michelle Stott James of the BYU German Department.

Concordances, Literary Editions and Corpora

Concordance to Eddic Poetry

PT 7235 .K45 1988

Corpus de la litterature medievale This link opens in a new window La base de textes du Corpus de la litterature medievale est une base litteraire de plus de 800 oeuvres en langue d'oil des origines a la fin du XVe siecle, geree par le logiciel BABEL dedie aux analyses de contenu. Le Corpus de la litterature medievale se caracterise par sa coherence editoriale et ses possibilites d'acces au texte original jumelees aux fonctions de recherche.

Corpus of francophone literature from black Africa This link opens in a new window Corpus of francophone literature from black Africa contains 11,000 texts of Francophone Literature from Africa.
Goethes Werke This link opens in a new window Goethes Werke im World Wide Web comprises the complete works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), including his literary works (prose, poetry, drama), writings in natural science, diaries, letters to and from Goethe and the Conversations (Gesprache). This is the complete full-text searchable edition of the Weimarer Ausgabe (or: Sophien-Ausgabe) in 143 volumes, including notes, variants and apparatus. This electronic edition contains, in addition, conversations and letters that were transcribed and published after completion of the Weimarer Ausgabe.
Schillers Werke This link opens in a new window Schillers Werke im World Wide Web comprises the complete works of Friedrich von Schiller (1759 - 1805), including his poetry and plays, the translations, minor prose works, historical and philosophical writings, letters to and from Schiller and the Conversations (Gesprache). This is the complete full-text searchable edition of the Nationalausgabe in 56 volumes, including notes, variants and apparatus.

Vocabolario della poesia italiana del Novecento

PQ 4113 .S24 1995

Primary Source Search

You can locate records for primary sources within the HBLL catalogue by using the specific keyword "sources" within the "subject" field.

By combining that word with other relevant terms elsewhere, e.g., "French Revolution" you can can find relevant primary sources lurking in the Harold B. Lee Library.

These may include diaries, manuscripts, transcriptions, translations and other items considered to be primary sources.

Local Projects

EuroDocs:Online Sources for European History and the related World War I Document Archive are two local projects designed to help you locate online primary sources on European history and on the Great War, respectively.

They provide transcriptions, facsimiles and translations of documents, along with occasional streaming video or audio.