Guides: History: History of Europe

Resources for the History of Europe

Books on the History of Europe will be located on the 6th Floor of the University Library:

History of the British Isles (including Ireland): Subclass DA (6th Floor)
History of Central Europe: Subclass DAW (6th Floor)
History of Austria, Liechtenstein, Hungary, Czechia & Slovakia: Subclass DB (6th Floor)
History of France, Andorra & Monaco: Subclass DC (6th Floor)
History of Germany: Subclass DD (6th Floor)
History of Greece: Subclass DF (6th Floor)
History of Italy & Malta: Subclass DG (6th Floor)
History of the Low Countries: Subclass DH (6th Floor)
History of the Netherlands: Subclass DJ (6th Floor)
History of Eastern Europe: Subclass DJK (6th Floor)
History of Poland, Russia & the Former Soviet Republics: Subclass DK (6th Floor)
History of Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland): Subclass DL (6th Floor)
History of Spain & Portugal: Subclass DP (6th Floor)
History of Switzerland: Subclass DQ (6th Floor)
History of the Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo): Subclass DR (6th Floor)

Floormap of the University Library's 6th Floor

Ebook Central
ProQuest Ebook Central (formerly ebrary and EBL) is a multidisciplinary collection of ebooks from numerous academic publishers. Visit the help page. NOTE: Titles can be dropped by the publisher without prior notice.
EBSCO eBooks
This collection includes over 8,000 ebooks covering a range of academic topics. Watch a how-to video.
Gale Ebooks
The GVRL collection includes encyclopedias and other reference works supporting a wide range of academic disciplines.
Humanities Ebook (ACLS)
The Humanities Ebook collection includes nearly 4000 ebooks. Subject focus is the humanities disciplines and area studies.

Global Newsstream (US & International Newspapers)
Full text access to hundreds of U.S. and international newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, and Wall Street Journal.
Times (London) Digital Archive (1785-2014)
Complete digital edition of The Times (London) newspaper. Use keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of a specific article or a complete page. To search full-text, change drop-down box from keyword to "text." The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. Funded by the History Department.
New York Times Historical (1851-2020)
The New York Times (1851-2020) offers full page and article images with searchable full text.
Economist Historical Archive (1843-2020)
The Economist Historical Archive offers an invaluable perspective on the great events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is an essential accompaniment to The Times Digital Archive. It contains editorials, news, commentary, letters, country reports, industry reports, surveys, and advertising that afford insight into British, European, American, and world affairs.
International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887-2013
The International Herald Tribune is an online, fully searchable collection of the full run of this internationally focused daily paper from its first issue through to 2013. It is one of the most innovative and original newspapers, famous for its objective and clear coverage. Bringing an international perspective, it provides a valuable counterpoint to the Anglo-American press, adding a new dimension to research.
Archives Unbound
Content includes primary sources regarding African American studies; American Indian studies; Asian studies; British history; Holocaust studies; LGBT studies; Latin American and Caribbean studies; Middle East studies; political science; religious studies; and women’s studies.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Materials are diverse, including not only books and broadsides but also Bibles, tract books, sermons, and printed printed ephemera by many well-known and lesser-known authors. Captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain, and is essential in order to understand the context of the French, Industrial, and American Revolutions. Contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable.
Women's Studies Archive, Part I: Women's Issues and Identities
This primary source collection contains manuscripts, ephemera, documents, newspapers, journals, and literature related to women's movements, feminist theory and activism, the social, political, and professional achievements of women, women's education, women's health and mental health, and other gender issues throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The archives cover multiple geographic regions and multilingual content.

Digital Libraries of Europe
This list (produced by New York University) notes the various national libraries in Europe and their online presence.
European History Primary Sources
This is a gateway to other databases about European history.
Europeana
This is really useful as a compendium of visual materials from Europe (great for images and also some texts). It’s a collection of art, artifacts, books, films and music from European museums, libraries and archives.

Court Rolls of Ramsey, Hepmangrove and Bury 1268-1600
This database at the University of Michigan explores the lives of ordinary people and the institutions of a rural community in the East Midlands of medieval England from the end of the 13th century until the beginning of the 17th century.
Perseus Collection: Renaissance Materials
This collection focuses on early 16th and 17th century works by a variety of authors (including several commentaries on Ireland).
Hansard
This site contains over 200 years of parliamentary debates from the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
UK Legislation 1267 to the Present
The original (as enacted) and revised versions of legislation in the United Kingdom.
Digital Microfilm at the British National Archives
This is a list of the various historic records of the British government (from the Admiralty through the Cabinet to the War Office) that are accessible (with a free account) online.
BAILII Databases
This is an extensive comprehensive and useful set of databases offering access to case law, legislation and court decisions for England and Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, St-Helena, and the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.
Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection
These digital images (drawn from the collections of Yale University) mostly concern 18th-century British prints, drawings, ephemera and other materials related to the world of the Whig politician and writer Horace Walpole.
Palmerston Correspondence and the Anglo-Jewish Association
This digitized manuscript collection at the University of Southampton contains the semi-official correspondence of the third Viscount Palmerston (prime minister of Great Britain in the mid-19th century) and the records of the Anglo-Jewish Association, a group that supported Jewish philanthropic interests from the late 19th century onward around the world.
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 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.
Crime Broadsides
Collected by the Harvard University Law School Library, this is a fantastic digital compendium of broadsides sold to audiences at public executions in 18th and 19th century Britain.
Legacies of British Slave-ownership
This searchable database at University College London documents the identity of all slave-owners in the British colonies and all the estates in the British Caribbean colonies at the time slavery ended.
Georgian Papers Online
This catalogue contains descriptions and digitized images of material dating from the reigns of George I to William IV in Great Britain, including personal letters, diaries, account books and records of the Royal Household.
Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium
This ever-expanding digital history project includes the digitized papers and letters of Thomas Carlyle, W.E. Gladstone, John Ruskin and Michael Field.
London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health Reports, 1848-1972
The reports were produced each year by the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) of a district and set out the work done by his public health and sanitary officers. The reports provided vital data on birth and death rates, infant mortality, incidence of infectious and other diseases, and a general statement on the health of the population.
Welsh Newspapers
This is a searchable database (through the National Library of Wales) for newspapers and publications in Wales from the early 19th century through 1919.
First World War (UK)
This is a searchable archive about British soldiers in World War I; you can search for places, units, people, etc., and consult digitized diaries, etc. Administered by the National Archives.
World War I Online
This collection at the University of Wisconsin contains a wide range of materials about the history of the First World War, including American commentary on conditions in Belgium and Serbia, French descriptions of the war, etc.
Sources on British Healthcare, 1900-1948
This collection (through Warwick University) contains a selection of primary sources related to British healthcare before the foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, focusing particularly on the debate over national health and the campaign for a state-run health service.
British Diplomatic Oral History Program
This collection includes oral interviews with British diplomats, and is particularly useful for understanding Great Britain’s role in the world after the Second World War.
British Pathe/Reuters
This website contains links to the British Pathé and Reuters historical collection of news films that aired from 1910 to the late 1970s. There are particular collections about wars (e.g. the First World War, the Irish revolutionary period, the Russian Revolution), politics and political figures, British royalty, sport, and more.
Gay Left (United Kingdom)
This is an archive of ten issues of a socialist journal published in London, U.K., between 1975 and 1980, examining the links between socialism and gay liberation.
Margaret Thatcher Archive
This document archive contains declassified files, engagement diaries and other materials pertaining to Margaret Thatcher’s career, and materials on other issues (like the Reagan-Gorbachev summits) that did not directly involve Thatcher.
1641 Depositions
Fully searchable digital edition of the 1641 Depositions at Trinity College Dublin Library, comprising transcripts and images of all 8,000 depositions, examinations and associated materials in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641. You need to set up a (free) login to access them.
Ireland in the 19th Century
These sources at the University of Wisconsin focus mostly on 19th century accounts of Ireland, with a few random other exceptions.
EPPI: Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland
Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland (EPPI ) - which comprises scans of over 15,000 official publications relating to all aspects of Irish affairs during the period of the Act of Union, 1800-1922, including bills, reports, royal commissions of inquiry and the published census returns. It is a rich source for the social history of Ireland, as well as for statistics and evidence relating to population, emigration, famine, crime and political movements.
IED: Irish Emigration Database
The IED is a virtual library of emigration-related primary sources, principally letters to and from emigrants, compiled by the Centre for Migration Studies, Omagh. This extensive collection of more than 33,000 records is drawn from a number of collections, including the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and many private donors, and is capable of expansion as new records become available. IIt covers a wide time period, but with a concentration on the period between c.1780 and c.1920.
VMR: Voices of Migration and Return
VMR comprises over 90 life-narrative interviews conducted with returned and non-returned migrants from Ulster (9-counties) gathered during the course of two studies on contemporary migration (2004-2008). The study participants represent a range of geographic origins within Ulster, class backgrounds and religious denominations.
CAIN: Conflict Archive on the Internet
Maintained by the University of Ulster, this site contains an extensive on-line digital archive of source materials and information on the topics of victims, survivors and commemoration in Northern Ireland.
Irish Left Archive
This is an online archive of materials related to Irish left politics, dating back to the debates over Home Rule at the beginning of the 20th century.

Biblioteca Italiana
This resource, run by the "Università di Roma, La Sapienza" contains a vast amount of Italian primary sources with xml markup, ranging from the 13th-18th centuries. One of its most useful features is the ability to perform full-text searches.
The Garibaldi Panorama and the Risorgimento
The Garibaldi & the Risorgimento digital archive seeks to provide a comprehensive resource for the interdisciplinary study and teaching of the life and deeds of one of the protagonists of the Italian unification process, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882). At the heart of this archive is a dynamic visualization of the Garibaldi panorama, a unique survival of a popular form of 19th-century public art.
Germany under Reconstruction
This is a fabulous collection at the University of Wisconsin about the occupation and reconstruction of Germany after World War II; it contains sources in German and English concerning a range of historical actors.
Nuremberg Trials Project
This collection at the Harvard University Law School Library contains trial transcripts, briefs, documents books, evidence files, and other papers from the trials of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany.
Rote Armee Fraktion
This is a collection of more than 1,200 digitized documents by and about the Rote Armee Fraktion, a militant left-wing terrorist group that operated in West Germany in the 1970s. Most of the documents are in German, but some materials are in different languages.
Gallica - Bibliotheque Nationale de France
This is the digital branch of the French national library. There is a tremendous cache of digitized material here (almost all of it in French, obviously), ranging from medieval manuscripts to more contemporary texts.
French Revolution Digital Archive
This collaboration between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France contains digitized images from the period of the Revolution and the archives of Parliamentary proceedings (in French) during the Revolution.
Esternay Project
This is an incredible collection of thousands of digitized letters from one family in western France that span the 19th century. Many (but not all) of the letters have been translated into English; they represent a window into provincial 19th-century Europe.
French Foreign Offical Gazettes
This is a digitized collection hosted by Harvard University Law School of official publications (often legal in nature) from French-speaking colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia, mostly from the early 20th century.
BelgicaPress at the KBR/BRB (Belgium)
This site, produced by the Belgian national library, is a fully searchable database of digitized Belgian newspapers, from 1830 to 1950. The newspapers are in Dutch, French and German, but the website can be viewed in English.

Travels in Southeastern Europe
This database (hosted by the University of Michigan) provides access to over 100 texts and travel narratives from the 19th and early 20th centuries about the Balkans.
Eastern European and Slavic Studies Collection
Another collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this focuses on Russia and Central Asia in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. While some of the sources are in Russian, there are quite a few travel narratives written in English that date from the late 19th century.
Chronicles of Terror (Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor)
This Polish collection provides access to the Second World War accounts of Polish citizens (translated into English!) and their fate under German and Soviet occupation.
Soviet Posters Collection
This collection at the University of Chicago contains 19 Soviet political posters produced in the early 1930s.
Albania Today
This is a digitized compendium of materials published in English by the ruling Communist party in Albania (particularly during the 1970s).
Audio Archive of Russian History
The archive consists of recordings dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet state. Included are the voices and speeches of key political figures, including Lenin, Kerensky, Kirov, Beria, Stalin, Gorbachev, and others. Among the recorded interviews are Anna Larina (Bukharin's widow); Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin's wartime interpreter; Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's widow; and Lev Pevsner, a survivor of the Leningrad Blockade. There is also on-the-scene recorded sound of many events in Soviet history, including: the Russian and American armies meeting at the Elbe; Stalin's funeral; the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, etc.
Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online
The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online provides access to English-language digitized materials selected from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS). The digital collection consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, the HPSSS includes vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions.